Can History Save Us?

When I woke up on November 9, 2016, and saw that Donald Trump had won the election, one of the things I felt—after disbelief and anger—was confusion.

How on earth did we get here?

During the first Trump presidency, historians published an abundance of illuminating, challenging, well-researched answers to that question. They helped us see that many liberals and moderates had misunderstood the right, overlooking a long, almost continuous strain of nativist populism that had been inflamed, not defeated, by the Obama era.

In that moment, understanding felt to me like resistance. Finding historical truth felt like a way to cut through deception, combat misinformation, and reject fantastical, fascist accounts of American identity. History, it seemed, was vital political work: if “democracy died in darkness,” it died in forgetfulness too. And if we could just find the right historical analogue for what we were experiencing, whether in first-century Rome or twentieth-century Europe, maybe we could predict and avert disaster.

This time, things feel different. It feels like we know how we got here and we chose it again anyway. If anything’s going to save us now, it’s going to be local activism and intentional community and labor organization, not new histories.

So then what am I doing getting a PhD?

As I’m training to be a historian of American religion, I’ve been thinking a lot about what history can and can’t do for us. On the one hand, I feel the urgent need to defend the humanities from right-wing attacks on public education and from capitalist attacks on anything that seems “worthless” or “unproductive.”

On the other hand, I’ve become skeptical of seeing history as first and foremost politically useful. There’s an impulse (among politicians and pastors and, yes, lots of historians!) to see history as a book of dos and don’ts, a record of what might happen if we do X or Y or Z.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned studying history, however, it’s that we can never know what will happen.

The results of our choices are hopelessly contingent, completely out of our control (a fact that shouldn’t be news to Calvinists). Perhaps the best thing history can teach us is humility.

But I’ve found another possibility in Monica Muñoz Martinez’s 2018 book The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Martinez describes three incidents of racial violence committed by vigilantes and Texas Rangers near the US-Mexico border in the 1910s: the lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in 1910, the double murder of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria in 1915, and the massacre of 15 residents of Porvenir, Texas, in 1918.

Previous accounts of this period, Martinez writes, offer either heroic defenses of the Rangers’ brutal actions or romantic accounts of violent Mexican resistance. But Martinez shifts the focus away from “armed masculinity,” centering instead the people and communities who were harmed by racial violence and how they made sense of their experiences. She writes about “what happened next”: about mourning and surviving, about filing official complaints and having them rejected (23–24).

After giving attentive, textured accounts of each violent event—often rediscovering names and lives that had gone unmentioned in official stories—Martinez turns to the practice of memory. She visits each town, speaks with the residents, and hears the stories they’ve inherited. These “vernacular histories,” preserved in homes and cemeteries and elders’ memories, are not just new data for her historical project. They are monuments to the “gravity of human loss” and to the persistence of human memory (280). 

At the end of the book, Martinez describes the opening of a museum exhibit based on her collaborations with local vernacular historians. While the exhibit did seek to educate the public with a more accurate account of the period, it also had another purpose: “Crowds  were eager to see the exhibit not because they wanted to consume curated history, to see a collection of objects, or to learn a history they did not know. They came because they did know, because they had heard these stories from their fathers or their grandmothers. They came to witness a history long disavowed now on display in a state museum. . .They came to bear witness to that first public reckoning” (266).

For these community members, history provided a collective space for memory and lament. It told them their stories mattered, their grief was real, and their efforts to retell and remember were not in vain.

They, of course, knew this wasn’t enough. At one museum event, a visitor asked when this revised history would be taught in public schools—an almost impossible ask, given the makeup of the Texas state government. At another, the audience didn’t want to talk about the past at all, but about the present: about “strategies for ending racism, vigilantism, and police violence” (277). That, Martinez suggests, is where the historian’s work has to end, and where the work of the community (which the historian might belong to!) begins.

In 2010, Martinez attended a memorial service held on the one-hundredth anniversary of Rodríguez’s lynching. The congregation prayed for the souls of Rodríguez and of Effie Henderson, who also died that day and who Rodríguez was accused of killing. The priest, Martinez writes, “seemed a bit baffled” to be presiding at a service where no one knew the deceased: this was “no ordinary service.” Nevertheless, as the people said the Lord’s Prayer and sang “Amazing Grace,” “some sitting in the pews cried in both sadness and perhaps relief” (70–71). 

I think this is a powerful image of the work of history. History is a memorial service for people we don’t know, people who lived lives of joy and sadness, peace and violence, laughter and fear. People who were crushed by empire and who refused to fall silent, people who don’t fit into the fictions dreamt up to categorize them.

History cannot tell us what to do next, but it can help us search for “lost humanity” (23). It can remind us of the courage, persistence, love, and solidarity humans are capable of. It can’t save us, but it can show us what there is to save.