The Rhode Island History Podcast enters its 3rd season exploring the state's unique history

"...without a sense of our past as a state and a people, we render ourselves passive transients through the present, devoid of any context or understanding of how we arrived here."

There are many useful quotes about history that I can draw from to begin this article, but my favorite is one that everyone already knows: history repeats itself. For posterity’s sake, I’ll stop the quote there, but those of us with a broader understanding of the relationship between history and politics know how the full quote goes.

As an academic historian, I am often thinking about the material and cultural ways in which the spirit of history moves through time. My craft is not as easy as telling a story of the past. Historians are all at once researchers, narrators, teachers, decipherers, archeologists, sociologists, economists, and much more. When we want to approach a topic (let’s say, the history of Rodger Williams), we can’t copy what has been previously written. To do so would be to accept the implicit biases of past writers and past times. Instead, we go into the archives—a sort of super-library, where states (and their various branches) and institutions catalog an expansive record of past documents and ephemera. These sources are isolated from a wider narrative, seemingly remote from each other, and it is the historian’s role to stitch them together into a narrative quilt that makes sense to the public.

For instance, if I wanted to research the history of Rodger Williams, I might investigate the various state and local archives. Let’s use the Rhode Island State Archives as an example, the one where Ashley Selima, a recent guest of the show, works. This archive contains a collection of disparate documents related to Williams’ personal life, his engagement with colonial authorities, his interactions with indigenous peoples, local contracts, religious texts, ramblings, maybe even ledgers of finance, and religious documents. The thrill of being a historian is partially in encountering these documents and trying to solve the puzzle: how do these documents relate to each other? What larger story are they telling about Williams’ life, and in what context is he moving? There are many different avenues to potentially take the story: Williams as an economist, as a nature enthusiast, as a religious zealot, or as a statesman. Depending on which avenue the historian takes, a vastly different story might emerge. In that sense, academic and popular historians are sleuths, spending long hours poring over documents cataloged by librarians and archivists to decipher the past.

Yet, historians are by no means lone actors; in fact, we are a small piece of a larger puzzle that sustains the field. There is a rogue’s gallery of people engaged in the preservation and conservation of history, and complementary public-facing allies committed to showing the public what we know—or what we think we know. Without the full index of related fields, history is nothing but a niche interest. In addition to cataloging, archivists study the science of preserving old documents that would otherwise wither away; they organize these documents according to a devised system, which they use to recall when information is requested. Indeed, archives tell a story in how they are organized: a state will often organize its documents differently than, say, an institution, a cultural society, or a leftist library. Preservationists take items, including entire buildings, and attempt to replicate or maintain their original integrity and layout so that people can experience the past as authentically as possible. Without these experts, places like Slater Mill and the Redwood Library, among many other historical landmarks throughout the state, might not be standing. There are also people who make the documents that will be cataloged and used in the future: photographers, journalists, and politicians who record the present through a unique interpretive lens (whether they want to admit it or not).

What I am trying to say is that history is a vast field of inquiry open to many forms of talent. As a historian committed to both teaching and a very specific form of writing, I could not do what a tour guide does, nor do I have the technical know-how of preserving an 18th-century structure (although I might have a sense of what it’s supposed to look like). I can provide context and narrative to Newport’s Slave Trade, or the history of Rhode Island’s indigenous community, but I cannot accurately represent what that history means to those people today, or how that history is still felt in those communities.

This is all important and co-dependent work. It’s important because without a sense of our past as a state and a people, we render ourselves passive transients through the present, devoid of any context or understanding of how we arrived here. Academic historians often couch their narratives within a broader theoretical apparatus that is often unapproachable to the layperson, so in a sense, the various fields of history that accompany academic history in its revolution around the sun are integral parts of the same galaxy, a co-dependent system that offers us a window into the past. After all, it’s impossible to know the universe without knowing how the galaxies function. And why do we study the universe? To have some sense of our purpose and place.

If you are interested in learning more about Rhode Island’s history from the perspective of its various practitioners, I invite you to listen to the Rhode Island History Podcast. The podcast releases episodes by the season. Each season features guests discussing various aspects of Rhode Island’s history. Everyone from academic historians who have researched and written about the slave trade, Roger Williams, labor history, state archivists, Slater Mill preservationists, photographers, social media pages, librarians, and many more. The purpose of the podcast is to showcase the diversity of careers engaged in the development, spread, and maintenance of our state’s past, both reconciling with the very troubled past and celebrating the unique achievements. Ever wonder about the granite quarries or the history of Garden City? Or maybe you prefer the macabre history of Rhode Island’s own vampires? There are a lot of episodes to choose from and even more on the way in season three.

History repeats itself when we remain ignorant of it or treat it like a foreign land. Changes in our country necessitate that we take control of our own education to some degree—we are responsible for studying history so that once its farcical clone re-emerges, we know how to confront it. Hegel and Marx—two titans of historicism—believed that forces (ideological or material) move the “spirit of history” and that, like a flower, what is present dialectically emerged from what was. In a world where federal-level concerns weigh heavy on the minds of Americans from Newport, RI to Oakland, CA, it’s important that we not just passively accept our membership into this “social contract” we call America, but that we operate from an informed position that draws upon a multilayered awareness of our past.

The Rhode Island History Podcast is thankful for generous funding from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and from small-time donors. To support the show or me, feel free to buy me a coffee here: buymeacoffee.com/rihpodcast

To send inquiries of any kind, please email rihpodcast@gmail.com

To listen to episodes of the show, you can find it wherever you stream podcasts, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

[Dr. Alexander Herbert is the host of the RI History Podcast and a professor of history.]