Historians need to read a lot. They can't read everything.
This presents a tremendous opportunity for people in almost any ideological movement to begin to rewrite the history of their countries according to the standards of their movement. This is certainly true of American conservatism. It ought to be true of American libertarianism. It ought to be true of American Christianity, as divided into half a dozen different denominational traditions.
Any group that does not have a comprehensive textbook in the history of its country, with the narrative dominated by the history of the particular group and its influence, is really peripheral to society. The group's members know that they have not had any influence, and they are content with this condition.
It gets even worse, members of the group are completely unaware of the fact that one of the responsibilities of any group is to make the case that it has something to say of importance, with evidence from history that it has had something to say. If an organization believes that it does not have anything significant to say, then surely it is a marginal organization.
If I were running the Liberty Fund, which has $350 million and is limited to publishing old books and holding conferences, I would sponsor a contest for American historians. It would be this: "Name the most important primary source book in your field that no one reads any more." The historians would write a 500-word defense. Top prize: $100,000. Second prize: $25,000. Third prize: $10,000.
I would advertise this contest in the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History.
There would be a lot of submissions to get a shot at $100,000. It would be possible to write a series of revisionist books and articles based on the responses. Reprints would be part of the project. There would be a high-quality Liberty Fund book, plus a page on the Liberty Fund's site with a PDF of the most widely published edition and also the first edition.
AND THE WINNER IS. . . .
I have a candidate for the most important book that historians don't read: Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Liberty Fund has an edition online.
Why do I pick this book? Actually, it is a four-volume set. Why is it so important? Beginning in 1765, virtually every lawyer in the United States was expected to read this book. Every candidate for the bar was expected to read this book. It was first published between 1765 and 1769. It went through many editions. Every British lawyer was expected to read it. But the first edition gives insight into the concept of parliamentary sovereignty in the North American British colonies during the years of the Stamp Act crisis. Then came the Revolution. Lawyers were at the center of both movements.
It would be an interesting academic project to post all of the editions online. The reason for this is that historians of both the United States and Great Britain could see the changes in the book, edition by edition. It would be at least reasonable to presume that younger lawyers coming into the profession would read the latest edition. It might be interesting to see the changes that took place in the law, as manifested by Blackstone, that would provide information on the changes of the law in British history. It would also be useful to study the developments in books comparable to Blackstone that were substituted for Blackstone in the United States. These would be books on Constitutional law.
In terms of an understanding of the history of any society, it is crucial to understand these neglected topics: the development of the law, the development of the economy, and the development of churches. Of course, the development of the family would be important, but that tends to be the realm of sociologists. Broad social movements or developments are difficult to follow.
You can focus on the law better than almost any other topic. The courts leave an enormous amount of written records. These records can be put online. It is clear that development of the law is fundamental to understanding the development of any country's history.
The astounding thing is this: it is not widely studied. Legal history is a closed book for most historians.
AN ENTREPRENEURIAL HISTORIAN
I was in grad school with an historian named Richard Cosgrove. We were both teaching assistants at the University of California, Riverside in the mid-1960's. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Crowe memorandum. Nobody remembered it in 1968. Nobody had studied it in detail. It was an aspect of the coming of World War I. That's exactly what a dissertation ought to be written about: a topic that is narrowly focused, long forgotten, yet at least marginally important. Maybe.
His timing was impeccable. The Ph.D. glut hit in 1969. He received his degree in 1967. He went off to the University of Arizona immediately after he got his degree, and he spent his entire career there. He was a popular professor, and he became head of the department of history.
I paid no attention to his academic career for 20 years. I should have.
Then, in the mid-1980's, I bought a copy of the Liberty Fund's edition of A. V. Dicey's The Law of the Constitution (1915). There was a photograph of Dicey at the beginning of the book. The book noted that the photograph had been provided by Richard Cosgrove. That caught my attention.
I wrote to Cosgrove and asked him why he had a copy of that photograph. He told me that he had decided midway in his academic career to begin writing about the history of Anglo-American law. He said that almost no historians in the United States were devoting their careers to this topic. There are legal historians who do it, but he made this point: they write in legal jargon, and they focus on topics that are of interest only to lawyers. He said that historians of the law who are not lawyers are rare.
He has written these books: The Rule of Law (1980), Our Lady the Common Law (1987), and Scholars of the Law (1996). He is the co-author of this book: The Great Tradition (2007), with Anthony Brundage. Prof. Brundage taught at California Polytechnic Institute in Claremont, California. It is a decent school, but it is not a research university.
I'm trying to make a point here. These two men were not Ivy League professors. You might imagine that Ivy League schools and a handful of other major research universities would employ at least a dozen professors in total who had specialized on the history of Anglo-American law. Such is not the case.
I am not saying that Cosgrove was not a first-rate scholar. I am saying that he stumbled into the field by accident, which he admitted to me. He recognized the opportunity, which is what entrepreneurial scholars ought to do. It was a wide-open field. It is also a crucially important field, yet nobody was doing much work in it. This is still the case.
It did not take an enormous library at a major research university for him to make significant contributions to the field. It only took alertness to the opportunity.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LAW
How can you understand any society without at least some understanding of the constitutional principles, moral principles, and legal principles that govern the nation's courts? The historical narrative in the textbooks are inevitably tied to politics. Even historians who understand other aspects of history as a whole are more important than politics find it almost irresistible to talk about national elections. It is almost impossible to write a history of the United States after 1789 in which the narrative is not driven by the Presidential elections. Yet in terms of the history of the actual Presidents, most of them did not do much. It would be a specialist in American Presidential history who could list the Presidents in order, and provide from memory as few as three major accomplishments of each President. The most famous thing that Millard Fillmore ever did was to install the first bathtub in the White House, and that was a fake story written by H. L. Mencken as a practical joke.
If we see civil law as an aspect of liberty or tyranny, we ought to know something about the history of law in the United States. If we see civil law as an aspect of slow cultural development, we ought to know something about the history of law in the United States.
The conservative movement in the United States has yet to produce a college-level textbook on the history of American constitutional law. If anything testifies to the academic weakness of American conservatism, this has to be close to the top of the list. I wrote about this 10 years ago: https://www.garynorth.com/public/2276.cfm. Nothing has changed.
When I was 20 years old, I took a course in the history of constitutional law. We were assigned a textbook that was old by the time I read it. That textbook is still commonly assigned. The seventh edition was published in 1991. The book is 1200 pages long in two volumes. You have to pay $80 to buy a pair of paperbacks. In other words, the book has been a monumental cash cow for over 60 years. Yet the conservative movement lets this book and others like it go without a challenge.
CONCLUSION
The study of the history of law is too important to be left to the lawyers.
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