Americans Once Respected Regional History
A Positive View of Sectional History
A Positive View of Sectional History
(Wanjiru Njoya) - The historian Frank L. Owsley is often described as a “sectional historian,” meaning that he was a Southern historian, born in Alabama, writing from a Southern perspective. Similarly, the historian Clyde Wilson has been described as “a Southern historian” who is “a Southern partisan in the best sense,” namely, one who offers “a Southern perspective on American history – one that yields interesting and important insights.”
As long as the sectional historian openly discloses his standpoint, he is in a unique position to offer insights into history that are lost to those who attempt to explain history from a neutral and impartial outsider perspective. This is not to say that outsiders cannot offer useful insights into history. On the contrary, Owsley praises Northern historians who recognize that simplistic narratives trivializing the grievances of the South are unhelpful in ascertaining the truth. The truth requires as full as possible an understanding of history, without which mankind is doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.
In his preface to Clyde Wilson’s From Union to Empire, Joseph Stromberg says: “It is the function of history and the role of the historian to help us understand who we are and how we got into the situation in which we find ourselves.” In that light, Stromberg commends Wilson as “noteworthy for being one of a vanishing small group of professional historians who do not regard Southern life and history as one dark, Gothic misfortune after another.” In understanding the ideological conflict between sectionalism and nationalism and the implications for contemporary politics, a time comes when readers sense that there is more to be learned from American history than can be gleaned from the endless sermons about…