The Reading History Project: "Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed History of America" by Michael Harriot

In Thinking About History Sara Maza writes that "The skills and temperaments of good research historians are very similar to those of successful journalists: curiosity, ingenuity, patience, and doggedness. And like journalists, good historians know how to put a story together and make it understandable to a wide range of readers." The similarities between historians and journalists may explain why Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed History of America by journalist Michael Harriot is so good.

This marvelous book is more than an account of traditional American history from a Black perspective, which is what I expected when I bought it. It covers a lot of material I didn't know about. Additionally, Harriot's position is that the history of America is the history of racism, a premise I haven't read about before. He does a good job of supporting his argument.

For instance, his contention is that Africans made the plantation system work not just with their labor but with their knowledge. In the Carolinas, Africans had the knowledge and ability to grow rice, what Harriot calls "America's first edible cash crop." He writes of the ineptitude of the original British settlers at Jamestown, saying the colony was saved because of the arrival of slaves. 

In case you haven't heard anything like this before and are wondering if this guy is really talking about whitewashing or just doesn't know history, culinary historian Michael Twitty writes of Africans being brought to America to grow rice in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. In The Story of America: Essays on Origins historian Jill Lepore says of Jamestown, "They brought the wrong kind of settlers: idle and indolent English gentlemen, who spent their time bowling in the streets." Harriot is also not the first to have written that Lincoln was primarily interested in preserving the Union, not freeing the slaves and that Franklin Roosevelt did nothing for Blacks. He's not the only writer who doesn't have a lot of positive things to say about Woodrow Wilson, either. 

So, yes, Harriot has read some history. 

I appreciated Harriot's covering the history of political parties in this country, something I've never been clear on, and describing how the Federalist and Democrat-Republicans evolved into the parties we know now. And how racial attitudes passed back and forth between them.

He also makes clear the incredible openness of the violent racism during the Jim Crow era. I missed learning much about the Jim Crow period in my schooling, and I've taken a few history courses in my day. That's something to consider when talking about the teaching of "our history." How much of "our," meaning everyone in the country's, history are we exposed to?

But don't think that Black AF History is just the heaping on of one grim event after another. Though, it kind of is. It is also entertaining. Harriot brings in some memoirish elements to introduce sections, describing his family. Uncle Rob, who appears a few times to take over the narrative, is a standout. "Racist Baby" also appears a number of times, interacting with Harriot's narrative voice so Harriot can provide the little one with some info that his racist parents most certainly will not. 

Harriot's enthusiasm for Black historical figures who have been lost to the general public is, well, touching or heart-warming, not terms I would expect to use regarding a history book. He particularly embraces Black women from the past. I swear I had heard of Ida B. Wells. I just hadn't heard enough.

To wrap this up, I will say that Black AF History is a great combination of content and presentation.

The Story Behind the Story: More Than a Revision

I have been making an effort to reuse blog material in other ways--primarily revising blog posts about books for essays appropriate to submit to a Medium publication. Usually this involves the essay becoming a more sophisticated version or being developed around a different angle. But I recently wrote about Make Believe by Mac Barnett in two very different ways, once here at Original Content and then at Books Are Our Superpower. 

Here at OC, I wrote about hyperbole and what it had to do with the Make Believe blow-up last month. This was part of a recurring feature here on humor writing.

At BAOS, I did more of what I'd call a reader response. This was inspired as I was reading the book when I found that while I couldn't get into the outrage it caused, I also couldn't embrace it the way reviewers and many of the posters I saw on BlueSky were. I found Make Believe to be neither as bad nor as good as others did.

In both cases, I thought I had something new to say about Make Believe, things I hadn't seen before. 

Jane Yolen's On-line Journal: An Appreciation

Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Recently I noticed that I hadn't seen anything from Jane Yolen on Facebook in quite some time. Long enough to realize that that wasn't a good thing. So I wasn't surprised when her family announced that she died yesterday. The news made People Magazine, because she was, is, and will continue to be Jane Yolen, but the Locus obituary is much better.

Once upon a time, Jane Yolen kept an on-line journal. It hasn't been available for a while now, so you'll have to take my word for it that it once existed. At the end of July, 2004 I first wrote here about it. 

"I've noticed that Jane Yolen has started an on-line journal. It doesn't seem to be a traditional blog, but a traditional journal maintained on-line. I admire what she's doing, but I don't know if I'll be reading it much because...she does too much work. Her work habits are far better than mine, and I don't want to keep reminding myself.

On the other hand, maybe this is just what I need."

In just a couple of days, I was hooked.

"I believe I owe this surge of creativity and ambition to my personal writing coach, Jane Yolen. Though we have never met--though she, actually, has never even heard of me--her online journal with its descriptions of her superhuman work habits shames my "inner Jane" and makes her work harder.

Hey, Jane, there hasn't been an update in a couple of days. I'm going to crash and burn here if I don't hear from you soon."

 By September, I was obsessed. 

"My many, many, many fans know that I am somewhat obsessed with Jane Yolen's On-line Journal, mainly because Jane is a maniac for work and I, well, I'm not. I hoped that reading Jane's journal of her work life would inspire me to make a greater effort. If anything, it's made things worse. The time I should be spending working, I'm spending reading about Jane working."

I sometimes called her my "writing coach." I sometimes called her my "spiritual advisor." I sometimes called myself her "stalker." In 2005 I was worried about her husband's health. Over time, I was more than a little freaked out that in addition to, say, knocking off a few poems, receiving some rejections,  and meeting with her agent on the same day and having multiple books published in a year, she was able to have people over to eat or meet them at restaurants or go shopping and she was able to maintain a second home in another freaking country.

My obsession continued until the beginning of April, 2007. 

"I haven't been reading Jane Yolen's journal the way I used to. In the past, I found her impressive work ethic and output inspiring. Now reading about what she's doing just makes me feel like a layabout. A lazy, disorganized, self-centered, kept woman."

And then I went on for a couple of paragraphs about what I'd just read at Jane's journal about editing. 

Gail and Jane in the Real World

I did meet her briefly in the carbon-based world a few times.

 Soon after my first book was published in 1996, she gave a talk at the University of Connecticut, and I asked her a question about how she had managed writing when she had young children. She said she had two things going for her. 1. Her husband was a professor and was available to take on parenting tasks more frequently than other fathers might be. 2. She'd started publishing before she had children and thus thought of herself as a writer before she thought of herself as a mother.  She wasn't saying she put work first but that she didn't have to create a writer mindset or identity after she had created a mother mindset or identity. It was natural for her to fit her kids into her already established work life instead of having to fit work into an already established mother life. Believe me, I totally understood what she was saying. Being a mother while being a writer or being a writer while being a mother is still not natural for me. I got started in the wrong order.

I would see her at another event at the University of Massachusetts where I attended a program she was running. She began with an apology, because her husband was ill and she had been distracted when preparing her presentation. Then she proceeded to give what I felt was a fine college-level lecture, because that was what she was capable of when she wasn't at the top of her game.

Maybe sometime in the 2000s, the early teens, I actually shook her hand at some small gathering, again at UConn. I mentioned that we'd run into each other a couple of times over the years, and she looked at me intently and said something like, "I hope I was pleasant," which I thought was just lovely.

I am certain someone took a group picture of us at the end of that event. I know I had it, but I can't find it now or remember exactly when it was taken or why we were all where we were, which would help me to look for it. I am afraid I may have deleted it because I remember thinking it made my ass look big. I suspect Jane didn't give a damn about her ass, which left her with more time for all the things she did give a damn about.

I never read a great deal of Jane's work. It was Jane, herself, who drew me, the fact that she existed. In a nod to Michel de Montaigne, if you press me to say why I was obsessed with Jane Yolen, I can say no more than because she was she, and I, sadly, was only I.

The Reading History Project: History and Politics

In Writing the Trump Years Into History in The New Yorker (May 12), historian Jill Lepore writes about writing history. After calling upon Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (which I read as a teenager and now want to read again) and her experience writing These Truths: A History of the United States, she discusses the impact she's witnessed of recent executive orders and state laws on what history is taught in classrooms.

Unless you have a New Yorker subscription, you won't be able to read her article. So I'll give you a few high points. Lepore says:

"Make America Great Again" is a four-word argument about American history, and one of the movement's aims has always been to press the teaching and writing of American history into the service of that argument." Trump wishes "...to make American history great again by removing all evidence of anything that ever happened that wasn't so great..."

"In the Trump era, government censorship of American history has been used against not only classroom teachers but also against writers and publishers and librarians and booksellers..."

Gift shops at national parks and National Historic Sites are now supposed to review what they offer for sale for conforming to the "President's preferred account of American history."

Not so great things have happened in America. And everywhere else. Does pretending they didn't happen make it so? Will pretending these things didn't happen make life better now or in the future? 

History vs Politics

I've just started reading Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins. In the Introduction (I read introductions these days) she says she wrote these essays "because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics." They are both interested in stories about the past, but

"Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationships between the past and the present."

"Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence."

But more on The Story of America after I've read beyond the Introduction. 

In the meantime, in Lepore's article Writing the Trump Years Into History she writes about how difficult it is to write historically about the very recent past, because you can't get much perspective on it. And writing a history of our recent past is complicated by what you might call the legal restrictions being placed on history. She brings up the issue of books purchased by Florida public schools, libraries, and universities requiring stickers that indicate the federal name for "Gulf of Mexico" is "Gulf of America," though the term "Gulf of Mexico" first appears in documents from the sixteenth century. 

Does the whole "Gulf of America" thing mean that governments today can change history? Yes, it's only a name, but it's a name that's been in use for four hundred years. 

"...sometimes," Lepore says, "the only thing to do is to fight. And the only way I know how to fight is to write."

Is Reading History a Political Act?

I am going to argue that those of us who don't write can also fight the political takeover of history. We can do it by reading.

No, don't just say "Those executive orders about history are ... " whatever outrageous term comes to mind. Don't just complain. Don't just make jokes about the President sleeping through history class. Jokes aren't doing anything these days.

You know what does do something? Educating ourselves.

Read history. Any history. Any group's history. Just by reading it, you're helping to preserve it. Support the historians you read by buying their work or by asking libraries for it or by reviewing it on-line. Spread your new-found knowledge any way you can.

My somewhat shallow knowledge of history suggests to me that someday we will come out the other side of what's happening now. Groups don't stay in power forever, and the kinds of groups in power now have not held on for long periods in the past. 

We are not powerless. We can retain historical knowledge for the future. Perhaps that is a political act.