The Hammock Papers: Invite.

19 April 2023

Invite.

Pyle, The Fight on Lexington Common, April 19, 1775, 1898

Professor Kevin Gannon on the impossibilities of objective histories ...

Some of the most valuable conversations I’ve had with my students about history are when we talk about how do we as people, as complicated and full human beings, engage with history?

This idea in my writing—to say, “Here, I’m going to lay all my cards on the table”—has come out of classroom discussions that I’ve had with students, where we talk about these intensely personal, as well as political, issues like abolitionism, racism, mass incarceration.

Objectivity cannot be a clinical detachment. And we need to own the fact that we’re coming into this as people; we don’t come out of vacuums. Those powerful classroom conversations convinced me that opening a textbook with such honestly can be a really powerful way to invite readers in, to invite students in.

From his blog ...

[W]hether one is writing, teaching, or contemplating History, it comes down to a question of what “matters.” But the mistake so many make is to assume there is one unchanging answer to that question. We fail our discipline and our students if we claim that what has traditionally been deemed historically significant–has mattered–achieved that status by any sort of “objective” standard. We are better served to emancipate ourselves from the iron cage of Objectivity and see Historical Facts for what they really are. Rather than create some sort of postmodern relativist hellscape where anything goes, embracing this “truth”* about History lets us acknowledge the nature of our epistemology. Freed from having to hew to some arbitrary standard that has somehow been elevated above all the other arbitrary standards, we can study, teach, and interpret History in ways which–paradoxically–might just be the most objective that we can achieve.

Teachers must remember that it's not about them. It's about exposing students to ideas and perspectives, challenging a student to think about the world beyond the end of his or her nose.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL