My Theory, which is mine

#37, January 14, 2004

My Theory, which is Mine

Having just learned from our august-through-may body, the American Historical Association, in its latest decree, “The Education of Henry Adams in the Twenty-First Century” (the most memorable scene in which sees Henry crossing a bridge into a non-teleological future of happy historians, but I digress) that American Historians have been responsible for more than their fair share of new ideas and methodologies, I feel that it is necessary to offer up a new theory in order to keep us moving forward across that parenthetical bridge.

I believe I have offered up theories before that may or may not have been accepted as bona fide American Historians’ theories – I once compared the changing Progressive consensus to the shift from Star Trek I largely populated with people of the kirk (Scots-Irish and other northern Europeans) to Star Treks II and III, where women and African American men found their way onto the bridge (and Klingons clung on for good measure too). On another occasion, I compared that same consensus to the Monty Python dinosaur – it is very thin one end, gets thick in the middle, and then is very thin again at the other end. These theories were all mine; though I am not sure whether I registered them in the disproportionately large manual of American Historians’ theories (I apologize if I failed to do so – but there was the problem of my citizenship to deal with).

My momentum-sustaining theory that I now offer up, therefore, which is also mine (and which I would like to have duly registered as such), deals with the shift from what I call Irony to Byrony. This is a historiographical shift that takes us from a period of questioning meta-narratives and AHA decrees, from the celebration of the fragment even and the dinosaur’s tail, to a period when we have to keep reading AHA and OAH declarations about the way we should be doing and thinking about history – the fat bit of the dinosaur, the whale (a shared four-star convention hotel room).

In line with this theory, I fear that I see Byrony ahead, afoot, or a-tail.

Beam me up, Scotty!