Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

This introductory article raises questions about history's work in the contemporary public sphere and sets the stage for the issues addressed in the special issue as a whole. Drawing on my experience at a public university in fiscal crisis, I argue that historians can and should contribute to debates about the future of higher education, the role of the humanities in the twenty-first-century liberal arts curriculum, and the fate of intellectual work in a global world.

This article recounts how I came to write for the Pan-African magazine, New African, and draws on my personal experience as a columnist to discuss a range of issues, including the challenges I faced writing for a non-academic publication as well as the controversies that arose within the magazine over my own racial identity. I also highlight how opinion writing, in particular, tends to generate a highly personalized form of criticism, in which the author rather than his or her ideas can come under attack. I conclude by arguing that if the humanities are to survive the current economic crisis, which has caused many to question the utility of a liberal arts education, universities need to more actively support the efforts of scholars who are writing for audiences beyond the narrow confines of academia.

This article explores the intersections between history, memoir, and collective memory. It re ects on my experience of writing, as both historian and former participant, about the 1965 Australian Freedom Ride, which protested racial discrimination against Aboriginal people. It also traces the ways in which memory of and discourse about that event has changed over time: how it was and is remembered and understood, and the di erent uses made of the event by Aboriginal people, educators, and historians.

In 2011 the editors of the Canada-based journal Left History ran a special issue on “Active History.“ Jim Clifford of York University pointed out that one aspect of the active history project “is for historians to work with and share authority with the community whose history they study.“ This is not quite the same as activist history, nor is it a project that simply suggests that history matters. The tenor is to see if academic historians could find ways to engage with social movements. I am greatly sympathetic to this project, and would like to reflect on its implications. But I am also aware that in some areas of social life, movements do not exist. What is the capacity of an historian to work “actively“ with the currents of our time, and what are its implications for institutional careers and intellectual trajectories?

This article reflects on the ways that individuals, communities, and political organizations sometimes invest in an understanding of history based on their lived experiences or, to borrow a term from Hugh Raffles, their “intimate knowledge.“ Debates regarding the practice of public history often begin with the question of how historians can—or should—address the abstract figure of “the public.“ In contrast, this article discusses how individuals and communities with political, emotional, and ideological commitments to a particular historical narrative emerge as an audience through their decision to engage, or sometimes not to engage, with the historian's research and publications. Drawing on my own research into the life of a South African anti-apartheid activist, Dr. Abu Baker “Hurley“ Asvat, this article also analyzes how contemporary struggles for historical visibility not only shape the terrain and process of academic research, but can also draw the historian's practice of writing into a broader landscape of discursive and political battles over the past.

In this article I ask what it means to turn to scholarly analysis to understand better the historical lineages of an urgent contemporary political situation. I first wrote on Kashmir in a journalistic fashion because I was appalled by the militarization and routine suspension of civil rights that I saw when I went there in 2003. Since then I have been thinking of analytical frames in which to provide a longer history for the political mess I observed and continue to observe, which leads me to read in the “field“ in order to understand issues as they developed before 1989—when militancy in Kashmir broke out. What limits on my understanding are put in place by my early writing, which was motivated by sorrow and anger, rather than by the criteria that we expect motivates historical analysis? What kinds of insight are enabled by that same beginning?

A contemporary history of higher education in the United States is being written on the Internet. Academic bloggers interrupt and circumvent the influence of professional associations over debates about unemployment, contingent labor, publishing, tenure review, and other aspects of creating and maintaining a scholarly career. On the Internet, limited status and prestige, as well as one's invisibility as a colleague, are no barrier to acquiring an audience within the profession or creating a contemporary archive of academic labor struggles. At a moment of financial and political crisis for universities, these virtual historians have increasingly turned their critical faculties to scrutinizing, critiquing, and documenting the neoliberal university. Although blogging has not displaced established sources of intellectual prestige, virtual historians are engaged in the project of constructing their own scholarly identities and expanding what counts as intellectual and political labor for scholars excluded from the world of full-time employment.

Contemporary social history is premised on the idea of writing histories of ordinary people. This article reflects critically on the concept of “ordinariness“ as facilitated by the author's brief moment of personal fame and her professional experiences of learning and writing about women's and gender history in and of southern Africa. These perspectives then informed her attempts to write and publish a story of the brief encounter in the late 1930s between a member of her family and the brilliant African-American writer, Richard Wright. The article explores the parameters and definitions of “ordinariness“ in African and American history.

When historians privilege writing to and for one another over all other kinds of writing—especially in a period when the humanities in particular are under siege at public universities around the country—do we run the risk of making ourselves irrelevant to anyone but ourselves? This article explores the stakes involved when historians shift the focus of their scholarly work toward alternate, non-academic audiences. In this case, I will focus my attention on writing for university and secondary student audiences through textbooks and reference works. On the one hand, I argue that writing for students has its pitfalls, because it is devalued in the historical discipline relative to monographs and articles based on archival research. As such, investment in such writing can prove detrimental to achieving tenure and promotion. On the other hand, I argue that writing for students allows us to reach a much larger audience than our peers. In addition, writing for student audiences forces us to think carefully about the accessibility of our writing as well as the link between research, telling stories in writing, and teaching. As such, I argue that writing for students may allow historians greater visibility and relevance in the public at a critical time, given recent cuts in higher education budgets.

Since the 1980s faculty and visiting lecturers at the University of Vienna, have collaborated on and contributed to various study programs and publications in global history and international development. This article explores how the desire to make these writings accessible to a broad spectrum of reading publics has combined with a specific interest in writing emancipatory rather than conservative and affirmative history. I argue that some of the professional dangers associated with writing global history—sometimes read by, and often directed to, less specialist audiences—are much more universal problems of historiography than many would think. Historians with a globalist agenda tend to be particularly well equipped to deal with these problems. This article explores how a number of writings emerging from the Vienna context have handled these problems and sought to combine transparency with accessibility. It also discusses some of the institutional and political contexts that have sustained the particular features of Vienna Global History, and some of the more problematic or ambiguous traits and critical evaluations of the Vienna enterprise.

In Memoriam Shona Kelly Wray, 1963-2012