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Historical Revisionism (and some detective work)

Historical Revisionism (and some detective work)

For six weeks this autumn I am tutoring third year students for a core module titled Historical Debate. The key focus of this module is not the content of history, but historiography – how history is written and used, by whom, why, and how those elements change over time. These are central issues in historical research but can be extraordinarily difficult to convey to students. They still tend to want to think of history as ‘what happened’, as an objective perspective on the past, rather than something constantly written and rewritten.

This week they began the section of the course on modern Irish historiography, with particular focus on historical revisionism, so I assigned some background reading, the introduction to D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day’s book, The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy. Overall it provides a fairly good survey of the issues and developments in twentieth century Irish historiography. I’ve studied revisionism before, but in preparation for the tutorials then I decided to brush up and look more closely at the sources mentioned in that chapter, which led to an interesting discovery (as I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat for Halloween!).

Boyce and O’Day draw quite heavily on an article written by Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’ (first published in Irish Historical Studies, vol.26). For the most part their summary of his arguments are accurate. However, on page 9 they write:

The difficulty of being at once a professional historian, engaged with these issues, and a political polemicist, deeply committed to a special interpretation of the past, can be illustrated again by Brendan Bradshaw’s dual role, as nationalist and Catholic polemicist, and as professional Cambridge historian. As the former, Bradshaw has gone so far as to insist that the popular perception of Irish history constituted a ‘beneficent legacy – its wrongness notwithstanding’, andeven to demand the reinstatement of ‘the popular perception of Irish history as a struggle for the liberation of “faith and fatherland” from the oppression of the Protestant English’. (emphasis added)

Essentially, they suggest in quite strong terms (insist, demand) that Bradshaw advocates the popular, nationalist version of history. In the footnote they cite as the source for these quotations only his article mentioned above. So I went back to it for a closer look. Now I haven’t read Bradshaw’s other historical works, but based on my reading and understanding of the article in question, they quite blatantly misquote, misread, and misrepresent his arguments. For the first quotation they give, the full sentence Bradshaw actually wrote is:

In a nutshell, the issue raised by Butterfield’s exposition of the positive values of English public history [in The Englishman & His History and The Whig Interpretation of History] is whether the received version of Irish history may not, after all, constitute a beneficent legacy – its wrongness notwithstanding – which the revisionists with the zeal of academic pursuits are seeking to drive out.

He does not say, as Boyce and O’Day suggest, that ‘the received version of Irish history’is definitively a beneficent legacy. He says that the issue is whether it is and his statement hinges on that word, making it something entirely different than the way Boyce and O’Day quote it.

The second part of what Boyce and O’Day write relates to the ‘reinstatement’ of the preeminence of popular, nationalist history. However, a very basic problem is that this quotation does not come from the article cited at all. It comes from a different article by Bradshaw, titled ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (Fortnight, no.197, 1991), which they fail to mention in their footnotes. In the context of that article, Bradshaw addresses the combination of empirical skepticism and the whig interpretation of history in the revisionist project:

The practical consequence of this combination was a determination to debunk the popular perception of Irish history as a struggle for the liberation of “faith and fatherland” from the oppression of the Protestant English. On the contrary, the implications of my own insight seemed to be that “national consciousness”, comprised of precisely those elements, lay at the heart of the historic “Irish problem”.

I think few would disagree with his assessment of the revisionist focus on challenging national myths and the narrative of rebellion against 800 years of oppression by the English. He suggests not that these ideas should be reinstated, but that their significance and relevance within Irish history should be recognized. Whether or not the nationalist version of history is in any way accurate, many people believed in it and we cannot understand Irish history without some discussion of nationalism. Thus, far from arguing that Bradshaw is an incontrovertible nationalist, after this bit of historical detective work I would tend to agree with his own assessment of the article ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship’ as much closer to a post-revisionist manifesto than a nationalist one. And as much as this sort of detective work can have its rewards (I can’t deny getting some satisfaction from the ability to call out the mistakes of established scholars) let there be one lesson: always properly cite your sources! In this day and age all Sherlock Holmes needs is Google (and access to JSTOR).

Oral History Network of Ireland conference 2012

Oral History Network of Ireland conference 2012

The last two days (28-29 Sept. 2012) I attended the Oral History Network of Ireland conference in Ennis, Co. Clare. The organization was set up about two years ago and aims to bring together all sorts of individuals and groups across Ireland who work with oral history. In this way it was somewhat unusual for a conference as a large part of the audience came from outside academia, but there were many interesting presentations and discussions.

On the first day three different workshops were offered and I attended the one given by Maura Cronin on ‘using and interpreting oral sources.’ Issues covered included interviewing techniques, organizing collected material, transcription, and the interviewer/interviewee relationship. She also discussed the challenges of teaching oral history to undergraduates and having them collect material. However, these experiences seem to have negatively impacted her opinion of students’ capabilities and she continually referred to ‘young people’ in a somewhat derogatory fashion, which frustrated me. Yes, I agree that unfortunately undergraduates often have little motivation or interest in the subjects they study and sometimes they may not fully comprehend the stories told to them by elderly informants, whereas someone closer in age might pick up on ‘cues’ or ask better questions. However, in my own case I have found that being ‘young’ (or often at least 40 years younger than most of my informants) can have advantages. The interviewees do not assume I know what they are talking about and therefore are more likely to explain what life in the past was like and how it differed from today. I am not saying that either a smaller or larger age gap between interviewee and interviewer is necessarily good or bad, but that in either case it can have an impact on the social relationship and narrative that should be recognized. As historians we would not gather oral history interviews if we knew everything about the past already – we go out to talk to people because the subjects have something we want to learn about that is often inaccessible by other means.

On Friday evening Alessandro Portelli, a giant in the world of oral history, gave a wonderful keynote address, ‘They Say in Harlan County’, based on his recent book of that title. He framed his speech with his own experience of research in Harlan County and the relationship between oral historians and subjects – when he decided to go there first a former girlfriend told him not to because ‘they kill sociologists there’, but he went anyway. He found a community frustrated with being over ‘sociologized’ and ‘folklorized’, one that ‘is both a real place and a place of imagination’ because it has come to symbolize so much in the history of labour relations in the US. He said, ‘what I bring to the conversation is my ignorance’: he went to learn about the place, its history, and its people, not with preexisting notions of what it meant or what he would find. In return, he formed many valuable relationships and friendships with the people he met during many visits over more than 30 years. This mutual respect definitely shone through in his speech. I am looking forward to reading the book!

Two other papers particularly stand out in my mind, not so much because of content, but because of a very similar special respect and relationship expressed between the authors and interviewees. Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire spoke about his research on Dublin’s restaurants and culinary history, which was motivated initially by stories he heard from a teacher and mentor and the realization that no one else had or would collect those stories. His passion for the people, food, and material culture was palpable. (His PhD dissertation is available online and he is involved in the Gastronomy Archive at DIT.) The other presentation that stood out was Brenda Ní Shúilleabháin’s on arranged marriages in Corca Dhuibhne, using film footage from her documentary work. These clips were very personal and many quite humorous. She came to the conclusion that arranged marriages can work if they are accepted and supported by the society. Of the examples she showed, some women entered into them and were happy, while others chose to emigrate rather than face that situation. She also wins the award for best quote of the conference: when asked by a colleague about a particular story, ‘is it true?’, she responded ‘it’s in the parish of truth!’

Many common themes also emerged from the presentations: gender, migration, work, religion, and conflict. And common questions: What is ‘true’? Is memory individual or collective? What do people remember and why? How and for what purpose does the researcher ask them to remember? What do we hear? What ‘duty of care’ does the researcher have for the interviewee and his or her memories? There are no obvious answers to any of these, but it was refreshing to hear that all oral historians of all ages and levels of experience raise and struggle with them.

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