I’m probably not
the only historian on the block who has a habit of thinking hard about
important moments in my own life. Give
me a long commute (check!), inconveniently early morning or late night travel
(check!), or insomnia (double check) and my mind often poses counterfactuals
about people I met, places I’ve visited, opportunities lost and regained, and
of course ideas.
The habit has
only increased through the process of writing a book. And now that the book has been published,
I’ve been thinking hard and often about how
this thing happened. My incredulity
at having actually finished the book is in part some sense of an imposter
syndrome that many young (or young-ish, in my case) historians feel when they
find themselves having become something other than a hungry graduate
student. But there was also a fairly
unlikely set of conditions that buffeted me forward and backward over the
years. I want to tell this story because
I hope that it gives proper, public due to the people, institutions, and ideas
that helped me think through this project over the years. But more importantly, I hope that the
graduate students laboring away on their coursework and dissertations will find
a brief oasis of entertainment and solace in my little odyssey.
I had always
been interested in “the state.” I almost use
the term “always” in the longue duree
sense that David Armitage and Jo Guldi advocate for in The History Manifesto: the third grade report on the demise of the
ancient Greek city-state (answer: they were too nice and needed a Ronald Reagan
to win), the 9th grade critique of media complicity in the ramp-up
to the Vietnam War (conclusion: we’ve come so far that history couldn’t
possibly repeat itself) the 11th grade history fair paper on the
National Security Agency (conclusion: quiet, effective spy agency that will one
day be recognized as heroic), and on, and on.
Given that my talent for prognostication rivals that of Washington Post
Ed Board, it is a good thing I did not become a political scientist. But I was pretty sure that I wanted to become
a historian.
The problem was
that I had no idea what historians did and thankfully my undergraduate
education at the University of Chicago did almost nothing to teach me this. I know that sounds weird. But I got away with 4 years of coursework in
which I thought that great historians were: Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Karl
Marx, the entire Frankfurt School (except for Marcuse), Hannah Arendt, Pierre
Bourdieu and David Harvey among others.
Thanks to professors like Moishe Postone, Michael Geyer, Jan Goldstein,
Herman Sinaiko, Jeff Librett, and of course Bill Novak, I was allowed to run
with ideas—many bad ones—relating to the rise of capitalism, the modern state,
and citizenship.
Given this
background, the doctoral program in American history at the University of
Chicago was a real shock. The almost
exclusively theoretical terms that I had acquired to think about the problem of
the state seemed to have minimal bearing in classes that emphasized empiricism,
historiography, and narrative. That
first year was really brutal. I
frequently got responses from faculty like: “You write like a social
scientist.” “I can’t tell what you are
writing.” Even, “are you sure you want
to do history?” But I figured it out
over time, and when I did, I was immensely grateful that I had been allowed to
take a heavy dose of theory before beginning to learn the practical skills
required to study history. It meant above
all that I would continue to frame my smaller projects—like a short primary
source paper about Tench Coxe’s political economy—in theoretical terms (however
much it ticked off my professors) and that I would pursue a dissertation.
Also, the
books I was reading in my courses with Novak, Amy Dru Stanley, Mae Ngai, and
others, were pushing me to ground those theoretical ideas in actual events,
personages, and periods of time. Incidentally,
those three things, it turns out, are really important for studying history. But back to the story. I was stunned at the argumentative power of
books like Polanyi’s Great Transformation,
Horwitz Transformation of American Law
I, Morgan’s American Slavery, American
Freedom, and Woodward’s Origins of
the New South. These books were also
about statecraft and the relationship between the state and social and economic
structures. Yet, while they were all
beholden to certain theoretical backgrounds, they and other books that I
enjoyed made brave moves in their own directions that ultimately complicated
reigning structural explanations about things like governance and market
relations. In short, my professors and
classmates, and the books we read in common, were teaching me that I could
still have my theoretical idols but that I did not always need to worship them.
Current events would
also prove important. My first class in
graduate school was shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. Much of my coursework occurred against the
backdrop of the ugliness of the USA Patriot Act and the drumbeat of the Iraq
War. Suddenly my intellectual interest
in questions about the state seemed to acquire a new, normative valence.
When it came
time to think about a dissertation I knew I wanted to work with Bill Novak,
whose People’s Welfare had changed
the way people thought about how law and the state worked in nineteenth-century
America. I also was interested in law
and governance in the era of the early American republic because it seemed
mysterious to me that while it was widely agreed that the founders of the
republic needed a more capable federal government, most of the literature
seemed to suggest that the federal government was insignificant until World War
I. Novak eventually dispatched me to the
National Archives regional branch in Cicero where I quickly found myself
digging through massive amounts of federal court, customs, and land office
records.
And in at least
one way I’ve never really left that uncomfortable, multi-use reading room in
Cicero (though it has been renovated and is now amazing). Almost all of my work since, especially my
book, has embraced federal court, customs, and land records. So in my next post, I’ll try to explain the
main idea behind the book and what I hope it accomplishes. But I’ve enjoyed this trip down memory lane!
