Regular People's History

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A while back, I started a site called Regular People's History, to think about histories of regular people, for regular people. The page explored some of the things that I've become very interested in, as I've been doing my graduate work in history:

The history of regular people in America,
Writing history for regular people,
What Americans know about our history, today and also what they knew in the past.

Recently, I've noticed that the various things I've been working on, at different pages here and there, are becoming more similar. So, rather than start cross-posting on my own sites, I decided to consolidate them all into history-punk.com. The static pages in the menu represent the old web pages, and the blog contents have been folded into the history-punk blog, tagged "People."

But what is regular people's history?

About a generation ago, a new generation of historians started talking about doing what they called "History from the bottom up." The idea was, they would tell the stories of people who did not appear in what they thought of as "elite history." So instead of looking at just the big names, they focused on groups that had been ignored. For example, Howard Zinn wrote a People's History of the United States, that told the story of America from the point of view of the groups that were either ignored or actually victimized by the establishment of European colonies in North America and the spread of the U.S. across the continent. Native Americans, enslaved Africans, ethnic minorities, workers, and poor people have their stories told in histories like Zinn's -- often for the first time. This type of history is hugely important, and recovers a lot of stories that are important parts of American history. Not only the stories of victims, but the stories of groups that stood up for these people.

But while these stories are important and need to be part of our national history, they are often the stories of special groups. Regular people -- most of the people who lived and died in America over the centuries -- are often as missing from the pages of these histories as they are from the old-fashioned histories of great men. And even the people who are mentioned, are often seen only from the perspective of their group membership. What does the Union soldier or the union member do, think, and feel, when he or she is not fighting the Civil War or battling for decent working conditions and a living wage? The Union soldier, if he lives, has a whole life before and after the war. The union member, when she leaves work or the union hall, must have a home, a life, possibly a family. If these other elements of their lives aren't as important as the spotlighted elements, aren't they still just "extras" in someone else's story?

Finally, the idea of "History from the bottom up" still supposes that there is an "Up." And that we share a basic set of assumptions about what's important in history. For the old, elite histories, this was often leadership. For the "bottom up" histories, it was often victimization or resistance. All these things are important. But another thing that's important is, how did regular people live? And how did even exceptional people live, when they weren't in the middle of their crises? Just as we don't spend 24/7 on the battlefield or the picket line or breaking the sound barrier or doing Nobel Prize research, neither did they. How people lived when they weren't doing the one thing they became known for, is important in history. Think of the Americans who have been called "The Greatest Generation." They endured the Great Depression and then fought World War II. They also gave us the Cold War, Globalism, International Financial Panics, and Global Warming. Knowing more about how people lived their lives, when the spotlight of history wasn't on them, might help explain how some of these seemingly contradictory things happened at the same time, done by the same people. A clearer idea of how we got here, might give us different ideas of what to do about it.