Dominant Narratives and Their Overturnings: the History Genre That Can Never Die

Scholarly historians are constantly told that they have to write narratively if they want to reach a non-specialist audience. That can lead to big messes.

Jerome trying to get some serious work done

TEMPORARILY UNLOCKED

My recent posts on David McCullough’s legacy and Stacy Schiff’s new bio of Samuel Adams may be giving readers the impression that I have a particular problem with the most successful practitioners in the genre in which I publish (popular history of the American founding, as distinguished from the scholarly kind). If there’s truth to that impression, I think it’s because the intellectual evasions, narrative dissociations, and sheer blank spots that mark the work of pop history’s best-known practitioners point less at failures in the authors themselves than at features of the pop-history genre as whole, which become especially visible in the works of the most visible authors.

And as a practitioner myself, I find this phenomenon is starting to really freak me out.

Certified historians sometimes address the issue with “What can you expect from a history book written for the masses by non-scholars?” But what makes the tendency interesting to me is that it’s not a pop-history-vs.-scholarly-history issue at all.

Those who know more of my work on these issues may recall that while I’ve written critically in this context on McCullough’s John Adams and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I’ve also written about the far more intellectually significant dissociations and denials of Edmund Morgan and other scholars in the old consensus school of the founding period, including Gordon Wood, Richard Hofstadter, and Sean Wilentz. (I’ll link to some of that stuff in “Further Reading,” below). Many certified scholars do exactly what the popsters McCullough, Chernow, and Schiff do. But because they’re certified scholars, and thus depend less on narrative, it’s easier for them to get away with making the most revealing action disappear just at the crucial moment.

Scholarship tends to de-center action anyway, in favor of ideas. When it’s time to fuzz things out, there’s a lot of fuzz to work with.

So today I’m considering something different, though related, with weird problems of its own, a major effort by a scholar to offer us action, and a lot of it: the recently published Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen, a Finnish historian who is Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. The book’s been called important by the general-reader press, even a must-read. It thus stands a chance of crossing over, and what I’m especially interested in is how an academic-type book like this—a book not published within my genre (not McCullough's and Schiff's, that is)—gets framed as something that the interested general reader should want to read.

Indigenous Nation is 592 pages long, and given the book’s ambitions, the page count is by no means high enough. According to the publisher, Hämäläinen “rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States.”

It’s true that the book covers 400 years. Also that the author explicitly sets out to look at every relevant incident of conflict between all European empires and the U.S., on the one hand, and every indigenous nation, on the other, throughout the near entirety of the vast geographical region that has become the United States of America. He doesn’t get there—plenty of gaps exist—but that’s the intent, and the book goes a surprisingly long way toward achieving sheer coverage, on the scale claimed.

The claim of overturning a dominant narrative is trickier. Contrary to what he says is the long-accepted way in which we usually look at the period, Hämäläinen wants to show that Europeans didn’t roll right over the indigenous people of North America: the indigenous were by no means the helpless victims of a colonial steamroller but played dominating roles for centuries after contact. In scholarship, however, there’s nothing new, putting it mildly, about saying that, and about exploring it in detail.

And not just in scholarship. Hämäläinen introduces his big idea by saying that he was turned off as a kid by the stereotyped, racist ways Western-themed movies and novels presented Native Americans—he thought there just had to be more to the story. But come on. He was born in 1967, and none of us was born yesterday. At this late date, the target audience is 100% predisposed to agree with his fairly obvious claim that things weren’t like the movies and even—this is the main thing—might have been the opposite.

Control over the continent, he says, was maintained by indigenous people for hundreds of years after European arrival; it was the Europeans who were weak and even subservient. To the extent that it’s true, that’s not news, but I also think looking at who had control over the whole continent is a highly abstracted way—a hundred-mile-high-view way—of framing the aims of all players, on all sides, especially early on.

But OK. This is a book by a scholar, pitched to the general reader, and I think Hämäläinen is largely correct in thinking that the interested public has little idea of the military successes and powerful internationalist roles enjoyed by many North American nations in the long period between contact and the national founding of the United States and beyond. On its face, the thesis isn’t wack.

The book itself, however, gets out of control almost immediately, to the point of unreadability, for me, both as a general reader and as a close reader of a few aspects of the subject. To prove his thesis, Hämäläinen wants to cover, as I’ve said, an astonishing multitude of events, an approach that the publicity copy naturally calls “epic” and “sweeping.” The copy even goes for the potboiler-y “young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk” sort of thing: “from the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast. . . ”!!

Nice try.

In real life, this book is an encyclopedia.

That might be OK, if it were organized like an encyclopedia and you could look up whatever you wanted to know. But that wouldn’t work—you don’t know enough about this stuff to know what to look up—so the author has to walk you through every bit of the encyclopedic content. And instead of breaking up that overwhelming bulk thematically, or by characters and character types, or by the gathering threads of an argument, or by some other means, he’s decided it’s not a textbook but a grand story—or he's been told it needs to be—so he has to start at the beginning and go on until the end, force-marching you chronologically through the multitudinous events taking place on a giant, overpopulated stage, stretching well past the horizon, where lots of stuff is happening all at once, and many elements are totally disconnected from others. You can’t focus on any one through-line, or five through-lines, or ten.

So, no—it’s not a story. In its headlong, even desperate hurtles forward, the book becomes a feat not of proving a general idea about the history of the continent—already known, to the extent that it’s true; unprovable, to the extent that it’s fanciful—but of cramming huge amounts of stuff as fast as possible into the smallest possible suitcase and sitting on the suitcase to keep it from popping open, even while trying to keep the audience excited about the awkward process as if it were a beautiful feat of gymnastics. (“Hoof-pounding accounts of battles on horseback,” Jennifer Schuessler noted in a Times article, with precision: the hooves are pounding, but the heart is not.)

The need to pack a bag way too tight for comfort has the opposite of the desired effect. It's not just anti-dramatic. It also undermines the thesis.

At any given moment, it’s impossible to tell how seriously to take what’s being presented, because everything that happens, in all its supposed sweepingness, is only there to prove, supposedly, one of three things: there’s a war going on for control of all of North America; it’s one of the longest wars in history; in this long war, indigenous people are powerful, Europeans weak and dependent. Real life, as we all know, present or past, doesn’t work anything like that, so no matter how many events the author piles up, he can't prove to us that it does. Some events will even prove the opposite, or something else altogether . . . Might it even be possible that some of the things that took place during a span of 400 years are fraught with a degree of mystery?

To get specific for a moment, Indigenous Nation totally botches the only part of the story I know intimately, which I told in Autumn of the Black Snake. That leaves me doubting whether the parts I don’t know are any more credible (I know they might be). Believe me, it’s no walk in the park to get a handle just on that one series of events: the first war the U.S. ever fought under the Constitution, the high-water mark of indigenous resistance to U.S. westward expansion.

I remember getting pretty desperate myself. It takes one to know one.

That war represents one of the key moments when indigenous power in America did triumph—for a while. But because Hämäläinen has so much else to do, because he has the whole history of a whole continent to hurtle through, he simply doesn’t have time to figure this sliver out, to grow intimate with it, to find a cogent point of view on it. So he gets chronologies backward. He refers back to things he's never actually brought up. He misses key turning points. The narrative and factual meltdown in this particular part of the book is the kind of thing that keeps writers up at night, or should. (Copyeditors too.)

By the way: downplaying the undeservedly obscure Blue Jacket and Little Turtle, who led the greatest indigenous American victory over U.S. troops of all time, and using them to lead up, one more time, to the perennially overexposed and overpraised Tecumseh, who had no such victories, by no means overturns a dominant narrative. It only replicates it.

And here's pretty much the opposite of the political and development strategy of the federal government, as it shifted from the old Congress to a national government under the Constitution:

Rather than trying to remove the Indians by force, the Confederation Congress sold millions of acres to land speculators, who in turn would sell the land . . . The strategy was obvious: once the land was sold, colonists would eradicate Native Americans on their own.

But regardless of my specific dissent regarding merely what actually happened, some writers are able to make a gigantic scope like this compelling. I’ve never known how they do it. You’d have to be a particular kind of artist, and Hämäläinen just isn’t in the running. He’s a scholar, with an encyclopedic cast of mind, and a single thing to prove. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that; the mess made by Indigenous Continent matters to me because I suspect an underlying cause of the mess is the insistence on telling a story when no story can truly be found. Which raises a question:

What if this book needed to not be narrative?

But it had to be narrative, because those supposedly in the know keep hectoring scholars with advice that they’d better write narratively if they want to reach a non-specialist audience. Worse, they keep telling the non-specialist audience that this is the sort of thing it ought to want to read. With a whole new interpretation of all American history on offer, how can the target audience resist? Indigenous Continent, the presskit tells the audience and the gatekeepers, is “necessary reading for anyone who cares about America's past, present, and future,” and isn’t that supposed to be . . . you? Don't you . . . care?

Back to real life for a moment. There is no such thing as necessary reading.

But here’s David Treuer on Indigenous Continent, in The New Yorker. You might think he’s saying something like what I’m saying.

The book is, at times, breathless in its exposition, and nuance is sometimes lost in the shuffle. So, too, are the attempts to include Indigenous concepts—linguistic, spiritual, cultural. . . . Hämäläinen’s eagerness to characterize the colonial slaughter of Indigenous people as evidence of fear and weakness wears thin as the tide turns, and the story of pitched battle gives way to one of systematic subjugation. . . . the tremendous scope of “Indigenous Continent” exacts a narrative cost: often it reads like a monkish chronicle—a quick succession of names, dates, harvests, tragedies, schisms, rejoinings, subsequent sunderings, wins, losses.

Exactly. So why is that criticism stuck at the end of a positive review that concludes, “I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,’ I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand”?

The guiding idea seems to be that when the material, the stuff to be gleaned from the book, is this important—this necessary, to those who care, and maybe to being defined as a caring reader—then such readers can be expected to be OK with, maybe even satisfied by, the minute-to-minute experience of hacking through what even some of the book’s promoters acknowledge is sheer tedium. It's ironic that the Schiff bio of Adams, a pop work, eschews action at the crucial moment, and Indigenous Continent, a work by a scholar, tries to be all action at its most crucial, and that each work achieves its own kind of dullness. Seeking to overturn a dominant narrative turns out to generate a reading experience similar to those generated by seeking to prop up dominant narratives. As a practitioner, I keep thinking that sooner or later the readership will rebel against the whole thing.

But what if a soporific of one kind of another is just what the readership for these American history subjects really wants?

As a practitioner, it's freaking me out, man. It's really freaking me out.

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Further Reading

(Some paywalls here, sorry!)

This is the most genuinely thoughtful and critical review I’ve seen of Indigenous Nation, raising issues I didn’t get into here.

Schuessler’s Times piece on Hämäläinen explores an interesting cultural conflict.

The Treuer review delves more deeply than I had space to explore.

My piece on consensus-school scholarship of the founding and its latter-day survivals.

You want agency? Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony, and the Invasion That Opened the West.