'Dreams' shows importance of narrative history | Florida Bookman

One day, about 12 years ago when I was in graduate school at FSU, my friend Lee Willis (now chairman of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point. Some of us have it; some don’t) made a discovery about how historians should write.

“Isn’t it pretty simple?” Lee asked. “You create an argument in your first paragraph, and then you recite the facts. Whether the facts support the argument is almost beside the point.” I remember that the rest of us in the room nodded sagely as if we had made a great discovery.  

For most of my life, there has been a debate among historians about narrative history, by which I mean a history without a lot of interpretation. I remember, growing up, reading three masterpieces of narrative history, Allen Nevin’s "War for the Union," Shelby Foote’s "The Civil War," and Bruce Catton’s civil war trilogy about the Army of the Potomac. They were written for a general audience, but they were also intellectually rigorous.  

The academic history profession has long been divided as to whether narrative history is needed any longer. When you pick up an academic history book, published by a university press, you are apt to find a very long introduction that not only tells you what the book is about, but also what you should think about it.  

When I wrote such an introduction for my master’s thesis, FSU Professor Jim Jones very quietly pulled a red pen from his pocket and marked through two-thirds of it. There are a lot of reasons why politicians and the general public don’t trust historians; the irresistible urge to tell the public what it should think about things is one of them.

Which is why the most popular history books are often those published by commercial publishers; the emphasis is less upon is upon proving your academic bona fides. The key to writing (and teaching) history, according to David McCullough, probably the most popular historian in the country not affiliated with a university, quoting Barbara Tuchman, another great historian who was not affiliated with a university is “to tell stories.”

There are some historians who can touch both worlds, maintain a very high academic reputation, but also sell a lot of books simply on the strength of their ability to tell a good story.

I’m thinking particularly of H.W. Brands, holder of the Jack S. Blanton Chair of History at the University of Texas at Austin, who is a writing machine, author of more than a dozen books of history and biography, from Andrew Jackson to Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, from the California Gold Rush to the titanic clash of egos between Douglas McArthur and Harry Truman.

Brands is, piece by piece, writing his own history of the United States, full of heroes and villains and larger than life characters, and full of the tragedy and comedy of human existence. Lots of other historians have written what we call syntheses of American History; the latest one was by Jill Lepore at Harvard, and of course, there’s the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States.

But Lepore’s book is one volume, has a clear axe to grind as she has had in most of her books, and by necessity is choosy about what she includes. Each volume in the Oxford history is written by a different author. In Brands’ project — one can envision it lasting the rest of his life — each volume focuses on a different era, or a different personality.  

When you put them all together, you have something that no other American historian has attempted, at least since the 19th century. It is also quite subversive; many of our finest academic historians do not believe in the importance of cultural or national myth and have built their careers out of trying to puncture them, one by one. Without glossing over their human frailties and mistakes, the sum total of Brands’ work so far is to remind us of the importance of myth in our national identity.

I just got through finishing Brands’ latest two books, "Heirs to the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster," published last year, and "Dreams of El Dorado:  A History of the American West" published just a few months ago.

"Dreams of El Dorado" covers the entirety of the 19th century, from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the advent of Theodore Roosevelt, who dedicated a good part of his presidency to preserving the west by creating the National Park Service.  

Brands’ book is full of environmental and human damage — particularly to the Native American tribes — but it is also full of individual and collective achievement and heroism. It is a revision of the revisionists, I suppose.

Brands’ book is full of the larger than life figures who created the mythical west: Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickock, Chief Sitting Bull, and the rest. But it also reminds us that the (winning? conquest? settlement? In our politically polarized times, you don’t know what word is safe to use) of the west was a project financed and completed by large institutions.

Those institutions included the federal government which passed the Homestead Act and financed the transcontinental railroad, the railroad companies themselves that built it, or corporations like Wells-Fargo, Winchester, Colt, and John Deere, which provided the money, firepower and technology to make it stick. 

American History is built upon the concept of the west, both the myth and the reality, which are not mutually exclusive.  Last weekend I watched for probably the 30th time, my favorite motion picture of all time, John Ford’s "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," which is about many things: myth, the nature of truth, and how we choose our heroes, just to name three.

It was Ford’s last great western, with the famous line of dialogue that most historians would disavow, but which they would do well not to: “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”  

H.W. Brands has printed the facts and at the same time, has enhanced the legend. Not an easy thing to do.

Bob Holladay teaches history at Tallahassee Community College and is president of the Tallahassee Historical Society.