Publication as Historical Document

As it does periodically, the UNC Charlotte university recently held a book sale for books being withdrawn, and like many other people I cannot resist. I picked up Samuel Flagg Bemis' A Diplomatic History of the United States, 4th edition, published in 1955. Bemis is the historian who published a widely and long-used textbook on U.S. policy toward Latin America, which I blogged about years ago when I was writing my own. Among other things, it's openly (like, really openly) pro-imperialist.

When you think of the countless readers of these volumes, highly educated, male, and white people who would likely go on to be influential in any number of ways, you can see how ingrained bad history could become.

So, for example, at the end of the Latin America section, Bemis writes that "totalitarianism, the shape of international communism, succeeded in intruding itself openly into Guatemala, and covertly into other states and colonies of the Western Hemisphere, without the American republics being yet willing to resort to more than empty words" (p. 786). However, "a successful anticommunist revolution in Guatemala temporarily eased the situation."

This is factually incorrect and a bad interpretation to boot, but there would be no way for anyone (if they happened to be inclined) to know that. Fortunately, that is not true anymore. I've been thinking about how what we write becomes a historical document on its own. So in 50 years, someone writing about U.S.-Latin American relations may take a look at my own textbook and point out how my interpretations reflected the era I lived in, perhaps in ways I've never even considered.