Teaching History Through the Arts

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There are many ways that people, including academics, decide what is vital to an understanding of a nation's past. Certainly, "ordinary" readers (which means book buyers) are fascinated by the biographies of political and military leaders. They continue to believe that charismatic personalities affect a country's destiny.

Professional historians have long since abandoned that idea as a delusion. Instead, for the last 30 years, they have told us that the intricacies of social history are the key to explaining a nation's identity and development. So for specialists in American history, what matters in the courses they teach and the books they write are the struggles and hard-won accomplishments of women, workers, immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans in a country inhospitable to the poor and the powerless.

Still, however fashionable social history has been since the 1970s, no American historian would dispute the importance of other almost-mandatory eras and topics. Colonial history and the formation of the Republic, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, industrialization and urbanization, the New Deal, America's emergence as a superpower ?- those themes are all meticulously covered in textbooks, monographs, and course syllabi. And such subjects, along with those in social history, dominate the sessions and book exhibits at the annual conventions of American historians.

But one might suppose that a central component of America's history (as of any country's history) is its culture. How can we fathom the values and preoccupations of the American people (no matter what their race, gender, or class) without paying attention to the nation's literature, painting, architecture, music, theater, and movies? If culture plays as significant a role as social, political, or economic issues in helping us make sense of the American past, why then do American historians expend so much effort analyzing the plight of women and workers, or the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and almost no time at all interpreting the paintings of Edward Hopper, the cartoons of Walt Disney, the lyrics of Cole Porter, the choreography of Jerome Robbins, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, or the films of Elia Kazan?

Such questions occurred to me in the course of doing research for a book about the global impact of American culture in the 20th century. Of perhaps 2,000 books that I read (or more often skimmed), not more than 50 were written by historians.

True, some of the works by historians ?- like Christine Stansell's American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Metropolitan Books, 2000) and Jackson Lears's Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Viking, 2003), which contains a brilliant chapter on modern painting and music ?- are superb interpretations of America's artistic and intellectual life. And Joy S. Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hill and Wang, 2000) and Lewis A. Erenberg's Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (University of Chicago, 1998) are equally invaluable histories of major episodes in American popular culture.

But those are the exceptions. Most of the books on which I relied were written by scholars in art history, music, literature, or film studies. If, for example, I wanted a new interpretation of American culture after World War I, two of the most innovative studies are Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), which concentrates on the intellectual interchange between white people and African-Americans, and Carol J. Oja's Making Music Modern (Oxford University Press, 2000), which analyzes the influence of European modernist music on American composers and songwriters. But Douglas is a professor of English and comparative literature, while Oja is a professor of music. Similarly, Wanda M. Corn's The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (University of California Press, 1999), a book filled with insights not only about American painting but about larger trends in American culture, is the work of an art historian.

Indeed, many of the most suggestive re-examinations of American culture are not written by academics at all. Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Crown Publishers, 1988) and his latest book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006), together with David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (Knopf, 2005) and Richard Schickel's Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Doubleday, 1985), are all stimulating works of cultural history written by people who are primarily freelance journalists and film critics.

Yet while the majority of American historians seem uninterested in writing about American culture, their counterparts abroad continue to publish books that deal with novels, music, photography, and film. I recently received a new collection of essays called Satchmo Meets Amadeus, written mainly by European Americanists and edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner, an Austrian historian of the United States at the University of Salzburg. The essays compare the cultural impact of Mozart in 18th-century Vienna and of Louis Armstrong in early-20th-century New Orleans. That is the sort of topic that would be inconceivable to most American historians ?- not just because of the book's trans-Atlantic perspective, but also because of its focus on classical music and jazz. Of course, foreign professors of American history remain acutely aware of the power of American culture since their societies are inundated with America's music, movies, and television shows.

But American historians were not always so oblivious to the nation's art and mass entertainment. If you were an aspiring historian in college or graduate school in the 1950s and early 1960s, the course offerings and reading lists in American history were crammed with allusions to novelists, painters, playwrights, and composers. The postwar American-studies movement (which was interdisciplinary, combining history, sociology, politics, and the arts) emphasized the significance of America's literature, in particular, and that affected the sorts of books historians assigned and the subjects they addressed in class.

When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, I read (because a history professor told me I had to) The Education of Henry Adams, Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. It was also made clear to me that I'd better know what abstract expressionism was if I had even the faintest prayer of becoming an American historian.

I was not alone. Nor am I being wistful about the good old days when Orson Welles and Saul Bellow were culture heroes to a generation of tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking connoisseurs, the types who are standing in line for the next showing of The Sorrow and the Pity in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, pontificating about Federico Fellini. Some of those pomposities aside, the acolytes of the 1950s grew up to become the virtuosos of cultural history in the 1970s: Christopher Lasch, Lawrence W. Levine, Warren Susman.

What happened to their assumption that cultural history was crucial to comprehending America, past and present? Basically, the post-World War II conceptions of what constituted both culture and history crumbled in the 1970s. The civil-rights and women's movements, together with the more-relaxed immigration laws that inspired a new wave of ethnic migration, largely from Latin America and Asia, forced historians to ask: Whose culture? Whose history? The answers led not only to a sharper focus on the social history of those groups previously neglected by scholars and teachers, but also to an anthropological definition of culture. What counted now was the culture of daily life ?- how people behaved in saloons and department stores, what kinds of clothes and cosmetics they bought, whether they were active or passive when they listened to the radio, and above all how they were manipulated by the ideology of consumerism. That approach affected not just historians, but scholars in American studies as well.

Traditional cultural history was clearly under assault by the 1970s and 1980s. But, ironically, no cluster of scholars did more to undermine the field than the cultural historians themselves. While Susman continued to highlight cultural issues in his collection of essays, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Pantheon, 1984), Lasch became more interested in psychology and social criticism, as in such best-selling books as The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Norton, 1978).

Then Levine published his most influential book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard University Press, 1988). He portrayed the high-cultural venues of the late 19th century ?- theaters, opera houses, concert halls, libraries, and art museums ?- as sanctuaries for the rich. Having failed to elevate the tastes of the masses, who were seduced by disreputable entertainment like vaudeville and the movies, the wealthy (according to Levine) escaped into their own luxurious asylums, shielding themselves from the chaotic and alien babble in the streets. Behind closed doors, they resolved to serve as the sentinels of high culture, guarding the fortress of art, literature, and music. Thus, for Levine, high culture became less a shared possession of the entire society than a refuge for snobs.

Levine's book ended at the moment that modernism crossed the Atlantic and took root in America. But his argument about the exclusivity of American high culture would not have changed had he examined the Armory Show or the Museum of Modern Art. How, after all, could ordinary people relate to Duchamp's painting if they couldn't detect either a nude or a staircase? And how many readers would try to decipher the multilingual puns in James Joyce's Ulysses, much less the three-page sentences in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!?

Levine surely did not intend to turn his colleagues and students away from cultural history. Indeed, he continued to write about American culture throughout his career. But Highbrow/Lowbrow implied that high culture was inherently esoteric, class-bound, and somehow "undemocratic" ?- in short, antithetical to the values social historians championed.

Yet if high culture seemed elitist in the eyes of many American historians, popular culture was insufferably commercial ?- and therefore equally distasteful as a subject of study. In the earliest days of cinema, as some historians noted, movies had been aimed at an immigrant, working-class audience. But soon the moguls took over (though they were immigrants, too) and converted an egalitarian art form into a money-making machine. Similarly jazz and the blues were once the creations of African-American musicians and performers with deep ties to the black communities in Chicago and New Orleans. Then white record producers, promoters, and agents transformed an authentic folk music into just another big business. So to write or teach about popular entertainment meant that you wound up exploring not the history of culture but the history of capitalism.

Of course, no discipline evolves simply on the basis of new ideas and interpretations. There are practical considerations at stake, like one's career. Graduate students learn swiftly what topics interest their professors. And what dissertation subjects will lead to book contracts.

Meanwhile, when it comes to new appointments, American historians, no less than scholars in other fields, like to clone themselves. They want in their departments a coterie of people working in their own areas, which they naturally define as "cutting-edge." That is called "building on strength." It rarely occurs to search committees that a department might benefit more from genuine intellectual and methodological diversity, from hiring scholars who are not studying the same subjects as everyone else.

The urge to assemble a collection of like-minded souls has meant that, over the past 30 years, most history departments have concentrated on hiring social historians, especially in American history. But "social" history is often narrowly conceived.

Consider one of the fields in social history currently in vogue: the "borderlands." Borderlands could have meant an analysis of how different cultures (high and low) throughout the world collide with and alter one another. For the majority of history departments, however, the idea of the borderlands has assumed an increasingly limited geographical definition: a study of Latin-American (mostly Mexican) immigration to Texas and to other areas of the southwestern United States. That influx is obviously a significant factor in America's social and ethnic development. But such a restrictive focus on a particular region does not encourage what could be the beginnings of a truly global cultural history.

If American historians, like Duchamp's nude, have descended a staircase from cultural to social history, it might seem that few people outside the academic world should notice or care. If students want to learn more about American culture, they can choose a class in art, film, or American literature. Nevertheless, most universities require students to take one or two courses in American history, which could expose the majority of students to the ideas and information they need to understand American culture. So the indifference to culture among historians has had devastating consequences for the overall quality of American education.

Like all professors, historians regularly complain that their students "don't know anything," that they're culturally illiterate. And it's true: Most of the undergraduates and graduate students whom I and others encounter have little or no knowledge of the history of American art, literature, music, or the popular culture of previous generations. Their familiarity with American culture is usually confined to the past 10 or 15 years of their personal experience. They know about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, but not about Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollack, Arthur Miller, or even Marilyn Monroe.

The lack of knowledge is not their fault. How can students be expected to have heard of any of America's pre-eminent writers, artists, actors, or musicians if their history professors never mention them in class ?- and perhaps don't know much about them either? We're teaching the subjects we want to teach, and talking about the people ?- mostly the exploited and the victimized ?- we sympathize with. Never mind if we're also passing on a substantial amount of cultural ignorance from one generation to the next.

Yet maybe the situation in our universities, if not in our history departments, is not quite so bleak. Students, fortunately, no longer regard their professors as gods, handing down the wisdom of the ages. They may not even read (or buy) the books their professors assign. But they do have more access than any previous generation to culture.
Where my generation depended on old films shown in execrable conditions on late-night independent television stations or at seedy "art" houses screening a retrospective of Sam Fuller's low-budget action flicks, students can now rent or download movies, television shows, and plays from all over the world. They can see Sidney Lumet's 1960 television production of The Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards and a very young Robert Redford. They can see Dustin Hoffman in 1985 as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. They can grasp why Marlon Brando was so mesmerizing in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, and why he became an American cultural icon. They can learn something about Charlie Parker's music and his life by watching Clint Eastwood's Bird. And they can begin to appreciate 20th-century dance by viewing the films of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.

Whether students take advantage of all those opportunities is uncertain. But they have the chance to ascend the cultural staircase. And if they get to the top, they may figure out for themselves why Marcel Duchamp's painting was both so infuriating and so central to the culture of our own time.

Re: Teaching History Through the Arts

There's so much to disagree with here that it's difficult to know where to start.

An undergraduate survey course in American history is typically, in my experience, divided into two semesters: the first semester dealing with American history through the end of the Civil War, and the second semester going from Reconstruction through the present. Each semester is roughly fourteen weeks, so in the first semester students are handling about two decades' worth of history per week. The second semester, in contrast, goes at a leisurely decade-per-week pace (compare that with a typical Western Civilization survey course, where students go through more than a century every week).

In the two or three classes per week, it's just a sad fact that the students can only be taught so much. For instance, in a week of studying the second decade of the twentieth century, students will typically learn about Wilsonian foreign policy and the nation's entry into the First World War, labor strife and the advent of modern industrial techniques, women's suffrage, the first "red scare," and a wide variety of other cultural, social, and political phenomena and events. In addition to their course books, they might also be assigned works such as The Jungle or Sister Carrie to give them a different viewpoint of the era. In short, survey courses cram a lot of information into a very small amount of class time, but they clearly can't cover everything.

Now, would it be nice if a survey course on American history covered Marcel Duchamps? Well, I suppose so, although it might make more sense to cover an American artist. But we have to bear in mind that we're dealing with a zero-sum game here: for everything that gets added, something else gets dropped. So what should we drop to make room for a discussion of the 1913 Armory Show? The American realist movement in literature? The impact of the automobile on American society? The creation of the Federal Reserve System?

There is, to be sure, a tendency to omit those subjects that are covered by other courses. If a university has an art history survey course, the history department might not feel obliged to devote a portion of the general American history survey course to art history. In allocating a scarce resource like a syllabus, that's not such a bad approach. The other alternative would be to make the American history survey a ten-semester course, and just throw everything about American history into it.

I agree with what you say, Joe, though it sounds like you're not exactly disagreeing with the author; you're confirming what he says but giving more plausible explanations for the observations he's making.