The Making of the Historian
January 12, 2014 § Leave a comment
One of my favourite history books is Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary. The book, published in 2001, tells the story of Bridget Cleary’s death at the hands of her husband, Michael, and a mixture of extended family, in Ballyvadlea, Co. Tipperary in Ireland in March 1895. As Bourke unravels the story, the murder of Bridget Cleary is an opportunity for the historian (or folklorist, in her case) to examine the collision between modern culture and folkways. Ballyvadlea in 1895 was essentially the boondocks of Ireland, far removed from the encroaching modern world, people there still lived according to old Irish ways, with beliefs in fairies, banshees, and the like. Whether or not Michael Cleary and his cohorts actually believed in this is neither here nor there, argues Bourke, what matters is that the belief system still existed and was still accessible to Cleary and his co-conspirators.
When I was in graduate school, I was fascinated by the collision between modernity and ancient folkways. In particular, I was interested in charivari, a means of community policing in pre-modern societies in Europe and amongst settler societies in North America. In fact, I was so interested in this, I set out to do my Master’s degree on this topic in Québec. What fascinated me then, and still does today, and why I enjoy Bourke’s book so much (I usually assign it when I teach Irish History) is the way in which modern legal culture intersects with traditional folkways.
Societies have traditionally been able to police themselves. Today, we live in a society where the state is omnipresent, whether in the form of of our driver’s licenses, or the regulation of education, and various other means. When someone breaks the law, we expect the police to make an arrest, the prosecutor to secure a conviction, and the jail to secure the lawbreaker until her debt to society is paid. But it hasn’t always been that way.
In October 1855, Robert Corrigan was beaten to death in Saint-Sylvestre, Québec, a remote agricultural community, some fifty miles south of Québec City, in the foothills of the Appalachians. He was beaten by a gang of his neighbours for stepping out of line. They did not mean to kill him, they meant to discipline him for his bullying, aggressive behaviour. That Corrigan was an Irish Protestant and his murderers Irish Catholics was secondary (at least in Saint-Sylvestre, for the rest of Canada, that was the most important detail in the highly sectarian mid-19th century). When the state attempted to arrest the accused men, they were easily able to elude the police forces sent in from Montréal and Québec, aided by their neighbours. When they did finally turn themselves in in January 1856, they did so on their own terms. They were also able to rig the jury when they went to trial in February so that they were acquitted.
The Corrigan Affair, in this light, was entirely about a local community maintaining its right to police itself in the face of the power of the state. The mid-19th century in Canada was a time of massive state formation and expansion. The same period in Québec saw a spate of construction projects around the province of courthouses and jails and other such buildings. The buildings were all the same down to the shade of paint used on them. Why? Because the state was attempting to establish its control across the province and it was attempting to do so with the message that the state was indifferent to local contingencies. Not surprisingly, the people of Québec rebelled against this. The mid-19th century in Canada offers endless examples of local communities rebelling against the state in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
The Wild West in the United States is another such example. The West has a reputation for violence that is only partly deserved. Much of the legends of the Wild West are just that: legends. But violence there was. Much of it was about the same thing as charivari in England or The Corrigan Affair in Québec: community policing. Disputes were settled between the belligerents for several reasons, most importantly, the state did not have the power yet to mediate between its citizens.
Historians have been studying this collision between folkways and the rise of modernity since the 1960s. During that era, that great generation of English historians (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Dorothy Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm) became fascinated by this collision. I always find it interesting when I see the influence of the historians I read in graduate school still on me today, all these years later.
Last semester, our favourite work study student, Alvaro, graduated. Alvaro had worked in our departmental office since we both (as in my wife and I) arrived here in the fall of 2012. For his graduation, we decided to buy him the books that had the greatest impact on us in our development as historians, as Alvaro is planning on going on to graduate school. I got him E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I first read this book in 1996, my first semester of graduate school. It was one of the few books I read in graduate school where I just couldn’t put it down. Meticulously research, and brilliantly insightful, Thompson crafted an historical study that could stand on its own on its literary merits. I re-read it a couple of years ago. It remains one of my favourite books of all time.
Matthew Barlow 
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