Leon Litwack, history professor at the University Of California, Berkley, died last week at the age of 91. His book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery was a groundbreaking look at the transformation of labor with the ending of slavery, that helped to put the story of Black people at the center of the study of Reconstruction. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In an interview, Litwack described the importance of history education:
The study of the American past is a complicated and demanding exercise. It does not lend itself to easy explanations, to simple formulas, themes, or lines on which to hang the historical phenomenon we will be observing during the semester. History is too ambiguous, too elusive, sometimes unfathomable. History, it has been said, is the study of the past in all its splendid messiness.
I like the way one of my colleagues, an eminent ancient historian, described his lectures as designed not so much to deliver results as to recount the agonies required to reach them. History usually defies measurement and exactitude and a unifying theme or “organizing principle,” and hence it is difficult to define “the biggest themes” in my course. I want to bring into the historical consciousness of my students men and women ordinarily left outside the framework of the American experience, mostly “ordinary” working-class people who did not leave behind the kinds of journals, records, and correspondence historians rely upon but who nevertheless found ways to communicate their experiences and ideas. I want my students to consider in a historical context the idea that social inequities are neither inevitable nor accidental but reflect the assumptions, beliefs, and policies of certain people who command enormous power; that there are limits to our power as a nation, that no country is exempt from history; that the indispensable strength of America remains the right of dissent, and that few people have cared more deeply about this nation than some of its severest critics; and that we need to be wary of those who in the name of protecting our freedoms would diminish them. History teaches, after all, that it is not the rebels, the iconoclasts, the curious, the dissidents who endanger a democratic society but rather the accepting, the unthinking, the unquestioning, the docile, the obedient, the silent, and the indifferent.
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