I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m a historian with tenure at a well-regarded, small liberal-arts college. I may not be well known or paid one of those highly publicized, exorbitant faculty salaries, but I don’t live with the terrible pressures weighing on those who try to enter academe today. I teach my classes, do my research, and try to contribute to my community.
Often I see the anguish of my inventive, energetic younger colleagues faced with the dire consequences of a society that has apparently decided that history isn’t important anymore. It doesn’t contribute to any corporate bottom line. State legislatures identify “useless” majors, like history, that students don’t really need. The research that academic historians do is seen as frivolous and a waste of taxpayers’ money. Tenure, too, has become a political target.
Because of these powerful ideological forces, my young colleagues cannot find jobs that will sustain them. They are being driven from an academy that desperately needs their fresh ideas.
The work of historians is central to daily life, identity, and culture. Pride in community or country relies on knowledge of a cherished past. Every wrong deeply felt gathers moral power through a recognition of historic tragedy. #BlackLivesMatter is an effective slogan precisely because it evokes a history of its denial.
Our work as historians is becoming increasingly invisible. I was reminded of this recently when, in June, I read a New York Times review of the play “The Twentieth-Century Way,” then running off-Broadway. The reviewer of the play, which explores a gay sex scandal in 1914 in Long Beach, Calif., concludes that the playwright “deserves praise for exposing an unhappy episode in the history of gay and privacy rights.”
Well, someone does. I thought so too when I wrote a dissertation chapter in 1990 that focused on “the twentieth century way.” And then turned that chapter into an article, published by the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 1995, titled “‘The Twentieth Century Way’: Female Impersonation and Sexual Practice in Turn of the Century America”; and then used the term again as a chapter title in my 1997 book, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (University of California Press).
The general plot is the playwright’s own, but his characters are the historical figures I unearthed, and snippets of the dialogue they speak appear in the archival evidence presented in my book.
Friends alerted me to the play in 2010, when it first had an award-winning run in Los Angeles. I cheerfully contacted the playwright, assuming he might want to chat with me, since the title of his play was my discovery and his characters historical figures that I had first described in print.
I politely suggested that perhaps he could acknowledge my work in the future. That didn’t immediately happen, as I learned when I went to see the play in Philadelphia two years later. We met and had a cordial conversation, and he offered to publish a full acknowledgment in future publication and performances. This he has graciously done.
It’s an interesting story about what happens to the work historians do and our sense of connection to the events and people we discover and write about. So I tell it at a lot at parties. But I also feel uncomfortable when I do. What are my concerns here exactly? Why was that acknowledgment so important to me? Don’t we do our work so others will read it and spread the history more widely? Isn’t this playwright doing just that? Can I really feel a sense of ownership over this history simply because I “found” it? In fact, I did not “find” the Long Beach sex scandal. It is public record, and historians have written about it for years.
But I did uncover “the twentieth century way.” And somehow that matters to me.
In 1988, I sat for months in the Sacramento city archives researching my dissertation. Day after day, I read divorce cases, sex-crime trials, prostitution prosecutions — anything that might reveal the sexual culture of the time.
The archive director asked me one day what I was working on. Nervously, I told him. Sexuality was not a common dissertation topic in 1988. He said, “I think I have something that might interest you.” The Sacramento Bee newspaper had turned over a collection of its investigative records, which had not yet been cataloged. Among them was a reporter’s notebook that a Bee reporter, Eugene Fisher, had used when he investigated the 1914 Long Beach sex scandal. In it were his private comments, notes of his interviews with the police and some who had been arrested.
As I flipped through the pages, I grew increasingly excited. I saw language and references to the gay community that no historian, as far as I knew, had written about before. I realized that I had in front of me what all historians hope for: a new and previously unseen source. I now knew something about the past that no one else knew.
There were many notations in Fisher’s notebook that I could have highlighted. But I quickly saw the one that I decided was the most important. Fisher commented that the slang term these men used for oral sex was “the twentieth century way.” What an extraordinary find! A marginalized group in 1914 evoking the new century and modernity itself to characterize a favored — and soon to be outlawed — sexual practice. That key insight drove the rest of my research about the Long Beach incident.
This recognition, this analysis, the material I pulled from the sources to make my claims — ultimately all the written work I produced in relation to this discovery — reflected my intellectual labor as a historian. There would have been no play for The New York Times to review had I not been trained, spent months in the archives, understood the significance of what I was seeing, picked out quotable, evocative details to bolster my argument, and published it: first in a dissertation, then in an academic journal, and finally in a book by an academic press — all entities profoundly threatened by the growing dismissal of the humanities.
This is about more than my struggle not to be “disappeared” from a research discovery. It is a reminder that we need to recognize the enormous power of the hidden intellectual labor that bolsters so much of our society. The work that historians do makes possible the very ground on which we all so casually walk. “Knowledge production” may seem to some like an invisible process, but those of us who watch our “products” drift into the world at large know better.
The dismissive voices in state legislatures, corporate boardrooms, and cable news studios who loudly urge that the humanities be abandoned — who do not recognize or value either our labor or our “product” — need to be forcefully resisted, lest the 21st-century way turns out to be the one where history itself — and not just some random historian — is erased for good.
