There are many reasons for writing a history. One might write a history in order to correct misunderstandings of the past. One might be interested in understanding a history in different terms (perhaps in "social conditions" terms rather than "great people acting" terms). One might want to write a history that memorialized or enshrined or celebrated some past. Or one might write a history to find out about one's own past, to come to understand oneself in the light of that past. There are many, many reasons, of which these are only a few possibilities. Additionally, there are many approaches to practicing historical thinking. Thomas Carlyle (1993) developed the idea of history as the story of great people. In this vision a history is told as the actions of particular, powerful individuals who move events along and telling such a history teaches the rest of us how to act in the light of these heroic individuals. Fernand Braudel (1972), on the other hand, called such history "trivial" and wrote that history is contextualized within geographical, social, economic, and cultural parameters which then make the human actors, as he wrote, "more acted upon than actors" (p. 19). Herbert Kliebard (1995) laid out a variety of approaches to educational history, writing of "house history" (a form of celebratory history) used to initiate teachers into a wonderful tradition, revisionist history which seeks to set aside such celebrations in favor of a more politicized vision, and radical revisionist history which sought to expose the place of conflict in the development of U.S. education.
          In all these cases the historian is practicing a partial historical practice in multiple ways: partial in the sense of having a viewpoint to develop, presenting only a portion or part of the story, wanting or desiring (being partial to) a certain kind of story. This is not to say that one could ever not be partial but only to recognize that one is inevitably, irreducibly partial. Within this notion of "partial" I will, in the following essay review of Janice Ross's excellent history of dance in higher education, develop some ideas about writing and practicing history. Along the way I will draw out the strengths and weaknesses of Ross's work, noting at the outset, however, that I have no general argument with what she has accomplished. Indeed, she has produced a very well-done critical history of dance education, showing us an important way to proceed with such work. Additionally she should be thanked for having done this work in the first place as the history of dance education has been a long neglected subject. My comments are designed to extend all of our thinking about the practice of historical thinking and writing rather than criticize her work. Let me begin by briefly describing her book.
          Ross's book divides into two sections. In the first three chapters, she lays out a cultural history of early 20th Century attitudes toward dancing, learning to dance, women's bodies, women's sexuality and health and how women were positioned vis à vis physical education and activity. In these chapters she instructs us about the highly gendered character of this time-period. Women were seen as people to be controlled and made docile in order to prevent the nature of their bodies from breaking forth into civilization and disrupting the progress of humankind. In this atmosphere Ross shows us how women, in subtle ways, subverted these notions while appearing to accept them. As a significant example, Ross discusses women's use of spas for rest and relaxation. While these spas appeared to inculcate women with the cultural value of indolence and lassitude, women also used them to gather themselves into single-gendered environments in which they might create community. Thus, while women were positioned against activism of any sort, here was a place to actually briefly escape the oppression of being made second-class while appearing to accept their situation.
          In the remainder of the text, Ross uses this cultural history to analyze how two University of Wisconsin physical educators, Blanche Trilling (the Director for women's physical education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Margaret H'Doubler (a faculty member in Trilling's department) created the first dance education program in the U.S. The book especially focuses on H'Doubler, who became both the leading spokesperson for dance as an important educational experience and the creator (at the behest of Trilling) of not only the first university program but for many years the most important program (even after programs developed at other universities). Of great importance was H'Doubler's insistence that the educational value of dance was distinct from and opposed to dance as an art form. Her ideas, especially as expressed in Dance, A Creative Art Experience (1940), influenced a generation of dance people trying to establish the legitimacy of dance in the university. H'Doubler's important move was to use Dewey's educational theory to develop her ideas about both dance education practice and dance as a distinctive educational good.

Margaret H'Doubler, 1917

          In the end Ross shows us how both women worked against cultural stereotypes while also being caught up in them. She provides a complex history of success and capitulation, of resistance and acceptance. Further she shows that H'Doubler's influence quickly waned after other universities and colleges established their own programs. These new dance educators did not want to promote dance as a general education good (and themselves as being interested in dance education) but, rather, as artists and the maker of artists for the professional field. For the most part within university and college dance education programs, dance education majors are, even now, second-class citizens to the dance artist-students. This was antithetical to H'Doubler's project. Given this present day fact, one would have hoped, through Ross's work, to understand how H'Doubler's approach might have prepared the ground for its own surpassing.
          There are hints of this possibility but only hints. I would suggest that the practice of history may be most important in how it enables us to understand the present not as idiosyncratic or anomalous but as an extension of previous activities. My first issue with Ross, therefore, is that I don't feel she sufficiently connects the present with the past. This may be due to her particular and partial orientation, due to the fact that no history can be complete and is inevitably partial. The rest of what I have to write hinges on an understanding of my use of the word "partial."
          As I wrote at the outset of this essay, "partial" can be construed in several ways. It can mean "only part of the whole" and it can mean, as it often does, "biased." These two ideas are not unrelated. To be "only part of a whole" is to be able to view the whole only from that part which necessarily skews or "biases" what one knows of the whole. "Partial" may also mean "partial to X," meaning having a particular liking for X. This, too, is related to the first two meanings as when I dwell within the confines of my part of the world, I may have a fondness for that part of the world and I may wish to see the world from that vantage point. I am partial to my "part of the world" (partial) which acts as a "vantage point" (partial).
          What does this have to do with history writing? It is obvious that histories are always partial. Scholarly thinkers cannot hope to encompass all that could be said or written about an historical subject. Rather, they have particular areas or angles from which they are exploring, areas and angles to which they may be particularly partial. These angles necessarily limit what they (and we) can know as well as limit the ways in which we will come to know it. In Ross's case, for instance, she pursues a feminist history of H'Doubler's work at the University of Wisconsin, placing much of what H'Doubler accomplished within the confines of a reaction to Victorian ideas about women and their bodies, coupling it with H'Doubler's working out of John Dewey's educational ideas (a man leading her thinking). Although Ross provides a wealth of insights into what H'Doubler had to overcome to accomplish her feats, she does not, for instance, bring into play the issue of social class. Ross avers that H'Doubler insisted on a certain public presence which was always well-groomed and, in a strong sense, refined. This desire may say as much about how H'Doubler's social class affected the development of her dance ideas as it does about her reaction to how women were viewed in late Victorian times. Ross does allude to this in her discussion of H'Doubler's rejection of certain forms of dance (folk, popular, and theatrical) as being not worthy of a university campus, but the point is not developed. We might understand this as an absence in Ross's work; but it is, of course, not necessarily that she intended this idea but missed the mark. Rather, she had her own questions to answer, which do not deal with the world tout courte. So, with social class we may say that this is not one of Ross's questions, but we may also ask what the consequences of its not being a question could be for how Ross understands the history of which she writes.
          It is important, I think, for historians to note for us what it is they might have pursued but have chosen not to pursue for good reasons, a sort of "absent presence" which is, in any case, at least acknowledged. Although I would understand a criticism of my position based on the fact that the historian would have difficulty acknowledging all the elements for which he or she has not accounted as there would be too many to enumerate, I would argue that without such demurrals the work takes on the guise of a final and complete account. Given that we have now come to know that a scholar's standpoint is always partial and situated, not to acknowledge one's own standpoint is to ignore a central aspect of how one works or what one's work means. Without this acknowledgement, we fall back into the modernist ethos of grand theories. I am not saying that Ross has done so here, but there is a quality of speaking for the whole in her work, rather than exploring an important and illuminating aspect of her subject.
          Historical thinking and history writing are hermeneutic practices in that the historian is engaged in the act of interpreting events and people of the past. Hermeneutic theorists, especially Hans-Georg Gadamer (1988) and Paul Ricoeur (Reagon & Stewart, 1978), teach us that an individual chooses to encounter a text, an event, sets of events, and so forth because that person has some questions to which he or she seeks an answer or answers. He or she lives in the hope that this particular text or event or sets of events, once understood, will yield those answers. We project our questions onto the text or event and formulate questions of it in the light of our initiating questions. The text or event provides the opportunity to concretize our questions and to ask new questions of which we may not have been previously aware.
          Questions, however, are never formulated de novo. They always emerge out of a context. Hermeneutic theorists call this context horizon. The interpreter stands inside the circle of the horizon and looks out on the world/text/event/events in question from the limitation of the horizon itself. That is, we cannot see beyond the horizon so our interpretation is always limited and partial. "Partial" is important here because, as Gadamer argues in many places, we can only make interpretations based on what we already know. We are never without "prejudice" or partiality, indeed could not know anything except that we know something else first. For another's interpretation to be understood we must, perforce, understand the horizon out of which the interpretation arose. To make the situation still more complex, our understanding of the interpretation is set within our own various horizons; and we, too, bring partiality (in its triple meaning) to the task of interpreting the interpretation. We must be wary, then, of making conclusive statements. We must accept the limitations of these horizons nested within each other.
          Out of these two considerations (questions and horizon) we may inquire into Ross's animating questions and horizon. Here an immediate difficulty arises. Ross does not provide us with either a discussion of her horizon (what she brings to the project) or her questions which she hoped to answer.

Margaret H'Doubler

          Why is understanding Ross's horizon important? Because Ross does not tell us about herself and her own history with dance and dance education (what her personal relationship was or is with dancing), we do not know what she sought to understand in her personhood. We do not know why she sought to understand H'Doubler and, perhaps most importantly (from my perspective), we do not know out of what kind of dance tradition she is working so that we might better understand how she understands H'Doubler and the history which she writes.
          It is possible, for instance, to examine this history from a ballet point of view, a contemporary modern dance point of view or a classical modern dance perspective (a Graham or Holm or Humphrey or Weidman perspective). I will briefly play out three of these possibilities: ballet, Graham and Holm.
          From a ballet perspective H'Doubler's work might be seen as inadequate to the making of artists (while not H'Doubler's desire, ballet people would probably not understand any other reason to teach or study dancing). They might even find it terrifying. I was asked, at one time, to teach a modern dance class to a regional ballet company. As part of my teaching, I always include improvisation. When we arrived at that point in the class, the ballet dancers clustered against one wall and were clearly quite afraid of trying to improvise. This was entirely foreign to their way of thinking. Given H'Doubler's strong reliance upon improvisation (as described by Ross), a ballet person's reaction to this history would be quite negative. From a Graham perspective (a very formal approach), H'Doubler's ideas might also bring about trepidation; and Graham people would, perhaps, take an equally negative view of her work. For them, the Graham forms are essential to understanding the body as artistic. Most Graham trained dancers continue to draw strongly upon Graham's dance vocabulary in much the same way that ballet choreographers draw upon the classical ballet vernacular.
          Perhaps the only modern tradition which would understand H'Doubler is the German expressionist tradition. Indeed, Ross tells us that H'Doubler felt an affinity for this tradition, and she did bring Louise Kloepper, a dancer with Hanya Holm (who had, in turn, brought Mary Wigman's German Expressionist modern dance to the U.S.) to UW—Madison to teach. I, too, studied with Hanya Holm and my own reading of H'Doubler has always been quite sympathetic, finding in her strains of my artistic tradition. Were I writing this history, I might feature the nascent artistic qualities of H'Doubler's approach even though H'Doubler might not have seen them in that way. For instance, where Ross sees, in a memo from H'Doubler about choreography, H'Doubler ignoring art in favor of a biological approach to choreography, I find just the sorts of sentiments of my own education in choreography. H'Doubler wrote that

[t]he creative act is a building process that constructs out of consciously evaluated experience . . . a dance is a designed entity–an embodiment of emotional experience transformed by thought and consciously given a movement form upon which the principles of composition have been imposed by the personality which was the subject of the experience. (p.223)

. . . poised on one foot with her head held stiffly, one arm reached outward and the other up holding a flute. The pose looks designed, as if arranged to mimic a statue of Pan rather than arrived at from some inner understanding of movement impulses. . . . The University of Wisconsin women here have the stiffness of figures in family snapshots caught in the midst of a silly good time they are not quite sure they want documented. (p. 87)

References

Braudel, F. (1972). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, 2nd Ed. (trans. Siân Reynolds). New York: Harper & Row Publishers.

Carlyle, T. (1993). On heroes, hero-worship, & the heroic in history / notes and introduction by Michael K. Goldberg ; text established by Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel. Berkeley, CA: U. of California Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1988). Truth and method. New York: Crossroad.

H'Doubler, M. (1940). Dance, a creative art experience 2nd Ed. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Kliebard, H. (1995). The Struggle for the American curriculum: 1893-1958, 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge.

Reagon, C. E. & Stewart D. (Eds.) (1978). The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An anthology of his work. Boston: Beacon Press.

About the Reviewer

Donald Blumenfeld-Jones is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at Arizona State University. His main research interests are the relation between the arts and educational research, critical social theory and curriculum, hermeneutics and curriculum, and the place of authority in education as a curricular issue. He was, for 20 years, a professional modern dancer. He continues to write poetry and dance on occasion.