On the Pursuit of Lost Historiographical Causes
I compare this pursuit to an inventor who has an idea that a particular line of inquiry will lead to a major discovery. He may be correct, but he probably is incorrect. Most inventors are part-time inventors. They don't do it for a living. They may do it for the sheer joy of the pursuit. They may hope to make a lot of money. They may hope to change people's lives. There are many motivations. But the reality is this: most people who begin the pursuit of some great breakthrough fail. We read about the ones who did not fail, but there are plenty of stories of people who made the breakthrough, and who never made any money off of it. The man who got to the patent office two hours after Alexander Graham Bell did is long forgotten. He did not make any money.
I think it is generally futile to become a full-time historian. There are too few jobs. You have to spend your life teaching not very bright students. They take the course probably because you have a reputation of giving easy grades. I was recently told this about Ralph Raico, who was an extraordinary historian, but who, unfortunately (for me, anyway), wrote very little. He described his career as follows: "I would begin teaching a group of students who could not find Portugal on a map. At the end of my course, they had never heard of Portugal."
I encourage people to become part-time historians. There are tens of thousands of Americans who are part-time historians of the Civil War. They are remarkably well-informed. Unfortunately, they rarely write. But, with free website software, there is now no legitimate reason why they should not publish book reviews, reviews of articles, and specialize in some area of the Civil War. This is equally true of regional or local historical investigations. There is lots of work to be done.
PETROGLYPHS
In the field of historical studies, part-time explorers and translators of petroglyphs often find very useful items. These items point to the fact that conventional historiography of pre-Columbus America is incorrect. But these studies virtually never get accepted by academic historians. What they find is never reported in any textbook. One such organization is the Epigraphic Society. It publishes a regular journal. The journal is never quoted in academic circles. These people have been doing this for decades.
Are these amateur explorers wasting their lives? I don't think so. They are making legitimate discoveries. But as far as influencing the academic guild, their efforts really are wasted. They have to decide whether it is worth it to them personally to make a unique discovery, even though the discovery will never be incorporated into the narrative of pre-Columbus America.
Yes, there's always the possibility that there will be a breakthrough that somehow does get picked up by academic historians, but the odds against this are astronomical.
I would tell somebody who is interested in petroglyphs that it's a good hobby, but it is only a hobby. To have any hope beyond this is psychologically self-defeating. The person is going to be disappointed, and this may lead to the person abandoning his hobby. But his hobby is good for him, and it is good for a handful of people who want to make sense of pre-Columbus America.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. It's a lesson I produced for the Ron Paul Curriculum.
CONSPIRACY HISTORY
Then there are the conspiracy historians. Here, there are real psychological pitfalls. Conspiracy historians really do think that there's a possibility that they will be able to penetrate the thinking of the masses of Americans. They think they're going to do an end-run around the academic guild. They also imagine that the masses of Americans are interested in history, which except for Civil War history and perhaps some other military histories, is a delusion. There is always room for another book on Lincoln, as long as the book is not critical of Lincoln. Of the thousands of books on Lincoln, only a handful are critical, and their arguments rarely make it into the textbooks. When an idea does make it into a textbook, such as Lincoln's obvious infringements on due process of law regarding the publication of antiwar opinions, the historians shrug it off or apologize for it.
The same is true for Woodrow Wilson in his efforts to get the nation into World War I, and Franklin Roosevelt's similar machinations to get the nation into World War II. Initially, all such arguments regarding Roosevelt were dismissed as being Republican crackpot theories. Then, in the 1970's, a handful of historians began to conclude that the original critics of Roosevelt were correct. But then the authors said that Roosevelt was justified. The obvious example here is Robert Stinnett, who has written the most effective book on Pearl Harbor, Day of Deceit (2000), who apologizes for Roosevelt's deliberate deceptions at the beginning of the book. On the first page of the Preface, he speaks sympathetically. "I understood the agonizing dilemma faced by President Roosevelt. He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in the fight for freedom. He knew this would cost lives. How many, he could not have known." This apology did Stinnett no good in academia. The academic guild dismissed his book as one more apology for isolationism, circa 1941. The book gained no traction. Its thesis is presented in no college or high school textbook on American history.
Then there are the part-time conspiracy historians. These people will read one or two books on conspiratorial movements in American history. They may read a few books on conspiracies in Europe, beginning with the French Revolution. Such conspiracies existed. The great book on this is James Billington's magnificent Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. You cannot understand European history of the 19th century if you are not familiar with the book, and more than familiar: you have read it two or three times, and you remember many of the details. The book is literally indispensable. It was published in 1981. That was the last we heard from Billington. He took Reagan's offer to appoint him the Librarian of Congress in 1987, and he kept the job for the next 28 years. He never wrote another book. He got sidetracked. We are worse off for it.
The footnotes of his book are extraordinary. They are in seemingly a dozen languages. I was told by his editor that he was still submitting footnotes when the book was at the printers. She finally told him he could make no more changes. He was a serious historian. He took the issue seriously. He devoted years to the study. He proved that there were conspiracies. But historians of these conspiracies who are serious never see their detailed studies picked up by the academic guild.
Most amateur conspiracy theorists are not self-disciplined. They don't read 50 or 60 books on the conspiracies they think are out there. They don't go to the primary sources. They do not study dozens of books from conventional historians regarding the era in which the conspirators supposedly operated. They will not tell you about cause-and-effect. They will not ever trace it back to a single conspiracy, with the possible exception of the international Jewish bankers' conspiracy, but they never read any detailed studies of the Rothschilds. They only read books written prior to about 1960. These books were written by people who do not read German, and who have never looked at a primary source document.
These people waste their lives. They become increasingly frantic. They are afraid to speak publicly about their beliefs. They think the conspiracies are after them personally. They are literally mentally incapable of connecting the dots. All they can see is multiple dots, which they insist can be connected, but they are unwilling to do it, and they are unwilling to go public with their findings, which are based on reading crackpot books written by undisciplined amateur historians. I think these people are self-destructive. The best that I can say for them is this: because they are terrified about going public with their findings, and they are personally undisciplined and unwilling to do serious studies, they do not make converts. They are regarded as crackpots by their friends, who want to avoid them if possible, at least when they are talking about "The Conspiracy," which is most of the time. I have dealt with these people for about 60 years. Their psychological makeup is predictable. I have only met one of these people who was married to a spouse who shared her views, and that was back in 1966.
CONTROVERSIAL MONOGRAPHS
What about people who pursue topics that really are important, but which are obscure? Of all the historians of America I have read who really was a master of the primary sources, and who wrote several books that are occasionally quoted, James C. Malin is my favorite example. His two-volume book on John Brown is worth reading. So is his book on the grasslands of North America. So is his book on American inventiveness: The Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand. He was one of the great regional historians in American academia. He was a master of the history of Kansas. But who cares about the history of Kansas? That was his problem. He wrote dozens of articles and detailed studies, but they were of no interest to anybody who is not an historian of Kansas.
I think the classic example of such an historian is Frances Yates. She was simply incredible. She wrote highly researched books on arcane topics, such as her book on the art of memory. She wrote a book on the secret messages in the design of the Globe theater, the building in which Shakespeare's plays were performed. She is not regarded as a crackpot. That book on the Globe never got any traction in the academic community, but that was because nobody wanted to challenge her work, which would have been intellectually suicidal, and they couldn't figure out why the book was important. One of her books did gain traction in academia: Geordano Bruno and the Hermetic Traditioin (1964). What she argued in this book and other books that she wrote was this: there was an occult side of the Renaissance. She was probably the first historian to get a hearing for her thesis among specialists in Renaissance history. She began digging in a series of abandoned academic gold mines, and she struck gold time and again. That was because there really was gold in them there hills. The academic historians had ignored the gold because they did not want to believe that the Renaissance was based on a comprehensive revival of classical thought, which was deeply influenced by occultism and magic.
Her intellectual predecessor in the late 19th century and early 20th century was Jane Ellen Harrison, who wrote Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). The third edition (1922) is published by Princeton University Press. She was a lecturer in Greek and Russian at Cambridge University. Technically, she was never regarded as a professional historian, but she clearly was. She had a group of disciples around her. One of them was John Cuthbert Lawson, who wrote Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion. He went to Greece and began researching religious rituals in the countryside. He concluded that the rituals were basically the same as those that Harrison had described in her studies. The book was published in 1910. It was never picked up by academia. The copy I have was published in 1964 by University Books, which is a publisher of outlier books. I bought it through the Mystic Arts Book Club.
I don't think Harrison and Lawson wasted their lives. But if you're going to evaluate the importance of their work by the number of footnote references you see to their works in monographs, then you would have to conclude that they did waste their lives. Their findings do not get into college-level textbooks on Western civilization, and these days there are not many textbooks on Western civilization. Students are not required to take courses in Western civilization any longer.
Murray Rothbard wanted to write a history of colonial America which would reveal the libertarian tradition in colonial America. This would culminate in his discussion of the Constitution. He finished four remarkable volumes leading up to the book on the Constitution: Conceived in Liberty. Then the device he had used to take his verbal notes broke, and there was no other machine available that would enable him to recover his notes. He was never very good with technology. He should have recorded everything on cassettes. So, he never finished this project. It was not his primary field of study, yet it is an extraordinary history. Did he waste his time? I don't think that he did. His book is still useful for any colonial American historian. But he never was able to prove his point. He only provided indicators that might lead some other historian to finish the task. That was over 45 years ago. There has been no such historian. Meanwhile, campus historians are unfamiliar with his book. Had they ever heard of it, they probably would not read it, and had they read it, they would not have believed it. He wrote the book, he said in his preface, in order to report on long-suppressed facts. Those facts have now been suppressed for an additional four decades.
Here is my advice to any budding historian. If you are trying to get a Ph.D., drop out of the program. There are few jobs. If you are doing this as a lifetime hobby, be ready to accumulate the primary sources. Post them online. Make certain that your readers can access these sources. Begin reading textbooks in the field to get the conventional story. At the same time, begin to read monographs in the field, in order to get the story at the upper division level and the graduate school level, and read everything you can find that challenges the conventional wisdom. To do all this, you must narrow your focus. Dedicate your life's hobby to a relatively narrow topic in which you will have a major competitive advantage within 10 years, even if you spend only two hours a day on the project. But if you're not willing to spend two hours a day on the project, do something else that you are willing to spend two hours a day on. That's because you cannot gain mastery without investing at least 5,000 hours, and you cannot become equipped to penetrate any particular intellectual guild unless you spent 10,000 hours.
I did this in the field of economics. It can be done. I decided not to do it in the field of history, where I had professional training, with the exception of my book on the Constitution, which I began in 1988, and my book on how the liberals captured the Northern Presbyterian Church, which I began in the fall of 1962, and I did not complete until 1996. Neither book was taken seriously by the academic guild. The thesis of neither book has found its way into monographs. Surely, my account of the Constitutional Convention has not made it into high school textbooks. Did I waste my time? The first book took me only a few months to write. The second book took me, intermittently, 34 years to write. I did the second book for my own benefit. I wanted to know how they did it. I had hoped that other historians would imitate me, and do similar studies of other denominations. I have never heard of any such books. But since I wrote the book for my own edification, I don't regard my time as wasted. I picked up a lot of material about the Progressives and the Social Gospel that I otherwise would not have bothered to pursue. I also learned a lot about tactics of the minority movement within Protestant churches to capture the institutions, and personally benefit from the donations and tithes of naïve and powerless church members who did not share the opinions of people who should be regarded as conspirators.
CONCLUSION
All this is to say the following: you have to have good judgment as to what projects are worth a lifetime of part-time work. Today, there are more possibilities than anyone could have conceived of a quarter century ago for getting information onto the screens and into the minds of people who would never have found your output before the Internet, Google, and even YouTube. In other words, there is far more likelihood that you will have influence with your discoveries today than there was from the beginning of time until about 1996. There is a lot more competition from others, but if you believe that the truth finally will have a positive effect in history, then you really ought to begin your studies.
If you want to start a home business, that's probably a better use of your time. Use your profits to donate to people who are doing the spade work. Support institutions that are producing this kind of unappreciated work, and which are packaging the outcome in ways that intelligent people can access, assimilate, and, most important, implement in their lives. Don't waste your time on studying history or anything else, except as a hobby which amuses you, unless you have a target audience in mind, and unless you have some kind of advice for these people to carry on your work in order to produce positive changes in history.