The problems of writing Contemporary American History

To write history is not an easy task. But I was able to meet the challenge upon doing my first historical writing of the United States. The first one was quite a great task for I have in my hands, 50 documents about the war, the personalities, speeches of the presidents, acts and treaties and the like. Those are primary sources. Raw and unedited primary sources. The question that I immediately have to answer was how to recreate the past using the documents. What followed was a massive amount of work but I was able to make it.


The next time I was asked to write about American History from 1950 to 2000 was quite a challenge. I belong to the contemporary times and have known the History of the United States for some time now but how to rewrite it again is definitely not an easy task. It got harder knowing that I am allowed to do research and background reading.


The more that I read, the more I got consumed of the articles and the facts and the more that I got confused of what to include. But I remained committed to my task. The historical perspective that I have in mind was not sufficient to put into paper. I did background reading and much to much dismay, I got brain freeze. I was bent on to writing which are the more important and which are not. It is a wrong idea to write history thinking of what I am going to include. In a way, I became biased. So what happened was that I am not able to capture the experiences of the nation that I am writing. Throughout my writing, I tried to focus on including facts but it falls short of my expectations. I was constrained by circumstances that made me think that I am doing a term paper and not a historical writing.


Accomplishing the goal of recreating the past became a tedious task for me. I need s strong chronology and a strong conceptual framework but my writing shows that I failed in so doing, but I am able to include the major themes that I believe is important in my writing. The themes about the presidents although short have given me a sense of a pattern in connecting bits and pieces of history. Each period of American history is signaled by the start of a new presidency. Each of the presidents has shown good and bad leadership that had caused a change in the course of American history.


To put a face in the historical experience of the United States is quite hard. Taken together, it is an experience worth writing. Good narrative is primarily a product of good sentences and a good coherence. On my part, I would say that this is one of my strongest points. The revising process is also an opportunity for me to incorporate my own writing style. But as far as I know, I wasn’t able to resolve the bitter issue that confronts new historian and that is to be biased upon the selection of what is history and what is not.


Being aware of some contemporary events, I was faced with the question of what recurrent events should be included in my work. But I tried to be fair. It will depend largely on how the audience will view my writing. Historian and future historians might also analyze the case of writing history from the context of influence. I believe that writing history is about making choices. Nowhere is this process more difficult than to write about recent events. We are bombarded with headlines and today’s headlines can become tomorrow’s history.


To write about recent events require courage and the all encompassing question of “Is my writing worth the time?” when the newspapers are all writing about it. But as far as I can tell, I was able to connect events and able to evaluate the documents. It is a difficult process that I am able to achieve.

The problems of writing American History

REFLECTION PAPER


The past is not dead; it’s not even the past yet. This according to William Faulkner was a fact. I thought it was just a lame excuse to say that a person has to look back at the past and learn from the past experiences and all those things that goes with it. I was wrong. In the writing of history, I was able to understand what it means. History is not just to recreate the past. It is to live with it. Explain it and be able to understand it wholly.


The fact that I was succumbed to writing history of one of the greatest nation of the world as requirement posed to me a big challenge. To recreate the past of the nation that is the United States in a manner that will show my potential as a historian is a tough job. First, I only have 50 documents in my hand. It is quite a minute amount of documents knowing for the fact that the country has been through a lot since the 1900’s. Second, the challenge lies in how do I recreate it given the very little time that I am suppose to do it. Certainly, people would say that historians do work 24 hours to explain things. Third, what philosophy am I going to apply given the scenario that I would like to have my own. I would want to see things in my own perspective and not to follow a certain model or a certain philosophy.


For the time being I have to. So what I did was to gather all the documents. Make sure that not one of them missing. Some say that I am a very traditional historian because in the age of cyberspace I need a hard copy of the document. I printed everything suffice it to say that I have in my hand almost 300 pages of paper works but still too little as compared to the readings that I have to be able to read to learn about history.


To write about American History is a grave task. As much as I would want to be critical about it, I arguably would not want to end up saying things that is not so true of a nation. I have prior knowledge of the country and that is where I started my writing from. What I did was to sort all the documents from the most distant to the most recent. I have been successful for so doing because the issues were quite related in a number of ways.


And so, I began my writing by stating some details prior to the 1900s. What better way to start but to mention facts about the African American slavery that is one of the reasons of the civil war. I began to cite documents from Du Bois and mentioned details of how the African Americans achieved the status quo. Worth mentioning would be the leadership of Booker T. Washington and how he was opposed by the new and younger groups particularly from the writings of Du Bois. The section on women suffrage is the next stop as it also helped paved the way for the age of progress that followed.


The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and industrialization focused on the age of progress. What followed through was a string of war documents that I cited just to prove that America is becoming a world power. Chapter II being about the New Era is one section that I had a hard time coming up with an issue. So I just cited that it needs more sources. My prior knowledge of the United States will tell me that prior to the 1930s there was the Great Depression of the 1920s but the problem is that there were no documents to prove my claim. The last chapter dealt with the diplomacy of the nation and the aggression that sparked the war. Given the very little documents to start writing about the war is a tough job especially because we were not allowed to do background reading. So what I did was to use the available resources given to me. The chapter lacks the merit I guess because of the fact that if it’s about the war there should be details and facts but there was none.



As a whole, I tried to be very smart of my writing. I ended up being criticized for my work. I wanted to apply the methods of Nietzsche but I believe that I lacked the proper method to do so. I wasn’t able to be a monumentalist because the writings about the personality were not as grandiose as a Nietzsche should have done it. I wasn’t able to be a critical historian because I did not criticize the writing myself afraid that my authority as a writer of history is not that big given the idea that I am just a student writer.


I love the idea of writing a history from the resources that are available. It made me feel like a real historian. I tried to connect each and every document and made sure that the personalities were given the character that they are. In my writing of the history of the United States, I had the futile attempt to discuss the more important issues of slavery and racism. For me, it was one facet of American History that is of interest to me.


In my next writing, I will be very blunt about every issue as possible. I hope to be able to meet my own idea of writing history. At the moment, I am confined to believing that I am not yet a writer but a researcher. But I know that in time, I will be able to achieve much more. History has always been interesting. I felt the joy and the fun of recreating the past myself. I need more practice but I will get there soon.


To write is really to capture the spirit of the great nation. Given that, to write about the United States is to talk about t great deal of economic, political, cultural and social history. At the moment, what I did was just the retelling of “what happened and then that happened.” It was just an assignment that I went through I guess.