The problem crystallized in my mind one day a few years ago. In the modern U.S. survey, I was covering 1950s consumer society and mass culture. My young students seemed entranced by the cultural optimism I was describing. I commented on their reactions, and some of them explained that they were fascinated by—and perhaps needed (I’m pretty sure that was their word)—a vision of American optimism about the future. For they had come of age in a pessimistic time. And, I suspect, they had been paying attention to the narrative trajectory of some of my other lectures.
(Don’t worry. I did plenty of things to complicate their picture of 1950s optimism.)
This matters for reasons beyond emotional health. First, historians’ habits of pessimism tend to produce cynicism about public affairs. Second, if left unchecked, our pessimism actually does an injustice to the vulnerable and marginalized people of the past—people who built lives of meaning for themselves amid the large-scale public failures we describe.
In fact, this can result in major analytic failures on the part of historical educators. To take one example: I’ve had college students express surprise after learning that a substantial population of free African Americans (amounting to nearly half a million people by 1860) existed from the colonial era onward. It was a concept that had never occurred to these students—ever. Our dominant narratives about slavery, in structure if not in substance, tend to submerge that population’s history completely, at least in high school.
Similarly, I’ve had students express shock upon learning that a central fact of enslavement was the separation of families at auction. This fact, of course, does not exactly lend itself to historical optimism—except that it tells us that enslaved people were, in fact, forming families, and often fighting to hold them together.
That is not a minor point. That is a reality that could express a human being’s entire world.