What Steve Earle can teach us about the Annales school of historiography
October 2, 2014 § 4 Comments
I’m teaching a course on Historiography this semester. This week, we’re dealing with the Annales school of history, as a sort of background before we read Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat. While this book isn’t really an annaliste work, Bloch’s theories of history still impacted his evisceration of his country after the Fall of France in 1940. We’re reading an excerpt from Fernand Braudel’s magnum opus, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II, published in 1949.
In it, Braudel talks about the mountain regions of the Mediterranean world, and argues that the culture and civilisation of the plains didn’t reach into the mountains. The hills, he claims “were the refuge of liberty, democracy, and peasant ‘republics.'” And he mentions bandits. One of my favourite history books of all-time, and one which was massively influential on me as a young scholar, is Eric Hobsbawm’s Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels, which, despite Hobsbawm being primarily thought of as a Marxist, was deeply indebted to the annalistes, and to Braudel in particular.
But, as Braudel goes on and on about the freedom of the mountains, I kept thinking about hillbilly culture, about the Hatfields and the McCoys, about hillbilly culture, and so on. And it occurred to me that the mountains are no longer this mythical place beyond the reach of modern society. The coercive power of the state has caught up to the mountains.
And then I thought of my favourite Steve Earle song, “Copperhead Road.” In this song, Earle sings of three generations of a family who live in the ‘holler’ down Copperhead Road. In the American Civil War era, copperheads were northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and called upon President Lincoln to immediately come to peace with the Confederacy. Braudel argues that
The mountain dweller is apt to be the laughing stock of the superior inhabitants of the towns and plains. He is suspected, feared, and mocked…The lowland peasant had nothing but sarcasm for the rude fellow from the highlands, and marriages between their families were rare.
At any rate, Earle sings of John Lee Pettimore III, named after his “daddy and his daddy before.” Granddaddy John Lee made moonshine down Copperhead Road. Daddy John Lee ran whiskey in a big black Dodge, which he bought at an auction. Meanwhile, John Lee III is a Vietnam vet growing marijuana in the holler down Copperhead Road. He signs the song in a good ol’ boy twang, and sings of white trash.
Granddaddy John Lee hid out down Copperhead Road, only came to town twice yearly for supplies, and successfully dealt with a “revenue man” from the government. Daddy John Lee was doing alright for himself before he crashed that big, black Dodge and the whiskey he was running burst into flames, killing him, on the weekly trip down to Knoxville. Meanwhile, John Lee III wakes up in the middle of the night with the DEA and its choppers in the air above his land.
In other words, as we move through the 20th century, from Granddaddy in the 1940s to John Lee III in the 1980s, we see the mountains lose their allure and mystique. What was once the badlands is now under the control of the government. In the early 21st century, it is even more so.
The Value of Death and the Value of Passion
December 14, 2013 § 4 Comments
I am reading what is turning out to be one of the best books I’ve read in years, Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Schulman is a survivor of the AIDS Plague in New York City in the 80s and early 90s. She is deeply implicated in queer culture in New York, in the fight for the rights of those inflicted with AIDS during that era and the fight to commemorate and remember those who died. 81,542 people died of AIDS in New York City from 1981 to 2008. 2008 is 12 years after the Plague ended, according to Schulman.
The Gentrification of the Mind is a blistering indictment of gentrification in the East Village of Manhattan, an area of the city I knew as Alphabet City, and the area around St. Mark’s Place. It’s the same terrain of Manhattan that Eleanor Henderson’s fantastic novel, Ten Thousand Saints, takes place in (I wrote about that here). This is one of the things I love about cities: the simultaneous and layered existences of people in neighbourhoods, their lives spatially entwined, but culturally separate.
Schulman’s fury drips off the page of The Gentrification of the Mind, which is largely her own memoir of living through that era, in that neighbourhood where she still lives. In the same flat she lived in in 1982. She makes an interesting juxtaposition of the value of death, arguing that the 81,542 were of no value to our society, that their deaths were marginalised and, ultimately, forgotten. Whereas the 2,752 people who died in New York on 9/11 have experienced the exact opposite in death: their lives have been valued, re-assessed and immortalised. Her point is not to take away from those who died in 9/11, but to interestingly juxtapose those who died due to the neglect of their government and culture and those who died due to external forces.
I just finished reading Amy Waldman’s The Submission, a fictionalised account of the process leading to the creation of the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero. Waldman reminds us that the lives of those killed on 9/11 were not valued equally, something that should be intrinsic to us all. The lives of the people who worked in the food courts, the restaurants, cafés and those who manned the parking lots, the custodial staff did not mater, in the end, as much as the first responders, the office workers, the people on the planes.
And this is an interesting argument. Schulman’s response is much more visceral than mine, but she was there in the 80s and 90s. I wasn’t. She was also there on 9/11, I wasn’t. But I am an historian, she is not. Death is never equal, just as life isn’t. It has been this way since forever. In The Iliad and The Odyssey, set in Ancient Greece, the lives of the foot soldiers and the sailors under Odysseus’ command are worth nothing, whereas the lives of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus are valued. The deaths of the first two cause mourning and grief for Odysseus, both at Marathon and on his epic journey home.
All throughout history, people’s lives have been valued differently. What Schulman sees relative to the victims of the AIDS Plague and 9/11 shouldn’t be surprising. It doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t make it okay. But, fact of the matter, it’s the same as it ever was. And, after researching, writing, and teaching history for much of the past two decades, I can’t even get all that upset about the devaluation of the marginalised in society anymore. I don’t think it’s any more right in 2013 than I did as an angry young man 20 years ago, but I have become so jaded as to not even register surprise or anger anymore.
So in reading Schulman’s book, I am surprised by her anger and her passion, and I am also intrigued by it, and I’m a little sad that being an historian is making me increasingly resigned to bad things happening in the world. It might be time to get my Howard Zinn, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm out, and remember that those men, even after a lifetime of studying, writing, and teaching history, maintained a righteous anger at injustice.
Matthew Barlow 