Review: Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History, by Tanya Evans

Abstract

Tanya Evans has a very clear and consistent goal for this book: to persuade academic historians, especially, that family historians should be taken much more seriously, not dismissed as dilettantish hobbyists. As the director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University in Australia and the leader of many workshops on how to do family history, Evans is well positioned and qualified to advocate on behalf of these industrious and enthusiastic researchers. Unfortunately, this book seems unlikely to make many converts.Evans too often belabors the obvious or writes opaquely. Take this key sentence, for example: “My continued research with family historians is committed to the belief that the historiographical projects of social and cultural history, with the history of emotions, are mutually constitutive; that learning and teaching should be collaborative; and that history researchers should aim for pedagogical and political impact” (p. 26). The book is also weakened by her portrayal of family historians as uniformly progressive and sophisticated.The book’s primary source of evidence is often at the heart of its circular, unconvincing assertions. The author sent a list of thirty-seven largely open-ended questions to family-history practitioners who responded to her invitation “to share their motivations, discoveries and the impact of these [motivations and discoveries, evidently] upon their lives” (p. 21). One of the questions asks if researching your family history has “helped you to develop your interpersonal (communication, listening and empathy) skills? If so, in what ways?” (p. 155). Evans is then able to quote from, in a chapter entitled “‘I’m much more empathetic now’: Family history, historical thinking and the construction of empathy,” several people out of the 136 who had responded that, yes, as a matter of fact, this work had made them more empathetic. When Evans is more specific about what proportion of her sample responded affirmatively to her questions, the evidence does not necessarily support her argument. For example, though less than 20 percent of those surveyed answered affirmatively to the question of whether or not feminism had “informed your work at all,” she reports this as “a significant proportion” of her (largely female) sample (p. 155, p. 63). This reader wished for a much wider range of primary sources and a much fuller and more even-handed treatment of the conservative ends, political as well as cultural, that family and local history often serves.That said, Evans certainly presents extensive quotations from the survey suggesting that family historians may indeed be much more sophisticated and progressive than is commonly assumed. As she points out, academic historians lecturing to and writing for dwindling audiences can hardly afford to ignore fellow practitioners who are so numerous and enthusiastic. This book is a flawed but timely call for mutual engagement, curiosity, and respect.