History Doyens
Joyce Oldham Appleby
What They're Famous For
Joyce Oldham Appleby is professor emerita from UCLA and retired in 2001 after
teaching there 21 years.
She is one of the United States' foremost historians of the early republic.
Appleby is at the pinnacle of her profession through her powerful
engagement with important ideas and controversial issues.
Throughout her 40-year career, her scholarship has examined the formation of an
'American' political ideology, with particular focus
on the connections between the history of ideas and the history of economic institutions,
policies and practices.
Her books include "Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s,"
"Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans," "Liberalism and
Republicanism in the Historical Imagination," "Economic Thought and Ideology in
Seventeenth-Century England" and a recently published presidential biography of
Thomas Jefferson. Appleby is past president of the American Historical Association,
the Organization of American Historians and the Society for the History of the
Early Republic.
Personal Anecdote
Perhaps because I began teaching at a university underfunded for research and overly funded with students with modest academic aptitude, I learned early in my career that the key point of teaching is to move students from one intellectual level to a higher one. What the study of history offers above all is an opening to the complexity of human experience. I devised ways to make complicated matters more accessible rather than simplifying the complexity.
Since we toss around complex with the same abandon as nuanced, I'll define how I think
of complexity in history. Complexity in human affairs arises from the fact that human
beings are never single-minded in their efforts and decisions, and events never slide
along a predictable cause and effect continuum. Getting across this point has always
been more important to me than raising consciousness about past injustices or rallying
students to the heroism of dissenters and reformers. For this reason, I may have been
perceived as conservative, even though in my extraprofessional, political life I have
always been a left-leaning liberal with libertarian undertows.
History offers students an opportunity to think and discuss sophisticated topics. For this words are needed, so I felt keenly the importance of habituating them to a larger vocabulary - one big enough to get at those nuances, complexities, and subtleties. I was astonished when I came to UCLA in my 15th year of teaching to run into a program in which the counseling staff monitored lectures in introductory classes with the idea of locating words that students could not be expected to know. This nefarious [in my view] enterprise ended with the production of a list of words that the monitors had found UCLA lecturers using which were deemed beyond the ken of the students. All that I cam remember from that list is the word, sovereignty. This is the dumbing down approach to education which still enchants some educators. I believe in the intelligencing up of students. From my point of view one of the greatest legacies of a college education is an expanded vocabulary. This may seem "small potatoes" to educational reformers, but not to me. One can not think of subtlety or complexity without the words to express their defining qualities.
All of this is by way of introducing one of the most satisfying moments in my teaching career. It happened at San Diego State University in a lower division class with students more interested in getting a requirement out of the way than learning American History, much less participating in my "intelligencing up" project. The class size was limited to 40 because the department had committed itself to class discussions of the assigned primary texts that venerable collection, The People Shall Judge. The students sometimes let me know that my vocabulary was not theirs, but I insisted that it was the vocabulary of educated discourse. And during the semester, I noticed that some began to integrate new words when they spoke. During the final, one of the members of the class, a young man somewhat ragged around the edges, came up to me and softly asked how to spell, benign.
I've remembered this moment all these years because it captured how studying a
subject plunges one into a conceptual universe which soon becomes one's own.
In this new universe he had discovered a word that he wanted to use in his exam answer.
He knew the meaning; he just lacked the spelling, because he had only heard it. He had
to get the spelling because he couldn't express his thought without it. There in a
nutshell was evidence of learning. I've always wondered if he continued using benign.
How I got involved in the History News Service
Having begun my career working for Mademoiselle magazine in New York and the Pasadena Star-News in California, I was familiar with the world of journalism. When I was elected president of the American Historical Association years later, I saw a chance to create a link between historians and newspapers with historians writing oped pieces that provided historical perspectives on contemporary events. Receiving a go-ahead at my first AHA Council meeting, Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association, ran this notice in its October, 1996 issue.
"AHA Seeking Volunteers to Write Articles: The AHA is looking for volunteers for a committee to promote the writing of feature articles and op-ed essays in the popular press. There are very few public issues that do not have a historical dimension, but the public rarely learns it. We would like to form a committee that would address this need by generating topic ideas and identifying appropriate authors within the profession as news stories break. Committee service would require a commitment of several hours a week and access to e-mail. Suggestions for committee members and ways to respond to this challenge should be sent to Joyce Appleby at Appleby@histr.ssnet.ucla.edu."
The AHA Council decided that its sponsorship of a group distributing opeds could
involve the association in unnecessary controversies, so HNS, not yet really an entity,
was hived off from the AHA. By that time, I had received the most important response
to my notice: James Banner wrote that he not only wanted to write for HNS, but
would like to help me launch the enterprise. The offer of expert help could not have
arrived at a better moment as I was about to enter my presidential year.
I readily accepted his offer, and he set about developing an organization for HNS
while I contacted newspapers, eventually finding more than 200 willing to look at our
opeds.
The oped writers nominated themselves by emailing submissions to both of us, now the HNS co-directors. Having hit our stride by the 2000 election, we learned that both prospective oped authors and the public thought about history in a time of crisis. More than two dozen opeds flooded into our in-boxes during the long, Florida stand-off. Jim and I wrote a pro and con piece on the Electoral College which appeared in some 20 newspapers, and elicited many, angry responses from both sides of the for or against divide. Our normal pace is a weekly distribution of one oped with six or seven papers (and many more web sites) picking it up, including the supportive History News Network.
A tribute to the internet, all of our writing, revising, and distributing is done through email; any payment goes directly to the writer; anyone may use HNS pieces after they have been posted. Writers and members of the HNS steering committee are volunteers. We share the same goal: building bridges to the public by using our expertise and responding to our civic commitment to enhance the quality of public discourse.
Quotes
By Joyce Appleby
History can minister to both perplexities,
not only by preserving the endangered diversity of the human experience, but also by
nurturing an understanding of how learned opinions are formed. Whether we meet our
audience gathered in the classroom, at museum exhibits, reading our books, or in
public forums, we need to offer an alternative to cynicism by making accessible
how we reconstruct the past. And since our work is similar to the construction of
all knowledge, learning how historical truths are put forward and tested possesses
a protean utility?.
History is powerful because we live with its residues, its remnants, its remainders and reminders. Moreover, by studying societies unlike our own, we counteract the chronocentrism that blinkers contemporary vision. That's why we cannot abandon intellectual rigor or devalue accuracy. History has an irreducible positivistic element, for its subject is real, even if that reality is evanescent and dependent upon texts. Historical writing creates objects for our thoughts, making audible what had become inaudible, extracting latent information from the objects that men and women have constructed. This materiality of historical evidence does restrain us. Imagine a willful forgetting of the Holocaust had the Nazis won World War Two. Eventually someone would have picked up the trail of clues or stumbled over the contradictions in the documents created by the victors. Texts would then replace texts, but the impetus for the change would have come from the past itself just as scholars reconstructing the succession of post-Columbian demographic disasters had lots of evidence to go on, once their curiosity turned in that direction. The concreteness of history is what gives it the power to compel attention, to stretch imaginations, and to change minds?
A hundred and fifty years ago, historians exalted the nation's commercial values as proof of democratic vigor; since the Progressives they have focused more upon those groups that failed to benefit from a profit-driven economy. Perhaps now, as the twentieth century closes, we may be ready to explore the social complexity of our entrepreneurial system while shedding the celebratory and compensatory burdens of our predecessors.
The power of history is liberating. The last four decades have demonstrated it, if proof be needed. First social historians located and analyzed group experiences which had been ignored by earlier historians. Then investigations of ideologies and paradigms, followed by postmodernist critiques and cultural studies, plumbed the depths of society's shaping hand in organizing human consciousness through models, discourses and language's insinuating codes. Today as teachers, exhibitors, preservers, and researchers of the past, we have been forced to think through the acts of appropriation and remembrance. We can no longer plead ignorance of their effects. We're self-conscious about our voices, our genres, our assumptions. If we can live with this indeterminacy, pursue its implications, contend over meaning, give repeated witness to the magnificence of the human effort to understand, and share these acts with the public, we can be certain that history - the quintessential Western discourse - will have no end. -- Joyce Appleby in "The Power of History," January 9, 1998 Presidential Address, published in the American Historical Review , 103 (February, 1998) and reprinted in "A Restless Past," Lanham, Maryland, 2005, pp.. 145-48.
In the simplicity of this national narrative there was little room for alternative
constructions of reality, no place for failures, scant concern for diverging truths,
and insufficient attention paid to prophetic voices. Only one division could not be
printed and papered over-that between the Northern and Southern States that was
leading inexorably to dividing the house that had gone in escrow at Philadelphia.The American Revolution had not produced its own reactionaries. The Southern gentry had applauded the break with Great Britain with even more fervor than Northern leaders. What they disdained to share was the interpretation of America's revolutionary heritage as a call to innovation, enterprise, and reform. The sucess of Noretherners in fashioning this understanding of their jopint inheritance led to a new North that spoke for the nation and an old South that clung to values that pushed them apart. what was happening in the United States in its first fifty years-the elaboration od democratic institutions, the hardening of racist lines, the openess of oppotunity, thinning of intellectual traditions, and reconfiguring of Northern and Southern states into the North and the South-could not be comprehended within a unifying story, yet this did not prevent those in the first generation most concious of the nation from claiming their story for the whole. Rather than abandon the cherished object of an American truth, they accepted the half loaf of a half truth wrapped in a covering myth about the land of the free." -- Joyce Appleby in "Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans"
"The most talked-about president in America's history, Thomas Jefferson
commands both praise and condemnation. He is regularly quoted when people speak of
natural rights, but the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence's
evocation of 'the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' and its author's
being a slave-holder troubles us more than ever before. Looking at Jefferson's presidency
helps us to understand this puzzle as well as his amazing accomplishment in washing out
the elite traditions of the nation's colonial past from the expansive democracy he so
decisively shaped." -- Joyce Appleby on Thomas JeffersonThere are two levels: One, because it created the... a sense that they had to do something with their lives and with the society, that was almost as if it were a gift, but it was a gift with a lot of strings attached to it. And then the other reason why it's important is because there were other developments that had nothing to do with the United States, per se-- economic developments, cultural developments-- which played out very differently for an independent nation than they would have had the Americans still been under Great Britain....
I think it was a charter generation, and it was because it was the first generation to live with this revolutionary inheritance, but also because it was the...very self- consciously being different in the world. The society was democratizing, it was becoming more liberal. There was an outpouring of religious enthusiasm, and many new denominations were formed, so the... Learning to live in this newly-created public space was what this generation did, and they, sort of, blocked out the areas that we're still living with. Joyce Appleby discussing "Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans" with Margret Warner on the "Newshour with Jim Lehrer"
But I believe -- again a kind of ambivalence -- the founders really did believe these were universal principles, at the same time they recognized that they were path breakers, that they were experimenting, and I think it would be quite reassuring for them to see that democracies are flourishing many places, they're struggling other places, but they are definitely in the ascendance. I think that would be extremely gratifying because they would feel that their revolution had been the beginning of an entirely new future for humankind. -- Joyce Appleby on the "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" discussing "The Founders' Vision," July 4, 2003
About Joyce Appleby
Those affirmations in this book flow from three distinguished scholars. Joyce Appleby of the University of California, Los Angeles, has worked primarily on 18th- and early 19th-century America; Lynn Hunt of the University of Pennsylvania is a specialist in modern French history, and Margaret Jacob of the New School for Social Research is a historian of science. The three speak in a single voice, in the "I work in the archives" tone of researchers unwilling to leave to theorists the task of explaining to the public the politics and cognitive mission of historians....
"Telling the Truth About History" is at once a vindication of historical knowledge against skeptical and relativist doubts and a popular history of the process by which these doubts came into being....
These three authors sharpen their pragmatic realism by making good use of the recent work of the philosopher Hilary Putnam, and they rightly insist that a consensus-based theory of truth is more defensible if the group of inquirers is genuinely open to women and minorities. Despite these whiffs of contemporary thought, the doctrinal core of "Telling the Truth About History" is a pragmatic realism long since appreciated by many historians in the United States. Making this pragmatic realism more accessible to the public is the greatest contribution of this book. It will no doubt serve also to help undergraduates majoring in history find their way through the post-modernist debates.... -- David A. Hollinger reviewing "Telling the Truth About History" in the NYT
Basic Facts
Teaching Positions:
San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, assistant professor, 1967-70,
associate professor, 1970-73, professor of American history, 1973-81,
associate dean of College of Arts and Letters, 1974-75;
University of California, Los Angeles,
professor of history, 1981--.
Visiting associate professor, University of California, Irvine, 1975-76;
visiting professor, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978-79.
Member of board of fellows, Claremont Graduate School, 1970-73;
fellow commoner, Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1977-78;
summer fellow, Regional Economic History Research Center, Eleutherian Mills-Hagley
Foundation, 1979;
visiting fellow, St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, 1982;
Phelps Lecturer, New York University, 1982;
Becker Lecturer, Cornell University, 1984;
Harmsworth Professor of American History, Oxford University, and fellow of
Queen's College, 1990-91.
Institute of Early American History and Culture, member of council, 1980-,
chairperson, 1983-86.
Area of Research:
seventeenth and eighteenth century America, economic thought in early modern
England, and the intellectual origins of capitalism.
Education:
Stanford University, B.A., 1950;
University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A., 1959;
Claremont Graduate School, Ph.D., 1966.
Major Publications:
Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:
Contributor to books, including The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism,
edited by Margaret Jacob and James Jacob, Allen & Unwin (Boston, MA), 1983;
and Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era,
edited by Jack P. Green and J. R. Pole, Johns Hopkins Press (Baltimore, MD), 1983.
Contributor to numerous journals, including American Quarterly, Business
History Review, Civil War History, Journal of American History, and
Past and Present. William and Mary Quarterly, member of editorial board,
1980-83, chairperson, 1981-83. Member of editorial board of Intellectual History
Group Newsletter, 1981--, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1982--, Journal
of the Early Republic, 1982--, American Historical Review, and Encyclopedia
of American Political History.
Awards and Grants:
Berkshire Prize, 1978, for Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century
England.
1993, Annual Distinguished Faculty Award of the UCLA College of Letters and Science;
1995, Guggenheim Fellowship for her project on the intellectual origins of liberalism;
She has received support from the Mellon Foundation to train advanced graduate
students to offer undergraduate seminars on current trends in historical theory.
Additional Info:
Appleby co-directs with James Banner, the "History News Service," an informal
association that distributes op-ed essays written by historians to over 300
newspapers weekly.
She also writes op-eds and book reviews for the news media, including the "New York Times,"
and has done commentary on the "Newshour with Jim Lehrer, anf recently appeared on
C-Span2, Book TV "In Depth" show discussing her life, career, and writings.
Memberships: American Antiquarian Society, American Historical Association
(member of Chester Higby Prize committee, 1982; member of council, 1982-85;
president, 1997), Organization of American Historians
(member of program committee, 1982; president, 1991).
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