" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

Dur­ing my meet­ing with my diss advi­sor last week, it became abun­dantly clear that my chap­ter is still all over the place. It opens with an anec­dote about the 1796 arrest of a pop­u­lar 18th-century car­i­ca­ture artist, James Gill­ray, along with his assis­tant and pub­lisher. I describe the event for maybe 2 pages and then imme­di­ately launch into an analy­sis of what I think it means. His­to­ri­ans aren’t sup­posed to do that. Before any dis­cus­sion of the the­o­ret­i­cal and con­cep­tual frame­work, you have to tell the story. My advi­sor says that I“m “not yet think­ing like an historian…”

See, you’re think­ing like an Amer­i­can Stud­ies per­son, which is all about the the­ory first. I need the story before you tell me about it.

For any of you non-grad stu­dents out there, you’re prob­a­bly think­ing, “duh!” But for those of us who are plow­ing the fields of lan­guage, it’s easy to get lost in the minu­tiae of writ­ing. In my last post, I included my word count to date — 39,700 — which amounts to a sub­stan­tial body of infor­ma­tion. How­ever, in that process I lost site of the story. To help me get back on track, Prof. Advi­sor sug­gested I stop col­lect­ing and read one book over the week­end: Near Ander­son­ville by Peter H. Wood.

Wood is an Amer­i­can his­tory pro­fes­sor at Duke Uni­ver­sity, spe­cial­iz­ing in black 20th-century life in the South. In the Fall, I attended a lec­ture where he spoke about his lat­est book, Near Ander­son­ville, a three-part essay about the above paint­ing by Winslow Homer. The paint­ing was unknown until it emerged in the 1960s and even after it was donated to the Newark Museum in 1966 (where it remains today), the paint­ing was kept in stor­age due to its poten­tial for aggra­vat­ing racial hos­til­i­ties in Newark. Through a nar­ra­tive that begins with the prove­nance of this paint­ing, Wood launches into the his­tory (I almost wrote “dis­cus­sion”) of Winslow Homer’s life and rela­tion­ship to the trauma of Civil War, a close read­ing of the paint­ing in the con­text of the 1860s and 1960s, and the pol­i­tics and power of doc­u­ment­ing war through the eyes of a slave woman. It’s a quick and fas­ci­nat­ing read (124 pages with end­notes) and demon­strates Wood’s nar­ra­tive strength, a skill lack­ing in my own writing.

Peter Wood is what my advi­sor calls a historian’s his­to­rian. He doesn’t muck about with the­o­ret­i­cal impli­ca­tions or dwell too long on mean­ing, he sim­ply tells the story. As an Amer­i­can Stud­ies grad­u­ate stu­dent, I’m trained to describe mean­ing. I do inter­dis­ci­pli­nary work, which means I write and research about stuff I like by pulling meth­ods from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines. I’m deeply invested in cul­tural and com­mu­ni­ca­tion stud­ies, so I’m trained to dis­cuss how a medium or mes­sage pro­duces and is pro­duced by mean­ing. I learned the hard way that tra­di­tional his­to­ri­ans don’t do that. At Wood’s lec­ture, my advi­sor intro­duced me to him and I asked how he saw the pro­duc­tion of black­ness oper­at­ing in the paint­ing. He flat out said he didn’t know what I meant by “black­ness” and it wasn’t par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to his book, he was inter­ested sim­ply in the story of the paint­ing. I felt like a dummy, an impos­tor, and that my ques­tion was ludi­crous, but why? The next day, Prof. Advi­sor gave me a signed copy (addressed to me!) of his book. She told me my ques­tion was per­fect, because it demon­strated the clear dif­fer­ence between the Amer­i­can Stud­ies and His­tory dis­ci­plines — His­tory tells the story, Amer­i­can Stud­ies tells you what that story means. This is sim­plis­tic, but think­ing about it this way helps me to refor­mu­late my writing.

So I think I finally kind of get it, sort of. My next steps are to return to the Gill­ray arrest in 1796 and report the who, what, when, where, and why. Which begs the ques­tion: are his­to­ri­ans jour­nal­ists? Am I the last per­son to fig­ure this out?