Making Of: Book Reviews

By Al Preston

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            By the posting of this blog post, a few book reviews have been posted. What, perhaps, hasn’t been as observed is the type of reviews and the differences between the books. There are two types of books and reviews we have and will continue to do.

            The only difference between these two types of books is the publication dates. Anything before 1995 will be considered either an out-of-date, primary, or older secondary source. Anything after 1995 is considered within the current scholarship of queer history with a few exceptions, of course.

             That sounds strange, doesn’t it? What does publishing date have to do with the kind of source we’re working with?

            Well, history has been happening for centuries, so have people recording it. Typically, historians in either academia or in historical institutions, will use two kinds of sources: primary and secondary.

            These are pretty obvious, primary sources are from the time period focused on, secondary sources are what came after in the form of collecting and making sense of the primary sources. That’s something we’ve all been told. However, there is some nuance to this distinction.

            The study of history has not been done the same way throughout time. Every culture, past and present, studies history in vastly different ways. Even between the 1920s and the 2020s, history has been studied differently. Therefore, a secondary source, something that analyzes primary sources, from fifty years ago may not only be working with limited understandings and sources, but how they were doing history could be more…biased.

            Perhaps biased isn’t the right phrase here. Let me explain with an example.

            During the 1900s to about 1940 scientists in the United States were trying to justify their racism with history and science. The slave trade had been made illegal, Chinese immigrants were arriving in mass amounts, and Mexicans were being used as cheap labor. With a lot of social changes occurring around these issues, a number of white people were seeking new reasons to be racist, to justify the treatment of people of color.

            They were measuring heads, examining bodies, and studying historical sources. For the time, they were using ‘sound’ historical and scientific methods to essentially see exactly what they wanted. People of color had heads far too small for the level of intelligence white people were capable of. Diaries from early explorers and scientists confirming their ‘savage’ nature.

            The eugenics movement was extremely racist. The white scientists doing this research had a solution they wanted to get from their research, which isn’t how we do science now. It’s not how we do history now. So, clearly, they were doing everything wrong, right? It was completely invalid research.

            To us, yes! Of course it was. We know that science and history should ask questions but obtain answers from research and study. However, that’s not the science and history of the time. Nor was the society around the research these scientists worked with able or willing to see other races any other way.

            Karl Popper, the man responsible for our current scientific process, was just developing that system at this time. History was reserved for academics and primary sources such as diaries, were treated heavily as fact without analysis of society, events, or bias behind the writings.

            Science and history are vastly different now. Science is based on evidence. Questions are asked, multiple times. Unbiased and well planned experiments (or as much as they can be) are conducted. Conclusions are based on the result of those experiments, by what is observed and scientifically sound. Hypotheses are made, but they are based on previous experiments and on a known understanding of the world. They are not the result scientists are hoping for.

            History, likewise, is done very differently today. Today, there’s a process to historical research. We read, a lot. Not only are we reading primary sources, newspapers, diaries, retellings; but we also read what other historians have already said. Secondary sources serve as a way for us to know how the way we have thought about a topic has changed over time. All of those sources, primary and secondary, are then scrutinized and studied in reference to what was going on in the world around the author and even the author themselves.

            Primary sources are tricky, much of the time, we have to take into account biases of the source. Nothing is without bias, even today (2024). I am writing this blog with a purpose. I learned this information from sources that were written with a purpose, and so on. I write from a time whose information is limited and processed differently from ten years from now and ten years ago. While we can’t remove these biases, we can acknowledge their existence.

            As unfortunate as it is, eugenicists were biased in a very horrible way, and there was no accounting for that bias in their research. They wanted to find a result and they did whatever they could to get it, and that was accepted. Doing history means accepting that our views today have no weight on what has already been.

            I fundamentally disagree with a lot of things that were normal in the past. They would be unthinkable today. I know how biased or factually wrong some things in the past could be. That is a bias I have and bring to the table every time I research history, and I have to acknowledge that when I write.

            So, what in the world does any of this have to do with the book reviews? Well, I want to be transparent in how everything is being done on this website. For these book reviews I am adjusting from the academic writing I have been taught. I also want to showcase how we do critical readings of different types of sources.

            I gave you an extreme example of the way we historians closely scrutinize and understand sources, but all of those things are what we are looking into when we read. I don’t necessarily bring all of it up unless I find it necessary to do so. Where the work of eugenicists is quite easy to analyze, other sources, like the ones I write reviews for, are much harder to pick apart in this way.

            Queer history is relatively new, given how the movement began in the 1940s and we are still uncovering what was going on before the 1900s in general. A lot of scholars writing about queer history—especially about the movements themselves—were either apart of them or were alive while they were happening. Those histories are extremely valuable but writing so close to something can blind the writer to all of the perspectives and limit their sources. It’s very common for some queer historians to completely change their perspectives on their older works with new information time away from events gave them.

            We are still defining how we do queer history. A huge part is how language and identity work (I made an entire podcast about it!). Many people who we would consider queer didn’t have the language we have now. If someone in the historical record had habits or spoke at length about their experience that we could consider them transgender, it’s still really hard to give them that label. As much as we have to acknowledge that how people write and study is vastly different from how we do things, we also have to acknowledge that identity and language is also not the same.

            Queerness is about identity, and we cannot place our values and understandings on the people of the past. While they may be dead, they were also once human and still deserve our respect. Just because we are from a time with a different understanding of the world than them, we are not better. We are all doing our best to survive with the circumstances we are given.

            That does not mean we cannot acknowledge their wrong doings. I can prove a historical figure made great powerful strides for lesbian rights, but at the cost of the respectability and rights of transgender people. I can be happy for the work they did but upset at their cruelty towards another group. That does not mean I respect them less or ignore their wrongdoings.

            People are horribly complicated. They can do both good and bad things for a variety of reasons or with levels of realization. Humans are complicated and are capable of change. The world is a colorful display of truth and lies. Nothing is one color or another.

            You’ll see book reviews where I completely agree with the writer and others where I completely disagree. More commonly, you’ll see me agree and disagree with different pieces of the same work. Arguments that we in 2024 consider defunct or just completely wrong may be the main feature of one of these works, but their evidence or secondary arguments might be ideas we still grapple with.

            Nothing is without critique, and nothing is perfect either. Even with the best or worst sources, every work has something to offer. I welcome criticisms and review of my work, and I hope it is constructive. I’m always happy to meet others as equals, I am, after all, also a human capable of changing and learning. There is a difference between criticism done in good and bad faith, after all.

            I hope this has helped explain the book reviews and the way we process them. Hopefully, this also allows everyone to look at what they are reading critically, even the things posted on this site.

            Happy critical reading!