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As the first entry for our Kean University Department of History HistoryBlog, I thought it appropriate to address a question professional historians and students alike get quite often. Most people have no idea. They have gotten an odd sense of it through movies like National Treasure, and of course, anything with Indiana Jones. It’s easy for accountants, for example, to say what they do, same for astronomers, or firemen, or cooks. How do historians answer this question?
In its simplest terms, the work of historians is the careful and thoughtful study of those elements which make up this thing we call vaguely ‘the past.’ Those elements are in large part the written record (though artifacts and photos and music as well). Historians plow through the mountains of paperwork left behind by the human race. We call these Primary Sources. We study the large and the small, the significant and the seemingly insignificant: the good, the bad, and the ugly. We do go on adventures and we do battle evil doers, but mostly our time is spent travelling the world to go in libraries and archives so we can read the words of the people we are studying and the data of the events we are analyzing. We spend lots of time reading through the details few others look at or even know exist. We read the letters and correspondences, the note books, and random scribblings of the past. We follow loud screams, quiet whispers, the seductive promises of lovers, and the inspiring words of heroes. We have heard the pitiless cries of victims in the night, the sharp bark of the evil and the abusive, from earlier today back to the dawn of time. This is an attempt to get some idea of what happened, why it happened, and who did it. We do this so we can learn from it.
While looking at this material, historians ask questions about it. We look for connections, putting our findings into context, and doing it all according to the procedures of scholarly research. At the heart of this process is the tacit understanding that it is done without preconceived ideas. We try to let the facts and evidence guide us to possible answers as best we can. Those answers are determined regardless of the political, religious, or cultural consequences they might have. We are always ready, however, to change our position should new evidence come along. The understanding of the past is not static, it evolves as we learn new things.
We search for knowledge. Knowledge can elevate and it can infuriate. It can challenge the status quo and undermine deeply held convictions. It can unmask criminals and topple empires. It can support the voiceless and accuse the loud and oppressive. Part of the job of the historian to bring all this out into the open.
The big role of the historian in society is to remind us of where we came from, not only as a society but also as individuals. This knowledge helps us make better informed decisions about how to conduct our lives, and how to avoid getting into trouble. When we stick our finger into an electrical outlet, because we thought it would be a good idea, then get shocked, history helps us learn not to do that again. The historian warns us not to stick our finger into the electrical outlet over and over. Unfortunately, we are not always successful at doing that.
Some learn the lessons we have to teach others do not. Some simply do not get it, while others know we are right, but intentionally refuse to hear, or disparage our work. This is often the result of religious or political concerns. Historical facts and evidence can be deeply troubling to some. They desire the past to have been a certain way. When the facts of the past do not line up with their desires they try to manipulate and hijack the past for their own agendas. History is not about making you feel good about yourself. You don’t get to ignore facts because they do not sit well with you. Historians fight against this.
Being an historian is incredibly fun. It is also exciting and even adventuresome. We fight to preserve facts and evidence; we fight to preserve rationality no matter the cost. In the twenty-first century we need historians more than ever. Historians do not just know the facts, they know how to analyze and interpret them. In that way historians work to save the universe.
That’s what historians do.
That’s how you answer that question.
Dr. Brian Regal
Associate Professor - History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Updated: Mar 5, 2020
In 1747, recent Yale graduate and aspiring (if unenthusiastic) lawyer William Livingston entered public life with the publication of Philosophic Solitude, a lengthy poem in which he imagined an idyllic life spent in rural retreat from the corruption and insincerity of high society. Livingston envisioned a life of intellectual stimulation in conversation with God, Nature, a carefully chosen circle of friends and wife, and the ideas contained in a carefully curated library.
In the years that followed, Livingston would find little of the solitude he craved, but he would continue to engage with the world of ideas in the public sphere. With two of his closest friends, he launched The Independent Reflector Or, Weekly Essays on Sundry Important Subjects, More Particularly Adapted to the Province of New-York, a short-lived but ambitious journal featuring essays on topics ranging from religion and education to immigration and free speech.
Like his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, Livingston believed not just in the power of books, but also in the power of education. In a 1755 letter to his cousin Philip, then a student at The College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in hopes of persuading him to stay in school, Livingston extolled the virtues of education: “Innumerable are the instances of persons having been advanced to the most splendid stations in the Commonwealth by that Knowledge of Books and capacity for serving the Public which they had acquired in the course of their students insomuch that many a man without either the assistance of an Estate or those in Power has by the Strength of a Genius cultivated by a Liberal Education vanquished the frowns of fortune and finally ecclipsed [sic] those of the Greatest affluence and external advantages.”
With foresight he wrote, “. . . as learning is evidently growing into Fashion tis highly probable that by the time you are settled in the World, it will be a scandalous reflection on a . . . man of Distinction not to have the best education the country can afford.” And he added, with a sense of superiority, “And to a Man of spirit it must be extremely mortifying to see himself out stripped in fame and performance . . . by Multitudes of the rising Generation of no family or fortune, while is pedigree & efforts [serve] him in no other stead with Men of Judgement & Merit, than only to render his Ignorance so much the more conspicuous.” Livingston’s belief in the importance of education was not just personal and familial: he advocated publically for the creation of King’s College in New York City (that would eventually become Columbia University), but the free-thinking Presbyterian Livingston fought to ensure that the school not be connected to the Anglican Church.
In the late 1760s, Livingston planned his retirement from the practice of law and, hoping to achieve that philosophic solitude he imagined decades earlier, moved to the home he built on the outskirts of Elizabeth Town, New Jersey: Liberty Hall. At Liberty Hall, he built an orchard furnished with fruit trees imported from London, assembled his personal library (the contents of which are being analyzed by History students at Kean), cultivated political, religious, and social connections in Elizabeth Town, and presided over the wedding of his daughter, Sarah, to John Jay in April 1774 (recreated at Kean University on film as “A Revolutionary Wedding” as part of LH360).
With the outbreak of the American Revolution, solitude gave way to service as Livingston was named Brigadier General of the New Jersey militia and in August 1776, and was elected governor of New Jersey, a role he filled until his death in 1790. As governor during the Revolution, he worked closely with George Washington to ensure that national military needs were supported on the state level through the recruitment and provisioning of troops, and the suppression of loyalists. To shore up support for the Patriot cause, he turned once more to print. Knowing the importance of communicating directly with the American public, he not only collaborated with printer Isaac Collins to create the New Jersey Gazette when New York and Philadelphia newspapers fell under loyalist control, but also put pen to paper in writing propaganda in support of the war for Independence. Indeed, he was the most prolific and effective propagandist on the Patriot side of the war, as the timeline created by Kean history student Nicole Skalenko makes clear.
Livingston’s work and conduct during the American Revolution and in the Early Republic reveal him to be very much a man of his time, sometimes leading as he did in effectively guiding New Jersey through the war and participating in the drafting of the United States Constitution, and sometimes struggling with change, as he did, for example, with regard to slavery. Livingston embraced the abolitionist cause by joining the New York Manumission Society and freeing his two slaves in 1787, but expressed ambivalence in attempting to find a means to end the practice and personal frustration with the consequences of hiring servants to run his household.
But Livingston lived a carefully examined professional and personal life, acting with intellectual rigor, formidable eloquence, and a belief in the power of the expression of ideas to change the world. It is more than fitting, then, that Liberty Hall, thanks to the generosity of the Kean family, is now connected to Kean University, one of New Jersey’s public institutions of higher education dedicated to providing the means to bettering the lives of its students. It is in this spirit that the Kean University Department of History, now in its new home in the Liberty Hall Academic Center, launches its new blog, HISTORYBlogs@Kean. As this first blogpost makes clear, William Livingston’s world (with the support of an NEH Humanities Initiative Grant) has already provided ample fodder for the exploration by Kean history students of the founding of the United States and New Jersey and the lives of the those who lived in that world. With Livingston serving as a model public intellectual and public servant dedicated to understanding and bettering his world, HISTORYBlogs@Kean will offer periodic posts dedicated not only to William Livingston’s historical world and the world he and subsequent generations of Keans created at Liberty Hall, but also to the role of history in understanding our world today. We in the Department of History, Liberty Hall Museum, and Kean University look forward to sharing this conversation with you via this blog and other programming. Stay tuned!
Elizabeth Hyde, Chair
Department of History
For more information, please contact
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