These days, many people are claiming that the United States is composed of two groups, oppressors and victims.
We see this in university “whiteness studies,” which treat white people as inevitable oppressors and black people as inevitable victims. We see it in the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which claims that the true founding of the United States was not 1776 but 1619, when the first African slaves (or possibly indentured servants) arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. Much of “cancel culture” is based on the ideas that white people are guilty for the sins of their ancestors and people of color remain victimized today.
Yet academic historians, by and large, do not look at race this way. And I am not talking just about conservative historians. I mean historians of all perspectives, including historians on the Left.
Why? Because historians direct their attention to “agency.”
Agency refers to deliberate actions of people in history, the choices they made, often under difficult circumstances. I was unfamiliar with this use of “agency” until I attended graduate history classes. Everyone else seemed to know it.
I’ve read since that the word began to be used in the 1960s as part of the “history from below” trend in historiography. “History from below” paid attention to the masses rather than just the powerful. It also sought to recognize the masses as individuals and to explore their interaction with powerful oppressors.
As E. P. Thompson said in a famous essay about the working people in England, his goal was to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”[1] To do this, one needed to understand their motivations, actions, and interactions with others.
In 2015 historian Eran Zelnik wrote a four-part discussion of agency. He explained that in the United States, recognition of agency took the form of rethinking the experiences of African Americans and Native Americans. Historians began to challenge “declension” history—history that stressed the negative and “highlighted victimhood.”
[The new] historians of slavery especially emphasized the vibrancy of slave culture and numerous moments of resistance, while historians of Native American histories insisted that in many instances Native peoples held positions of power in their engagements with Europeans. [2]
Similarly, when writing about colonialism, legal historians have dispensed with the idea that imperialists and colonized were simply oppressors and victims. Lauren Benton describes many interacting parties, both imperial and local, that contributed to the development of colonial law. Although ultimately laws prescribed by the mother country won out, there was a “contested historical movement from truly plural legal orders to state-dominated legal orders”[3] Douglas Hay and Paul Craven see colonial labor law as highly diverse, reflecting complex histories. “The details of its variation . . . invite us to examine how law changes, how it is adapted, and how it shapes and is shaped by the societies in which it is embedded.”[4]
Feminist historians have built on the concept of agency. In one dramatic instance (well, dramatic to historiographers) Joan Wallach Scott called out E. P. Thompson for treating nineteenth-century labor as largely male. “Women are referred to without comment as cheap labor used to substitute for men in the fields, workshops, and mills,“ she wrote [5] Yet they, too, had agency.
And in recent years, historians (mostly female) have helped restore complexity to the study of workers in the Industrial Revolution. A book by Jane Humphries [6] and another by Emma Griffin [7] are based on memoirs of people who overcame the adversities of living and working in early British factories. According to Griffin, the bleak images of working long hours in oppressive conditions are not the full story. “Economic exploitation and political oppression could live side by side with newfound and much-valued personal freedoms.“[8]
Perhaps greater historical study will persuade today’s “woke” elite to look more closely at the people they are shoving into just two categories. After all, Frederick Douglass cannot be called a victim in spite of cruel treatment, and the white “oppressor” who taught him to read, Sophia Auld, was herself a victim of an oppressive husband. [9]
Notes
[1] E. P. Thompson, Preface, The Making of the English Working Class. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 8. (Joanna Southcott was a fanatical eighteenth-century British religious leader who developed a large following with her prophecies.)
[2] Eran Zelnik, “Agency, Part 1,” U. S. Intellectual History Blog, https://s-usih.org/2015/10/agency-part-1/.
[3] Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Culture: Legal Regimes in World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28.
[4] Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, Introduction, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire 1562-1955, edited by Hay and Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3.
[5] Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, Columbia University Press, Revised edition, 1999), 74.
[6] Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[7] Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press),
[8] Griffin, 19.
[9] See Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2018).
Image by Monica Volpin from Pixabay.
I doubt that anybody can save the Wokes from the Wokes.
The woke “historians” are not writing history. They are creating myth, not unlike ancient Egyptian historians who treated pharaohs as gods and wrote only of victories, never defeats, and who erased the names of women pharaohs from stone and paint. Even the late ruler, Cleopatra, was portrayed as Isis.
The woke writers recognize myth masquerading as history when they cite some of the early idealizations of Washington and other founders often given superpowers like throwing a dollar coin across the Potomac River. Then we have our myth of the “Pilgrims”, as idealized seekers of religious liberty. The Soviets recognized the power of myth and attributed near miracles to the baby Lenin.
If we were to make clear the distinction between myth and history, this would place woke narratives where they belong.
Among a few books that present the complexity of human history I include some historical fiction that captures what life was like and encourages what psychologists call Actively Open Thinking (AOT). My recommendations include: Zora Neal Hurston “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” (agency within early 20th C black southerners); John Sedgwick’s “Blood Moon” about the wars between the Cherokees and also their negotiations with presidents; Amy Belding Brown’s novel, “The Fall of the Sparrow” about Mary Rawlinson’s captivity during King Philip’s War in the early 1600s; Polish immigrant Anzia Yezierzka’s stories of life in NY’s Lower East Side; Ellis’ “First Family” about Abigail and John Adams; Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Historia de la Florida”, a 16th C account of Spanish and Florida Indians by a half Inca writer.