Nathan Irvin Huggins, the art of history, and the irony of the American Dream.

"I find in the study of history the special discipline which forces me to consider peoples and ages, not my own.... It is the most humane of disciplines, and in ways the most humbling. For one cannot ignore those historians of the future who will look back on us in the same way."

--Nathan Irvin Huggins, 1982

"When a boy had come, the friends had said, 'now you have a son and a successor.' But the son was no successor."

--Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 1951

"Whenever we write history," wrote the late Nathan Huggins in his final work, "we do so with a sense of transcendent meaning. No matter how limited or particular our study, we assume a broader and grander context in which what we say has meaning and makes a difference."(1) In such assumptions is rooted the maligned but enduring vision of history as art, as human story with employment and consequences, as narration that matters.

At heart Huggins was a historiographer in the broadest sense of that term, even a philosopher of history, a meditator on the shape and the meanings of American history. He was also, like his teacher Oscar Handlin, a great narrator. Huggins's story-telling, however, resisted closure and avoided endings, happy or otherwise. He was often perceived as a centrist-integrationist on the sensitive issues at the heart of black studies as the field underwent its highly politicized birth and growth from 1970 through the 1980s. But a careful look at his writings reveals a scholar who wrestled in complex ways with the revolution that occurred in the study of Afro-American history and literature from the late 1960s to his death in December 1989. This essay is not a comprehensive appraisal of all of Huggins's work; it assesses his historical and artistic vision by examining primarily his most imaginative book, Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery (1977, 1990) and related essays.

Huggins's first book, a revised dissertation, Protestants Against Poverty: Boston's Charities, 1870-1900 (1971), was, like all his later work, rich in irony and paradox, and levied a stern critique at the "moralism and self-indulgent mentality" of late-nineteenth-century antipoverty reformers. Although this earliest book did not deal with black history (he avoided, or was urged to avoid, identification with the field early in his career), it did reveal an informed understanding of the social control impulse that motivated "genteel charity reformers." Moreover, Protestants Against Poverty carefully demonstrated that, historically, poverty in America was a problem of social, not merely personal values, a theme that has remained at the center of our political culture from the Civil Rights era to the present. This work was written as Americans discovered the "other America," and launched a "war on poverty," the ideas and contexts in which Huggins framed the book. Huggins's essential concern with Americans on the margins, all the while he sought the nature of national history, would remain his scholarly project throughout his life. His Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (1980), written as part of Handlin's Little, Brown series in American biography, is a concise but critical look at the abolitionist turned eider statesman.(2) It richly surveys the stages of Douglass's life, and shows how much the black leader's thought and behavior were rooted, self-consciously, in his own experience--a journey from slavery to freedom to citizenship. Huggins re-created Douglass's story as a reflection of the nation's life in a dramatic era.

Huggins was very much an empirical historian, interested especially in intellectual and social history; but he experimented with forms and style in imaginative ways, insisted on a broad self-consciousness about the craft among fellow historians, and he probably enjoyed writing more than research. Huggins was not a historian's historian in the way, for example, John Hope Franklin or August Meier have been in the same field. He did not open new paths of scholarship with innovative methodologies as, for example, Leon Litwack, Lawrence Levine, or Sterling Stuckey did through folklore. His contribution to the new slavery historiography during the 1970s was an epic history aimed at a broad audience, not a major work of scholarship. He shunned ideology and theory, at the same time he could admire the work of some historians who were innovative in their use. With one compelling exception, Harlem Renaissance (1971), he did not produce pioneering monographs that continued to uncover and launch a new field.(3) Huggins entered the field of Afro-American history with, not before, the crest of revolutions in society and scholarship through which that field found extraordinary new growth.

Above all, Huggins may have been at his best as a kind of epistemologist of Afro-American history. He insisted that we could get beyond race as professional scholars at the same time we probe the depths of its meaning in American experience. He freely acknowledged that for black scholars the black experience is often a matter of personal identification, just as in any other group or national experience. But it was the intersections of multiple experiences that he found the most interesting, and the sheer excitement of history for Huggins may have been the challenge of discovering just what was knowable or unknowable about the past. "Black Americans, like the American nation itself," he wrote in 1983, "will be forever searching into the past to provide a sense of legitimacy and historical purpose, forever bound and frustrated in the effort." Huggins believed that American history, as broadly practiced, is still far too driven by a sense of chosenness, special destiny, or the doctrine of progress. He kept calling for a chastened, more ironic, tragic view of American history, with the Afro-American story brought to the center of a new history evolving from the conceptual and social revolutions of his own time. American dualities and, indeed, the dual character of history itself animated his writing. "We need to know how and why we use history," he said, "to serve both our needs of personal and group identity as well as for the more 'scientific' and humanistic purposes of historical analysis. We should know the differences and not confound them." That notion of what historians do compares well with W. E .B. Du Bois's simple but poignant definition of history as "an art using the results of science." It also squares well with R. G. Collingwood's conception of history as the "science of human nature." Coilingwood warned against the underestimation or misunderstanding of the role of imagination in history. "The historical imagination . . . is properly not ornamental but structural," wrote Coilingwood. "Without it the historian would have no narrative to adorn. The imagination, that 'blind but indispensable faculty' without which, as Kant has shown, we could never perceive the world around us, is indispensable in the same way to history."(4) The structures of historical imagination come from the questions we ask of the past. Huggins was one of those narrators who eschewed adornment at the same time he searched for his own voice by exploring into the past. He tried to understand the epic quality of history without being trapped by its formulas.

Huggins loved the big questions. In his 1971 essay, "Afro-American History: Myths, Heroes, and Reality," the lead piece in Key issues in the Afro-American Experience, he tried to capture the meaning of that charged and formative moment in the history of this field. After surveying vast changes in American race relations since World War II, and especially during the sixties, he struck the chord of what was happening: "The crisis of the moment has always given rise to new and pressing questions. Thus, in our time, it is not sentiment, liberalism, humanitarianism, nor sudden…