The Art of History: A Conversation with Jonathan Spence

Abstract

Jonathan D. Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and President of the American Historical Association (AHA), visited the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia Slate University in April, 2004. During his visit, I had the opportunity to ask for his views (as the Chinese would say, qingjiao,) on various issues related to Chinese history and historiography.¹ We had mutually agreed that this was not to be a formal interview but rather a series of “chats.” Our conversation, however, did touch upon a wide array of topics: history and literature, narrative and theory, social history and daily life, tradition and modernity, the policy implications of historical writing and its impact on popular knowledge, Chinese historians in the U.S., the future of China, and so on. Although most of the questions asked reflected my own interests, Professor Spence's insights on the subjects discussed no doubt will be of benefit to a broad spectrum of China scholars and historians.

In what is a rare achievement for a historian, Jonathan Spence has attained an eminent status in academia while enjoying great popularity among the educated general public. This is particularly remarkable considering that Chinese history is, to be blunt, marginal in American historiography. Spence's dual feat of historiography is self-evident in the fact that his books have occupied a prominent place in the catalog of Barns & Noble for decades and that, in 2004, he has been elected as the AHA president, the first Yale professor to serve in that post in more than thirty years and one of only three China historians ever to have been accorded that honor (the other two being John K. Fairbank and Frederic Wakeman, Jr.). His remarks on various issues recorded here, if I may summarize, constitute a record of a historian's wisdom on the art of history.

Since Professor Spence's Chinese name, Shi Jingqian (史景迂), might be translated—or rather interpreted—as “A historian who admires Sima Qian,” our conversation starts with the great Chinese historian, Sima Qian (司弓迂), and the issue of historical writing as a literary tradition.²

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Notes on contributors

Hanchao Lu

Hancilao Lu is Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the award-winning author of Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (California 1999) and a forthcoming book, Street Crier: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars (Stanford, 2005).