#75, November 10, 2005

Of Epigrammatology

Non, Je ne regrette rien, except…

I have one great regret regarding my essay, “Making the World Safe for American History,” which was published in Antoinette Burton’s edited volume, After the Imperial Turn (Duke, 2003).  It has nothing to do with anything that might substantially alter the content of the essay.  I would not want to change my analysis much, though I am sure there must be something problematic in what I have to say somewhere in the essay.

Indeed, the essay seems to have had very favorable responses.  One hears through the grapevine that some such fellow really liked it, but funnily enough one hears less frequently directly from the people themselves.  C’est la vie.  It doesn’t seem to lead to invitations to give lectures or the like, even while the targets of the essay itself seem to be fêted across this fair and meritocratic land of ours.   But, there are no regrets on that score either.  Indeed, when one gets a review in The Historical Journal from a historian as smart as Susan Pedersen at Columbia University (and we know that she is smart, not just from the well-written and thought-provoking review of the whole volume, but because she liked my work!), then it brings a smile to one’s face that almost makes one forget the regret associated with the essay.

For, Professor Pedersen writes that there are a number of “gems” in the volume dealing with historiographical and interpretive battles.  And, she continues,

my favourite essay among this group is Robert Gregg’s splenetic and very funny skewering of the recent endorsement of an ‘international turn’ by the doyens of the Organization of American Historians (‘Making the World Safe for American History’), a ‘turn’ whose muddle-headedness he finds captured perfectly in a recent invitation-only meeting to discuss this project held (as all good conference-cum-boondoggles should be!) at the Villa La Pietra in Florence. (‘Let’s be honest now, Gregg writes disarmingly, ‘My real beef with OAH’s conference on internationalizing the study of American history at La Pietra was that I was not a participant.  Had I been invited…I would be endorsing the La Pietra Report in a snap, like all the other worthies on the participant list.’ (p. 173).)  It is nice for us he was not invited [not for me], though, for exclusion provides him with the perspective (or perhaps just the animus) to point out that – as should be obvious to anyone taking a cab, buying a newspaper, or simply spending five minutes contemplating the furnishings and appliances of their own home – one scarcely needs to travel to Florence to understand how utterly ‘global’ is the history of this mature settler state [nice].  As Gregg mildly proposes, ‘internationalizing American history might be more effectively demonstrated by endeavouring to bring out the global buried [clearly not very deeply] within the local’ (p.171).

Who wouldn’t enjoy reading that about their work?

Nonetheless the work itself is a disappointment to me.  Just look at the epigraphs in the piece.  I use one from the album “Who’s Next,” but I could have used one so much better from the same song (“Won’t get fooled again”).  I was in the car the other day  and these lines came floating over all those annoying engine sounds:

And the world looks just the same,

And history ain’t changed….

Damn!  How could I have missed those lines.

Well, I feel a little better now.