On the
impressive and important starting points for Jennings’ career and book.
Tucked
inside my grandfather’s copy of The
Creation of America was Francis
Jennings’ obituary, in which I discovered a couple specific
facts (among many inspiring details of his life, from his World War II service
to his leadership of a teacher’s union in opposition to the House Un-American
Activities Committee) that definitely contributed to my renewed interest in
Jennings’ scholarship and perspective. For one thing, Jennings was precisely
the kind of exemplary Temple
University undergraduate I met during my time at that institution: born and
raised in a small Pennsylvania mining town, the first member of his family to
attend college, and so on. And even more impressively, he spent the decade
after receiving that degree (and before returning to graduate school to obtain
his PhD) teaching history in the Philadelphia public schools.
While he
left that secondary school environment to enter the academic and public
scholarly ones, however, he clearly didn’t leave it behind, as the opening
paragraphs of his final book’s Introduction make clear:
“A long time ago when I tried to teach
American history in a rough high school for slum boys, I thought to brighten
the usual routine with an ‘educational’ film on the Revolution. Astonishingly,
my students groaned. I had to wonder why.
There was no need to wonder long. As the
‘educational’ film’s actors strutted pompously about, they looked more like
Martians than honest-to-goodness human beings. And as they declaimed about
refusing to be slaves, my students’ eyes glazed over. My students were black.
I began dimly to see the error of
conceiving the American Revolution as an unqualified struggle for liberty.
Undeniably something of that sort had been involved, but liberty for whom and
for what?”
Rarely
have I found in the work of any academic scholar a clearer sense of two hugely
significant stakes to the work that we American Studiers do. First, Jennings
recognizes here that every historical interpretation entails not only our ideas
about the past, but also a particular connection to audience—or, far too often,
a disconnection from many American audiences. In this case, for example, the
“Great Men” narratives of the Founding Fathers, whatever their accuracy (and
Jennings agrees with me that those
narratives are too simplistic by far), certainly would seem entirely
disconnected from the heritages, experiences, and identities of young African
American men in 20th century Philadelphia. That wouldn’t mean that a
teacher shouldn’t engage with those narratives; but he or she would at least
have to acknowledge these gaps forthrightly, and to likewise engage with other
American histories and identities alongside them.
Second,
and even more crucially, Jennings here grounds his American Studies public scholarship
in an attempt to find and argue for a more genuinely communal American
history—a vision of our national past and identity that can in fact include and
thus speak to multiple audiences. While that vision has of course been part of
a multicultural curriculum for many decades now, too often it is presented
simply as a given—there have long been multiple communities in America, this
argument goes, so of course we should engage with all of them. But the truth is
that such engagement is much more active than that, represents a conscious
choice to envision historical moments not only through the experiences of different
communities, but also and even more overarchingly through the interconnections
and relationships between those communities. Such a vision, after all, as
Jennings acknowledges at the outset of his book, is the only one that has the
potential to speak to all 21st century Americans.
Next
Jennings-inpsired post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Any experiences that have helped you see the stakes of your work?
7/24 Memory Day nominee: Amelia Earhart, whose pioneering and inspirational
life is rivaled by her mysterious and legendary final
flight in our
national narratives and stories.
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