It's hard to believe that it will be a year since last year's High Schools New Face conference. The JMT is planning yet another exciting and memorable event. Once again, there will be a strand for school leaders. "Leading the Way" will be facilitated by Neil Rochelle and Bonnie Smith. As the conference approaches, please feel free to e-mail or blog topics/conversations you want to make sure we have over the course of the 3 days we will have together. As plans are finalized, we will make sure they are posted to the blog.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote a fascinating critical essay in the New Yorker this week beginning with a very worthy question: what is all this fuss on history vs. fiction vs. memoir? Why do we crucify the James Freys of the world who disguise their fiction as memoir as though they'd personally betrayed our trust? It's a question I've always wondered myself. The only real betrayal I could ever see was to the historians of the future who might one day look back at such a "memoir," and use it as evidence in writing their histories. Yet, as Lepore very lucidly demonstrates by going over the "history of history," fiction has often been seen as its own form of history; if not constructed painstakingly from empirical evidence, it is nonetheless often something that could have happened. Few could argue that fiction is entirely useless as an output from its era; after all, it often embodies the mood or characteristics of a historical period in a way that dry documents cannot, and thus can be very useful to the historian.

But, what I found most interesting in Lepore's essay was her gendered analysis of the division of novel and history. Lepore writes: "By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men."

She then goes on to cite Gordon Wood's analysis in his new book, “The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History," that the rise of "family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, 'microhistory'" might just be an attempt by historians to reclaim territory they ceded to female novelists in the 18th century.

Yet, it seems to me simplistic to group social and women's history, family and microhistory in such a way. If we are to begin by approaching this from a gendered perspective, then we must continue so. After all, it was the Joan W. Scotts, the Joan Kellys, and the Bonnie Smiths of the world, not the Eric Hobsbawms and E.P. Thompsons, who initially uncovered the disregarded histories of women, of reproduction, of the household, of sexuality, and of those who made the personal political. Thus, it is not that historians appropriated the female novelists' subjects, but that women joined the ranks of professional historians, and as a result often addressed subjects that they found more significant than their male colleagues. This is demonstrated by the cognizant use of 1980s women's history as a combative tool on the side of feminism. (There are of course exceptions, such as Cambridge historian Richard Evans' pioneering The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894-1933, published 1976, and follow-up The Feminists: Emancipation in Europe, America, and Australasia 1840-1920, published 1977.)

Additionally, as Lepore parenthetically notes, women in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries also "might write biography, or dabble in genealogy." Lepore's tone indicates that she finds such works trifling, yet I hardly think these endeavors should be so easily dismissed. First, show me which male historian from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not dabble in biography (Ranke had his Roman popes and Hardenburg, Thomas Carlyle his Frederick the Great). Secondly, Lepore ignores the presence of "amateur" female historians who, in weaving together subjective narrative with historical fact, using the body and the domestic to explicate character and action (Historian Bonnie Smith uses Madame de Stael's Corrine as such an example), in many ways practiced a more modern form of history than their contemporary professional male historians, whose empirical standards failed to acknowledge the fallibility and subjectivity of the history they wrote.

In failing to take account of these amateur histories, Lepore fails to fully utilize the possibilities of her gendered analysis. It is less a question of historian versus novelist (of a simplified male/female division) than of the professionalization of the historical discipline. In order to legitimize, develop, and delineate their work as "history," male historians in the nineteenth century developed a methodology and means of instruction to verify what could and could not be called "history." Though women often worked as their historian husband's or father's research assistants, professionalization necessarily excluded women, who were barred from the university seminar and thus unable to achieve proper accreditation. Viewing all this from a situation biased by our contemporary views of university-validated history, Lepore falls into the trap of using her historical subjects' classifications, forgetting that these women's "amateur" histories should be viewed as history in their own right. The turn to social and gender history in the second half of the twentieth century can, in that way, be seen as a continuation or rehabilitation, though an obvious improvement, of this form of history. Like amateur history, contemporary history acknowledges the domestic, the bodily, the personal, and yes also the imaginative (not just in the blatant case of Simon Schama, but in the contemporary historian's admittance that s/he has had to selectively determine the narrative, and thus used the license of his/her imagination to group the evidence into (hi)story). It is not the ceding of the novelist's themes to the historical, but a loosening of terms, a widening of the profession, and the reclamation of a half-ignored, half-forgotten historiography. And it was very much driven by the entrance of women into the professional, historical field.

Lepore's final question in her critical essay is this: Is history at risk? Lepore writes, "If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like 'Guts and Guns,' it just might be." Yet, I wonder what she means by "at risk." At risk from what? If, according to her analysis, women have never read history, and if, until the relatively recent rise of social history, men had little choice to read anything but histories with similar themes to "Guts and Guns" (with a different marketing campaign, Ranke's Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries might been Blunt Blows and Brutal Kings), then I don't see that there has been much change in reading habits at all.

I don't want to argue that reading habits have improved. While I'd like to be optimistic, I doubt they have. But I do think there should be a distinction made between the status of popular readership of popular histories and the output of our "professional" historians today. Given its ability to incorporate various kinds of historical method and to acknowledge its own vulnerabilities, whilst using the vast archival and technological resources to build a complicated history, I'd say the historical discipline is doing quite well. And given its incorporation of all spheres of history, its acknowledgment that the working-class woman's story might be just as worthy as that of the Sun King, and that inquiry into gender, race, and class might give us a more sophisticated frame in which to work, I would call off the doomsday carrions and enjoy the excitement, analytical possibilities, and yes, methodological challenges, that historians face today.

For a history of amateur female historians see: Smith, Bonnie G., The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.