Making History
My grandmother has a compiled family history in a binder in a drawer in Texas. I’ve read the whole thing a dozen times. It follows family trees back to the 18th century, has old photos and marriage certificates and stories. When I was younger, I turned every laminated page like I would find a new treasure, and I did. Names like Edward Loil Bang Jones and Ida Applewhite delighted me, and stories of my great grandfather’s wagon ride across Texas on a pilgrimage to his mother’s grave fascinated me. I built a story of my family around these pages, memorizing names where I could and tracing pictures whose names were forgotten.
This was a process of self-knowing. I absorbed that history and made it my own, injecting those Texas tales into my veins in the hopes that they would somehow give me meaning. That family history was to me a sacred text.
But as I got older, something ugly began to creep in when I read it, and that is that my ancestors, these people who I read about and idolized, were white people in Texas, often white landowners in Texas, in the 18th and 19th centuries. As my personal politics developed, it was no longer palatable to claim this history, a history of settler colonialism and slavery. The stories didn’t read the same anymore, and the names were no longer so holy.
I was in Texas again last weekend, standing on the ranch land I visited every summer growing up, and I couldn’t stop thinking about history. There’s my personal history with that land, the story I tell myself about it. There’s a family history, one that I can follow back hundreds of years. There’s the history of Mills County, which is compiled in a book with a chapter about early white settlers entitled “Their land or ours?” There’s a longer history of people who inhabited that land for centuries before it was known as Mills County. And there’s the history of the land itself, which used to be an ocean as evidenced by all the fossils my grandmother collected.
I’ve been thinking about history for a while, though. After my last newsletter, I was brainstorming what I could write about next and the phrase that would not leave my head was history as a spiritual practice. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I think I might have some idea now. Writing history is an act of meaning-making, a creative act, and even a spiritual practice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.
***
I want to establish some terms here, and I am going to use my own definitions. When I talk about writing history, I mean any attempt to organize past events into a coherent narrative, especially one involving cause and effect or one that creates identity. This definition leaves room for personal histories and cultural histories, histories of small groups and histories of all people.
When I talk about a spiritual practice, I mean any attempt to find a meaning beyond the human in a text or activity. This includes traditional spiritual practices that appeal to a God, like prayer or worship rituals, but it also includes any practice an individual or group engage in that gives them a sense of connecting with something beyond our understanding. For example, running is a spiritual practice for a lot of people; writing is a spiritual practice for me; cooking is a spiritual practice for my friend. And I believe that history is a spiritual practice, because history isn’t something to learn or memorize; it’s something to do.
This isn’t prescriptive; I don’t think that every historian would consider what they do spiritual. But I do think that looking to the past and making it coherent is always an appeal to something that isn’t human, whether you call it order, or divinity, or just history. Historian Margaret MacMillian wrote:
[History] restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.
While rates of religion drop, I think many people still long for some sort of spiritual practice. And history is universal: we all tell stories about the past, be they personal or cultural. By acknowledging that the writing of history is a spiritual practice, rather than a scientific one, I think we can begin to address some of the dangers that lie within it.
***
In high school, I attended a three-day retreat called Kairos. It was highly structured, with different leaders (both students and adults) giving talks–talks about their lives and, chiefly, their trauma. We broke out into small groups, where we were encouraged to also share our stories, chiefly, our traumas.
I loved Kairos. I felt like I had grown closer to a number of people I never would have known otherwise, and I emerged with a new sense of narrative coherence to my life. I took everything I learned at Kairos and, a year later, turned it into a retreat talk for a crowd of ninth graders. I synthesized every event in my life to fit what I believed was one of only two narratives: I suffered, and then I found Jesus, and now I was happy. I told this story to these young teenagers, and some of them cried, and some of them told me how powerful it was.
I call this process of finding cohesion in my history a spiritual practice not just because it was explicitly religious, but also because of the form it took. It was meaning-making, certainly. I was looking to something external, beyond myself, to make sense of the traumatic events that shaped me. I wanted a story, not just fragments, and that story helped me understand my life. It was helpful.
But it wasn’t just helpful, because the story wasn’t actually over. I was seventeen, and there was a lot of suffering ahead of me. So when, in college, I stopped feeling like that story was true, I didn’t know what to hold on to. I didn’t know how to make sense of my pain if I couldn’t mediate it through Jesus, and I no longer believed that he had anything to do with it. I suffered two simultaneous crises: one chemical, and one spiritual. How could I understand what was happening to me without a framework to lean back on?
So I developed a new story, one that placed brain chemistry in the place once held by God. I now had a history of mental illness that acted as a history of my life. There was no room for God, but I still believe it was a spiritual exercise. I wanted something more powerful than me to explain what was happening.
We all do this, create histories, and I don’t know of another way to be. It’s just how I make sense of things. But this spiritual practice, creating cohesion, can be limiting. When my story about myself is that I have bipolar and that shapes my life, what happens when I am more or less stable? I lost my footing when I lost Jesus, and I lost it again when I didn’t have a mood episode for six months. When we create our personal histories, appealing to something beyond ourselves, we tread in dangerous territory. Life is never that simple.
***
I studied history in college, so I know as well as anyone that it can be mystifying in an academic setting. I dropped out of my one historiography class, and never did much to remedy that gap in my knowledge. But I had the chance to observe that in the academic world, historians create history, and their desire to understand the past, and thereby the present, has a spiritual element to it.
Creation is often spiritual; people talk about a higher force guiding them, a muse or inspiration or something external to them. I don’t think history is any different. And history is a creative discipline, not an objective science. It is true that events happen, and certain people did certain things in certain places, but the telling of these facts is never objective. Every historian makes decisions: what sources to use, what events to include, which voices to privilege, and even where to start and end a historical account. It’s my opinion that this is a creative activity. “The past would surely die,” writes Sarah Maza, “if we merely memorialized it, if we did not argue about it.” It’s in that arguing that the past comes alive.
Ultimately, writing history, studying it academically, is about speculation. We can’t truly know what caused the French Revolution. Historians over the last few centuries have argued about what ‘cause’ even means–do we look at immediate, inciting events? Do we look at the events of the preceding years, the rulers of the time? How far can we go back? When a historian writes an account of a certain event, they make choices, and those choices create a certain reality. Their audience will absorb their narrative, either critically or unquestioningly, and in a certain way, that narrative becomes the truth.
When historians hunt for causes and meaning, they are appealing to something beyond the human. I don’t think historical inquiry is a rational field; I think it’s closer to creative writing. That’s not to say it lacks logic or academic merit, but it is about creation, a creation that loops in something greater than the historian or the history. But historians aren’t the only ones who practice history, and I think it’s in public history that we really find the spiritual root of this discipline.
***
Outside of the academy, history has taken on a responsibility that religion once held as the dominant source of identity and meaning-making. History is not a religion, and I’m not saying “history is spiritual because it bears a resemblance to religion,” because religion and spirituality are not the same thing. But what makes religion spiritual—myth, meaning, ritual—can now be found in the public practice of history.
When I think about public history, I think about monuments and street names–what Reuben Rose-Redwood et al. call the “city text.” The city text is often written by low-level administrators, but sometimes, the city text is significantly revised. Last year, the Lee Highway I had driven up and down in Arlington my whole life finally became Langston Boulevard. More dramatically, the monument to Robert E. Lee that towered in Richmond, VA was finally, completely removed last year. When I say that public history is a spiritual practice, I mean that it appeals to something beyond the mere human–in this case, truth. By revering Lee, generations of Virginians created a truth, a simple one: Robert E. Lee was a hero and a good man. By finally changing how he appears in our city texts, some contemporary Virginians create a new truth: this man does not deserve honor or memorial.
Public history, like all history, is always about the present and the communities we want to create. By honoring Robert E. Lee in every county in Virginia, 19th and 20th (and 21st) century city officials reinforced the racial boundaries that divided their communities. When they said “we honor this man who fought for slavery,” they sent a clear message to Black Virginians, and to white Virginians, about who belonged. The creation of imagined communities is the work of historians, would-be historians, and people manipulating history. This, too, is a spiritual act, a creative, evocative function of history.
“For all the talk about eternal nations,” MacMillan writes, “they are created not by fate or God but by the activities of human beings, and not least by historians.” Spiritual practices are not necessarily beneficial, safe, or good. Spirituality, appealing to a higher external force, can be dangerous and harmful, and in the case of history, I think it often is. The creation of community using history can lead to discrimination, violence, and war, and it has throughout the last several hundred years. History is not benign, nor is it neutral. It’s a tool, and like any tool, it can be used to build or to harm.
` ***
When I was in Texas this month, I didn’t read the family history my grandmother so carefully compiled. I didn’t need to; I know what’s in there. I no longer revere those ancestors, and I no longer want to claim them. But I can’t deny them, either. It would be just as dangerous a spiritual exercise to rewrite my family history and ignore the reality that my ancestors were complicit in some of the worst crimes in America.
This essay reads as a pessimistic condemnation of history as something that has to be dangerous or harmful, but that’s not what I believe. Whether it’s personal, local, national, cultural–history is full of possibilities. A lot of those possibilities are harmful, and I do think that most uses of history in the last several centuries have done at least as much harm as good. But when we write history, literally or figuratively, we have the opportunity to create something powerful, something good.
History is about the present. If I view my history as something larger than the human, it can become a mandate. It can inform how I act today–what I spend my time, attention, and money on. Laurent Binet, the patron saint of this newsletter, wrote, “History is the only true casualty. You can reread it as much as you like, but you can never rewrite it.” His point, that certain things happened no matter how we try to interpret them, stands–my ancestors did terrible things, and I can’t explain that away. But on another level, I think he’s wrong. You can rewrite history, and we do it all the time.
You can rewrite history, and if you do it with careful attention to who it harms or helps, it can be a beautiful thing. If my family’s story doesn’t end in Texas, but rather in Boston today, then it doesn’t have to stay fixed in stone. If my family’s story doesn’t end in Texas, but rather doesn’t end at all, then history is alive and I can shape it. And that, to me, is a spiritual practice.
Subscribe to the Imaginary Novelist to receive these musings in your inbox on the first of every month.