When Academic Historians Tackle Hard Histories
Can institutional histories illluminate our national past?
I wanted to explore history and memory—in this case, the relationship between historical existence and legend, both "the life" and "the symbol." — Nell Irvin Painter in Southern History across the Color Line
Later today, April 17 from 12 noon to 1 pm ET, we’ll talk live with two academic historians, Dr. Andrew Jewett and Dr. Ken Lipartito, about their approaches to writing hard histories. Dr. Jewett is the lead author on an institutional history of Johns Hopkins that will appear in conjunction with the university’s 150 year anniversary in 2026. Dr. Lipartito is at work on a biography of enslaver John McDonogh, for whom the McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, is named. Registration here is, as always, quick and easy.
We are eager to speak with Dr. Jewett and Dr. Lipartito having in mind how, when we began our work at Hard Histories, one of the first texts we contended with was a small book titled Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, a collection of reminiscences and family lore collected by Helen Hopkins Thom, a great niece to Mr. Hopkins. Originally published in 1929 by Johns Hopkins Press, and republished 80 years later in 2009, by Johns Hopkins University Press, Thom’s book was a source for some misunderstandings about the relationship of Mr. Hopkins and his family to slavery.1
Some observers termed Thom’s text a biography while others refer to it as a history. But these monikers might mislead contemporary readers who would expect a biography or history produced by an academic press to be undergirded by scholarly methods – including archival research and citations that document its claims in that record. Today we understand Thom’s text to be less a work of biography or history and more a hagiography: the effort of an admiring descendant who compiled the varied recollections of elders and their impressions of Mr. Hopkins and his family. In recent years, Thom’s stories have, to some degree, been tested. And while they don’t always stand up to scholarly scrutiny, Thom’s book remains one window onto how her generation hoped we would remember our founder and namesake. We learn how, long after his death in 1873, Mr. Hopkins’s story became intertwined with the myth of the Civil War’s “Lost Cause.”
In our lab, a source like Thom’s book remains important, even as it is not a reliable source for the facts it purports to tell. We rely upon it as one key to understanding how memories, even the faulty ones, of Mr. Hopkins and his family developed over time. We also look to discover what distinguishes Thom’s book from the academic histories upon which we do rely, as well as from our own new research. That begins with our methods, which are rooted in the critical interpretation of archival sources, and extends to citational practices that evidence that research and make it transparent for other scholars and also for lay readers.
But, as Dr. Jewett and Dr. Lipartito will tell us, research methods are not the only way in which we mark the distance between Thom’s work and our own. In the lab we are also asking questions that engage the existing historiography. That is, we are approaching the past not only as a chronicle of events. We are approaching the past as an opportunity to be in conversation with other historians about that past, joining long standing debates about how to explain major questions such as the centrality of slavery to the American past, the vexed relationship of slavery to freedom, the memory of the Civil War, the evolution of philanthropy, the development of educational institutions, and even the role of orphan asylums in the longer history of families and child care in the United States.
It is not, we have learned, self-evident how to link the local and institutional interests in men like Johns Hopkins and John McDonogh with the questions that historians are asking about the times they lived in and the worlds they occupied and even influenced. Always lurking behind an academic approach to history is the question “Who cares?” Do the stories of Johns Hopkins and John McDonogh include bigger insights than their biographies might suggest? Can they teach us broader lessons about the American past? Dr. Jewett and Dr. Lipartito are at work stitching together these Baltimore stories to our national narratives and we at Hard Histories are all ears!
— MSJ