Journal of Southern History

In his novel The Sea, the Irish author John Banville writes, “The past beats inside me like a second heart.”¹ For historians of the South, that is, for us, that second heartbeat is not simply the memory of our own pasts, but of the past about which we teach and write. What we know of the southern past has shaped our lives, just as our personal experiences have shaped them. Our perceptions of possibility, truth, doubt, and justice spring in part from that knowledge, not only from the facts that we know, but also from the emotions and aspirations they generate within us. Our second heartbeat is sometimes comforting, but in this era of disinformation, decline, deceit, and disaster, it becomes an internal alarm that sounds constantly.

I begin with our second heartbeat because it’s more important than ever to acknowledge what we share: our collective passion for the past and our mutually constitutive identities as historians who inhabit that past as contemporary individuals. Since we last met together in person, calamities of historic proportions have challenged us at every turn. The events of the past four years—the pandemic, the rise in violence and hate crimes, attacks on the historical profession and on democracy at all levels, and a culture of disinformation—have deeply affected all of us and have devastated some of us.

Moreover, whatever crises historians specifically face in our place in academia and the public denigration of actual history, we experience those crises as individuals. It’s our jobs, our reputations, our students, and our classes that bear their brunt. It’s folly to assume that our individual performance as historians—our ability to teach, write, and pursue a career as usual—has not suffered.

I’ll use this time we have together to make an intervention to disrupt business as usual at this gathering, to invite all of us to let our [End Page 5] professional masks slip, and to upend our academic hierarchies. By openly sharing our collective plight, perhaps we can think together about our mission and historical practices to make sense of and partly mitigate the constant heartbreak of the past few years. Simply acknowledging that we are in crisis is a first step. Inviting conversations that put our experiences in shared context is a second. Formulating propositions to reshape our futures as historians and history’s future is the third.

Historians are not a particularly unified bunch of people, either by temperament or by training. We chose our life’s work partly because we are naturally skeptical of received wisdom. History is a discipline that systematically trains its students to question that wisdom and drills into us the art of argumentation, which we practice ad infinitum on one another. Unity is not our strong suit, but we do share it, and we need it now as never before.

I’ll begin with an overview of the crisis of the historical profession and then move to the outside forces that have gathered against the discipline and particularly against southern history. I’ll offer some open-ended suggestions on how we might reimagine our programs, practices, and profession. I don’t purport to do this with any degree of authority. Since these are our shared experiences, your thoughts matter as much as mine. If most of this talk is a jeremiad, I’ll conclude with the evidence that this moment should be the best in my lifetime to practice history. The digital archival revolution of the past twenty years, the strong foundation of work that exists on heretofore marginalized topics and people, and our fresh sense of urgency to explore useful hard histories now enable us to do astonishing things.

I attended the same school from grades five through twelve, and it was unaccredited. The only thing I remember from history classes, taught by Mr. Robinson, the football coach, is this saying: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” I believed that Mr. Robinson had made that up himself. The going is tough, and so are we, but we can’t seem to get going...