Michael Gedaliah Kammen (October 25, 1936 – November 29, 2013) ranks among the central figures in late twentieth-century American historiography and counts as a founder of the modern study of American cultural history. Across a career of nearly half a century at Cornell University, he reshaped the study of national identity by tracing how history, memory, politics, law, art, popular entertainment, and public ritual converge to form national consciousness. His scholarship helped install historical memory as a major field of inquiry, and it demonstrated that the stories a people tell about themselves carry as much historical weight as the events those stories recall.
Kammen worked at a moment when the discipline expanded past its older concentration on presidents, wars, parties, and formal institutions. Trained as a political and intellectual historian, he became an early and influential investigator of the symbolic side of American life. He examined constitutions, monuments, museums, holidays, commemorations, architecture, paintings, popular entertainment, and collective memory with the same seriousness historians had long reserved for legislation and elections. His governing claim held that American culture resists explanation through politics or economics alone. To understand the country, a historian must also study how Americans remember their past, invent their traditions, celebrate their national myths, and reconcile, or fail to reconcile, the contradictions at the heart of their society.
Early life and education
Kammen was born in Rochester, New York, on October 25, 1936. He passed much of his childhood in the Washington, D.C., area, and his attachment to American history took shape amid the monuments, archives, and political culture of the capital.
He entered George Washington University and earned an A.B. with distinction in 1958. He then moved to Harvard University, where he took an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1964. At Harvard he studied under Bernard Bailyn (1922–2020), whose account of the ideological origins of the American Revolution shaped a generation of scholars and helped redirect the field toward the recovery of political belief.
Bailyn’s influence runs through Kammen’s career. Both men cared about ideas, political culture, and the intellectual foundations of American society. Kammen, though, moved past his mentor’s concentration on formal political thought. He carried historical inquiry into territory that earlier scholars had treated as marginal: public memory, popular taste, artistic controversy, and the cultural uses of the past.
Cornell University
In 1965, soon after he completed his doctorate, Kammen joined the history faculty at Cornell University, and he stayed there for the rest of his life.
He rose quickly. In 1973 he became Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture. He chaired the History Department from 1974 to 1976 and directed the Society for the Humanities from 1977 to 1980. Cornell served as more than an employer. It became the institutional center of his intellectual life. Across nearly fifty years he taught thousands of students and supervised roughly two dozen doctoral dissertations. Colleagues described him as generous with younger scholars, curious about emerging fields, and ready to engage historians who worked far outside his own specialties.
Many prominent academics withdraw from undergraduate teaching as their reputations grow. Kammen did the opposite and stayed devoted to the classroom. His courses drew large enrollments, above all those on American myths, national identity, and cultural memory, and students recalled his lectures for their breadth, their humor, and their capacity to link parts of American life that seemed to share no common ground. He retired in 2008 and became professor emeritus. He returned to teaching in the fall of 2013, shortly before his death.
Colonial America and the early scholarship
Kammen’s first scholarship addressed colonial America and the relationship between Britain and its North American colonies. His early books include A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (1968) and Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (1970). Both studies examined the political structures and economic arrangements that governed the empire before the Revolution. He followed them with Colonial New York: A History (1975), which remains a standing contribution to the history of colonial society.
These works established Kammen as a serious historian of early America. They also disclose the wider interests that came later. Even here he cared less about formal institutions in isolation than about the cultural assumptions and political convictions that held those institutions together.
People of Paradox
Kammen reached national prominence with People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972), which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for History and became an influential interpretation of American culture for the rest of the century.
Kammen argued that contradiction defines American civilization. Americans honor equality and hierarchy at once, liberty and order, the individual and the community, idealism and material gain, local autonomy and national union. He treated these contradictions not as defects to be corrected but as a source of creative energy, and he held that American culture draws much of its force from the coexistence of values that pull against each other. The argument set the theme for much of his later work. He returned again and again to the tension between consensus and conflict, unity and diversity, continuity and change.
Constitutional culture
Kammen made a lasting contribution through his study of constitutional culture. In A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986), he traced the place of the Constitution in American public life. He declined to treat the document as a legal text alone and examined its career as a cultural symbol. He argued that Americans came to invest the Constitution with sacred standing, and that its authority rested not on judicial interpretation alone but also on civic ritual, public commemoration, schooling, and national myth. The book won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize and stands among the important studies of the Constitution’s standing in American culture.
Memory and the invention of tradition
Kammen’s most durable contribution came through his study of collective memory. His landmark book, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), examined how Americans build and rebuild their sense of the past. He argued that traditions seldom arrive as fixed inheritances. People revise, reinvent, and adapt them to meet present needs. Americans remember certain events, heroes, and symbols and neglect others, so historical memory functions not as a record of the past but as a continuing act of cultural creation.
The field now called memory studies counts among the most active areas of historical scholarship. Many scholars contributed to its rise, and Mystic Chords of Memory serves as a foundational text that helped establish the field within American historiography.
Public history and historical consciousness
Kammen’s interest in memory carried him into public history. He studied museums, historical societies, commemorations, monuments, heritage tourism, and the ways ordinary citizens meet the past outside the university. A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (1978), Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (1987), and In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (1997) examined the relationship between professional historians and popular historical understanding. He held that professional scholarship is essential and that history belongs to the public and should remain accessible beyond the academy.
That commitment linked him to the world of state and local history. His wife, Carol Koyen Kammen, became a respected local historian and public-history advocate. Each pursued an independent career, and both shared an interest in how communities preserve and interpret their own pasts.
Art, culture, and public controversy
Kammen kept challenging the boundary between elite culture and popular culture. In American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999), he traced shifting cultural standards and aesthetic judgment. His biography The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (1996) studied Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970), the critic who fought to legitimize popular culture as a subject of serious attention.
Late in his career Kammen turned toward visual culture. In Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (2006), he investigated fights over artistic censorship, public funding, museum exhibitions, and offensive imagery, and he showed how disputes over art expose deeper political and social conflict. Arguments about paintings, sculptures, photographs, and monuments often become arguments about national identity. His study of the painter Robert Gwathmey (1903–1988), Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (1999), belongs to the same line of inquiry. Across these books the old theme of paradox holds. Conflicts over culture reflect the broader tensions that occupied him throughout his life.
An extraordinary range
Few historians have written across as many fields. His major books include A Rope of Sand (1968), Empire and Interest (1970), People of Paradox (1972), Colonial New York (1975), A Season of Youth (1978), A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1986), Selvages and Biases (1987), Mystic Chords of Memory (1991), Contested Values: Democracy and Diversity in American Culture (1995), The Lively Arts (1996), In the Past Lane (1997), American Culture, American Tastes (1999), Robert Gwathmey (1999), A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004), Visual Shock (2006), and Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (2010). In all he wrote or edited more than three dozen books, published over 165 scholarly essays, produced hundreds of book reviews, and delivered roughly 240 invited lectures.
Recognition and personal life
Kammen’s work drew wide recognition. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize for History (1973), the Francis Parkman Prize (1986), the Henry Adams Prize (1986), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, several major fellowships, and the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2009). The 2009 award stands among the highest honors in the profession and recognized a lifetime of achievement.
On February 26, 1961, Kammen married Carol Koyen Kammen, and the marriage lasted more than fifty years. They had two sons who built distinguished academic careers of their own. Daniel M. Kammen became a leading scholar of energy policy and sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley. Douglas Anton Kammen became a scholar of Southeast Asian politics and history and joined the National University of Singapore. Three grandchildren completed the family. Friends and colleagues remembered Kammen for his humor, his kindness, his generosity, and his appetite for ideas as much as for his scholarship.
Legacy
Michael Kammen helped redefine what historians study and how they study it. He showed that constitutions, monuments, holidays, museums, paintings, popular entertainment, and public memory belong to serious historical inquiry, and he bridged political history and cultural history, elite institutions and popular taste, scholarly rigor and public engagement. He held a middle position between the older political historians and the more theoretical cultural critics, stayed committed to empirical research, and welcomed new questions about symbols, memory, and identity. His influence continues through the historians who study public memory, constitutional culture, heritage, commemoration, and national identity.
The American Association for State and Local History established the Michael Kammen Award to honor outstanding contributions to state and local history, a fitting tribute to a scholar who spent his career showing that history lives not only in archives and classrooms but also in the memories, traditions, and cultural practices of ordinary people. More than most American historians of his generation, Kammen lit the relationship between history and memory. His central insight held that nations endure not through governments and institutions alone but through stories, symbols, traditions, and shared understandings of the past, and through those investigations he helped Americans grasp how they came to imagine themselves as a people.
David Pinsof builds his argument around a flattering story he says intellectuals tell themselves: the world’s problems come from misunderstanding. People are biased, ignorant, gullible, misinformed, and the intellectual, whose trade is understanding, becomes the one who can fix them. Pinsof rejects the story. People understand their incentives fine. What looks like error is strategy. Partisans hate because they compete over the coercive apparatus of the state. Stereotypes track reality. The cynical truth gets coded as icky, so intellectuals perform idealism and reach for the kinder explanation. The trick, he says, is to confuse stated motives with actual motives, to read a mission statement as a goal. Judge people by what they claim to want and they look like failures. Judge them by what they pursue, status, allies, moral standing, resources others lack, control of the state, and they look rational, because they are.
Turn this on Kammen, and two of his signature ideas come under pressure.
Start with paradox. Kammen builds People of Paradox on the claim that Americans hold contradictory values at once. Equality and hierarchy. Liberty and order. The individual and the community. He treats the contradiction as real and as a source of creative energy. Pinsof’s read drains the puzzle. There is no contradiction at the level of motive, only at the level of stated principle. A man invokes equality when equality serves him and hierarchy when hierarchy serves him. He praises local autonomy when the locals are his and national power when the nation is his to direct. The values do not fight in his head. They sit in his toolkit, and he reaches for whichever one pays. What Kammen calls paradox, Pinsof calls people serving interests behind a screen of principle. The mystery exists only if you take the stated values as the thing to explain. Drop that assumption and the paradox goes.
Kammen comes closer to Pinsof on memory. Mystic Chords of Memory shows that traditions are not fixed inheritances. People revise them, reinvent them, fit them to present needs. Pinsof grants most of this. People do manufacture their past. Where the two part is the why. Kammen routes the manufacture through cultural need, national self-understanding, the work a society does to hold itself together. Pinsof routes it through status and coalition. A group remembers what it pays to remember. It honors the dead who flatter the living and forgets the dead who indict them. The selection is no failure of accuracy and no noble act of collective meaning. It is savvy. So Kammen names the deed and flinches at the motive. He sees that the past gets built. He will not say it gets built to win.
The reading bites hardest on the Constitution. In A Machine That Would Go of Itself, Kammen shows Americans investing the document with sacred standing, surrounding it with ritual, commemoration, and civic faith. He treats the reverence as the thing to study. Pinsof asks what the reverence does. A sacred value, on his account, is a coalition marker and a weapon. You raise the Constitution to holy standing because holiness puts your reading of it past argument and shames the rival who reads it differently. The fights Kammen describes, over what the document means and who gets to say so, are the fights Pinsof predicts: zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state, dressed in sacred language so the winner looks pious and the loser looks profane. Kammen records the civic faith with affection. Pinsof reads the same faith as a club.
Kammen half-sees the construction Pinsof insists on, which makes him a softer target than the bias-correctors and divide-bridgers Pinsof skewers. The misunderstanding myth has a quiet version that still fits. The historian who decodes a nation’s memory becomes the man who understands the nation better than the nation does. The generosity, the warmth, the talk of history belonging to the public, all of it seats a man at the head of the table he is setting. Saying the past belongs to everyone is a fine way to keep the keys. And the field of memory studies, which Kammen helped found, runs on collecting the public’s distortions of its own past, the academic cousin of Pinsof’s misunderstanding-collecting, with one difference Kammen never quite states. The distortions are not mistakes. The public remembers what it has an incentive to remember.
Pinsof also reads the tone. The reach for paradox over competition, for creative tension over plain interest, for civic faith over coalitional weaponry, is the move of a man who knows that cynicism reads as mean in the seminar room. The warm account is the safe account. It signals that the author is a sweetie, and it works. The kinder story about American memory is also the more publishable one, the one that wins the Pulitzer and the named chair and the lifetime award, because the people handing out those honors prefer to hear that a nation’s myths are creative rather than that they are weapons.
Kammen looked harder at construction than most historians of his day and got most of the way to the savvy view. He saw that Americans build their past, sacralize their charter, and choose their heroes. He stopped one move short. He gave the building a kind motive. Pinsof finishes the move. People do not misunderstand their history. They use it. The selective memory, the invented tradition, the sacred Constitution, the creative paradox, none of it is a puzzle for a wiser interpreter to solve. It is a savvy animal doing what pays. On Pinsof’s reading, the only thing Kammen misunderstood is that there was anything to understand.
What the Dead Are For: Michael Kammen’s Hero System
In the fall of 2013 an old man returns to a classroom at Cornell he had left five years before. He is dying. The students do not know it. He stands at the front of the room and teaches what he has taught for almost half a century, how a people keeps its dead alive, and a few weeks later he is one of the dead himself.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) gives us the frame to read that scene. In The Denial of Death he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear it, and that culture is the shared project built to make the death bearable. A hero system, in Becker’s sense, is a set of rules a society offers for earning significance that outlasts the body. Raise a cathedral. Father a line. Write a book. Die for the flag. Each is a way of saying the grave is not the end of me. Becker’s claim is that almost everything a man calls meaning is a bid for symbolic immortality, made against a terror he keeps out of sight.
Kammen spent his career on the technology of that bid. His sacred value is memory. Not memory as a faculty of the brain, but memory as the thing a people does with its dead. He studied monuments, holidays, commemorations, sacred charters, and reburials, and he treated all of it as one subject: how the living arrange the dead so the living can go on. Digging Up the Dead is a history of Americans exhuming and reinterring their famous corpses, moving the bones to better ground, and it reads now as the most honest title he ever chose. The man was always digging up the dead.
Here is where the standard hero-system essay stops, with the protagonist’s sacred value named and a rival or two lined up against it. Kammen asks for more, because his value will not behave like the others. Memory is not one sacred value beside courage or purity or freedom. Memory is the ground all the other systems stand on, since every hero system finally turns on some arrangement of the dead. So the right way to see Kammen is to walk the rooms where his one word breaks into many, and to watch the same word mean things that cannot be reconciled.
Walk into a Family History Center on a weekday morning. Fluorescent light, gray carpet, a retired man in a white shirt with a lanyard, a screen where a microfilm reader used to sit. He has traced a great-great-grandmother to a parish register in Denmark, a woman who died unbaptized in the faith he holds, and this week the temple work was done in her name. “We don’t lose anybody,” he says. For him memory seals the dead into an eternal family, and the work of recovering a name is the work of salvation. The past is a rescue operation that never closes. To remember is to redeem.
Cross the country to a meditation hall. A bell, a row of cushions, a teacher with a shaved head and a borrowed robe. Here the project runs the other way. The dead are not to be recovered. The self is not to be preserved. “You are not the story you keep telling,” the teacher says, and he means it as good news. The hero in this system earns his immortality by dissolving the very self that craves to persist, by loosening the grip of memory until the chain of clinging breaks. To remember, here, is to suffer. The heroic act is to let go.
Stand in a town square between two people who will not look at each other. A bronze cavalryman on a granite base. On a folding chair beside it an older White woman with a thermos. Across the grass a young Black man with a clipboard. She says her great-grandfather rode with the man on the horse, that the statue holds his courage and his name, and that you do not tear down a man’s grandfather. The young man says his own great-grandmother was held as property three blocks from where the bronze stands, and that the statue tells her she still is. The same metal. Two hero systems that share a square and nothing else. One remembers to honor a lineage. One remembers to indict a crime. Each calls the other’s memory a lie, and each is a complete account of what the dead are for.
Drive to an office with kombucha on tap and a founder in a fleece vest. On the wall, a chart of biomarkers. He has a cryonics contract and a shelf of compounds and no patience for any of this. “Memory is a backup of a system you let crash,” he says. “I’m not backing it up. I’m keeping it running.” He wants to beat death the literal way, in the body, in the cell, and he finds the monument and the prayer and the family seal grotesque, consolation prizes handed out to people who surrendered. The past is friction. Only the future is sacred. To him the historian is a curator of defeat.
Then a sanctuary on the holiest evening of the Jewish year. White robes, a worn prayer book, a wall of small plaques with bulbs that light on the anniversary of a death. The cantor leads the memorial service and the room stands and the names are read. “We do not invent this,” he says. “We are commanded to remember.” His system inverts Kammen’s most famous claim. Kammen argued that traditions are made and remade to serve the present. The cantor holds that the duty to remember comes from outside the present, handed down and binding, and that the day he treats it as his own invention is the day it dies. For him memory is covenant. To forget is to break faith with God and with the dead at once.
Five rooms, one word, no agreement. The Mormon redeems the dead, the monk releases them, the woman honors them, the young man arraigns them, the founder discards them, the cantor obeys them. Each man is a hero on his own terms and a fool on everyone else’s. That is the part the cynic misses and the part Becker saw. The systems are not arguments about a fact. They are rival answers to the one terror, and a man cannot stand inside more than one of them at a time.
Kammen could stand in the doorway of every room. That is his hero system, and it is a strange one. He does not seal the dead or release them or honor or arraign them. He maps the others doing it. His relation to memory is the scholar’s relation, one step back from every altar, and his bid for significance is to be the man who understood the bids. He named the field. He wrote the books that taught a generation to see the monument and the holiday and the reburial as one subject. Mystic Chords of Memory and A Machine That Would Go of Itself are field maps of other people’s immortality, drawn by a man who claimed no plot on any of the grounds he charted.
Kammen won the immortality he catalogued. The Pulitzer, the named chair, the lifetime award from his profession, and then the cleanest stroke of all: the American Association for State and Local History created a prize and put his name on it, so that the student of how communities honor their dead became a thing communities use to honor their dead. He spent a career on reburial and joined the honored corpses he had studied. The man who explained the monument got a monument. His own system offered him one form of life past the grave, the scholar’s form, to be remembered as the one who explained remembering, and the profession granted it.
Go back to the classroom in the fall of 2013. The old man does not give the students an answer, because his system has no answer, only the map. He hands them the question instead, which is the only thing a teacher can leave that outlives him. He dies in November. The course runs on in other hands. The dead historian becomes a name on a reading list and a prize and a shelf of books, which is to say he becomes exactly what he studied, a piece of memory that the living arrange so the living can go on.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, Kammen becomes Mearsheimer’s witness, and a better one than Mearsheimer found for himself. Mearsheimer needs a transmission belt, some engine that carries the value infusion into the long childhood and binds the grown man to his group. He gestures at family and society and leaves the machinery dark. Kammen spent fifty years lighting it. The holidays, the monuments, the schoolroom myth, the civic ritual, the sacred charter read aloud, all of it is the value infusion at work, and Mystic Chords of Memory reads as a field manual for how a nation loads its young before the young can answer back. Kammen thought he was writing cultural history. On Mearsheimer’s reading he was charting the socialization that beats reason, the force Mearsheimer asserts and Kammen documents.
The second consequence cuts at Kammen’s signature idea. People of Paradox holds that Americans balance liberty against order, the individual against the community, and draw creative energy from the tension. Mearsheimer denies the balance. The social and national side comes first because survival requires it. The individualist side is a late ideology, thin and recent, laid over a deep tribal floor. So the paradox is a hierarchy wearing the mask of a balance. Americans do not hold liberty and community as equals in permanent suspension. They run on community and tell themselves a story about liberty, and when the two collide the nation takes what it needs and the individual yields. Kammen’s tension is real as a story Americans tell. As an account of what holds the country together it sets a thin thing beside a deep thing and calls them partners.
The third consequence reaches Kammen’s constructivism. He argued that traditions are made and remade to serve the present, and the liberal mind hears in that a kind of freedom, the past as clay the living rework. Mearsheimer narrows the freedom hard. If the value infusion lands in childhood before reason wakes, then a man does not select his nation’s myths the way he selects an argument. The myths arrive first and build the man who later imagines he is choosing. Kammen is right that traditions change. He overstates how much of the change is chosen, because the chooser is already a product of the tradition he proposes to revise. The hand that reworks the clay was shaped by the clay.
The fourth consequence turns on the author. Kammen stood one step back from every American myth and mapped it with the scholar’s distance, and he trusted that distance. Mearsheimer takes the distance away. No one stands outside the value infusion, the historian least of all, because the historian was a child once too. Kammen’s frame, pluralist, ironic, sure that traditions are constructed and so revisable, is the creed of his own tribe, the postwar American research university in the human-rights era Moyn describes. That creed was infused in him before his reason matured, by graduate seminars and disciplinary honors and the moral climate of his guild. The man who taught a generation that every tradition is invented sat inside an invented tradition he could not name, the liberal academy’s faith that reason and evidence float free of the group that trains them. On Mearsheimer’s anthropology that faith is the deepest socialization of all, the one its holders read as the absence of socialization.
The last consequence is the largest. Kammen studied the American argument over memory, the fights over which heroes, which holidays, which reading of the charter, the revisions and the contests and the pluralism, and he found there an open and creative culture forever remaking itself. Mearsheimer says he studied the weather and missed the climate. The argument over which myths is loud and visible and endless. The truth beneath it never changes. Americans contest the content of the binding and never the binding. No faction proposes to live unbound by any shared past, because a people cannot survive that way, and survival is the floor under everything Mearsheimer describes. Kammen’s catalog of the contests is accurate and his sense of their meaning is liberal. The contests are surface motion on a tribal sea that does not move. He gave fifty years to the variety of American memory, and the one thing his frame could not let him see is that the binding is not optional, not balanced against the free individual, not chosen in adulthood by reasoning men, but the price a social animal pays to go on living in a group.
If Mearsheimer is right, Kammen keeps his data and loses his framing. The monuments and the mystic chords and the sacred Constitution stay exactly where he put them, and they stop meaning what he thought. They are not the creative play of a free and pluralist people. They are the value infusion by which a tribe makes its young its own before the young can reason, and Kammen, who saw the infusion more clearly than almost any historian of his century, read it as freedom because freedom was the myth his own tribe had infused in him.
The Consecrated Heretic: Michael Kammen and the Boundary of History
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) gives us a way to read a scholarly life as a trajectory through a field. A field is a structured space of positions where players compete for a particular kind of capital and for the authority to say what the game is. Cultural capital is the competence and the credential a man carries. Symbolic capital is the recognition others grant him, the honor that lets his word land as authoritative. Habitus is the set of dispositions a life lays down in him, his feel for the game. Consecration is the act by which an institution turns a man’s capital into legitimate authority, a rite that announces: this one is real. The highest stake in a field is never winning a single round. It is the power to redraw the boundary, to rule what counts as the game and what falls outside it. Kammen’s career is a clean case of every part of this.
Start with habitus. A boy grows up in the Washington capital among monuments, federal buildings, and the staged memory of a nation, and the dispositions of that childhood settle into him before he chooses anything. He takes his first degree at George Washington University, in the same city. The objects he will later rule into history, the monument, the commemoration, the sacred charter, are the furniture of the world that formed him. His feel for which subjects will repay study is habitus reading the field before the field knows its own next move.
The doctorate is a rite of institution. At Harvard, Kammen studies under Bailyn, and the lineage hands down more than method. It hands down consecrated authority, the inherited capital of a master whose own standing the field already honors. A degree from that house, under that man, certifies the student as a legitimate heir. Kammen enters the field carrying capital he did not earn from scratch, the way an heir enters a market already holding shares.
Then conversion. The Pulitzer for People of Paradox, the Newton C. Farr chair at Cornell, the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at the close the American Historical Association’s award for a lifetime of distinction. Each is a consecration. Each converts work into recognition and recognition into the authority to define what good work is. The capital compounds, and by the middle of his career Kammen no longer plays for position. He plays for the boundary.
Kammen spends his standing to widen the field, ruling monuments, museums, holidays, popular entertainment, and ordinary taste into legitimate history. The expansion looks like an argument that won on its merits. On Bourdieu’s account it won on capital. The field hears the redraw as a founding rather than as a heresy because the orthodoxy had already crowned the man proposing it. A junior scholar who urged the same expansion would read as a crank with no feel for the discipline. Kammen urging it reads as a discipline finding its future. The difference is not the argument. The difference is the volume of consecrated capital standing behind the same words. The avant-garde a field accepts is the one it has already honored, and Kammen is the consecrated heretic, the man licensed to break the rule because the rule-keepers made him one of their own first.
The erasing of the line between elite and popular looks like a leveling, and it is the opposite. In Distinction Bourdieu reads taste as a marker of position, the way refined judgment sorts people by rank. The scholar who takes comic strips and museum fights and the four seasons in American life as serious objects performs a sovereign and capacious taste, the bearing of a man so secure in his cultural capital that he can study the popular without any fear of falling. The Lively Arts, American Culture, American Tastes, and Visual Shock are not descents from the high ground. They are the high ground rebuilt one floor up. Kammen does not abolish the hierarchy of taste. He relocates it to the place where he stands, the meta-position of the historian who can see all tastes as data. To study popular taste from a named chair is to consecrate yourself as the one who grants the popular its legitimacy, which is the most refined distinction of all.
His insistence that history belongs to the public reads as humility, the professor stepping down from the tower. Bourdieu reads it as a position-taking inside the academy, not a step out of it. The man who speaks for the public draws the authority of the public to himself while keeping his chair, his prizes, and his graduate students. He takes a stand against the territorial, jargon-bound, narrowly professional historian, and the stand is a move in the same game those historians play, made from a stronger square. The world of state and local history, the public-history wing his wife helped lead, gives him a second base of capital, a flank that the narrow academic struggle cannot reach. The historian who throws open the gate is still the man who holds the keys, and holding the keys is the position.
Founding a subfield is the largest accumulation a scholar can manage, larger than any single book, because the founder sets the positions later players must occupy and becomes the reference whose citation grants them entry. Kammen helped found the study of memory in American history, which makes him a consecrating authority, a man whose name in a footnote admits a newcomer to the conversation. The American Association for State and Local History then placed his name on a prize. That is a rite of institution, and it perpetuates his consecrating power past his death. Symbolic capital reaches its most durable form when it stops depending on the man and becomes an instrument the field uses to consecrate others. Kammen, dead, still confers legitimacy every year the award is given.
The player believes in the game. The stakes feel real to him because the dispositions that make him a player are the same ones that make the stakes feel real, and the sincere belief that the work is a disinterested search for truth is precisely what makes a man effective at the work. Kammen believed monuments were worth the study and believed history belonged to everyone. The belief is the engine, not a cover for one. The cultural field pays its highest symbolic profit to the player who appears to want nothing from it, so the disinterest is the investment. Kammen looked like the historian who walked away from the academy’s small game for the public’s large one. On Bourdieu’s reading he never walked away. The move that looked like leaving the field was the field’s own logic carried to its finish, performed by a man with the capital to perform it and the habitus to mean every word.
The Set
Place the set first. It lives in the seminar rooms and faculty clubs of a small number of universities, Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Princeton and Berkeley and, in Kammen’s case, Cornell, across the decades that run from the early sixties to the turn of the century. It gathers once a year at the convention of the American Historical Association and again at the Organization of American Historians, in hotel ballrooms where the job interviews happen in bedrooms and the reputations get made and broken at the receptions. Its elders set the air Kammen breathed. Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) at Columbia, Daniel Boorstin (1914–2004) at Chicago and then the Library of Congress, Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), Perry Miller (1905–1963) and Oscar Handlin (1915–2009) at Harvard, C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) and Edmund Morgan (1916–2013) at Yale, John Higham (1920–2003) and David Brion Davis (1927–2019). These men taught that America had a character large enough to hold a single ambitious book, and that writing the book was the highest thing a historian could do.
Kammen comes up through the most consecrated line of all. He takes his doctorate at Harvard under Bailyn, and the house Bailyn built turns out a generation of early-Americanists who become his peers and rivals: Gordon Wood (1933–2026), who won the Pulitzer for the radicalism of the Revolution and trained two generations at Brown, Pauline Maier (1938–2013) on the Declaration, Jack P. Greene (b. 1931) on the colonial constitution. Kammen begins there, in colonial agents and mercantile politics, and then turns toward memory, which carries him into a wider world. At Cornell his circle is Walter LaFeber (1933–2021), the diplomatic historian whose lectures filled the largest hall on campus, Mary Beth Norton (b. 1943) in women’s and colonial history, Dominick LaCapra (b. 1939) in intellectual history and theory, and, in the public-history world next door, his wife Carol Kammen, the local historian.
Ask what the set values and you get a clear answer. It honors the synthesizer. The figure these people admire reads everything in a field, masters the archive past any rival’s ability to catch him out, and produces the long interpretive book that reorganizes how everyone else sees the subject. He writes prose a scholar respects and a literate citizen can follow. He wins the large prize. He trains students who carry his questions forward and cite him at the head of their own books. He serves the guild, edits the journal, sits on the committee, runs the association. The life the set treats as great is the life that ends with a shelf of synthetic books, a named prize, a line of students, and a method that outlives the man. Generosity to the young is a real virtue in this world and a shrewd investment at once, because the students are the part of a scholar that keeps working after he stops.
The status games run on recognition handed out by a small number of people who decide what counts. The Pulitzer, the Bancroft, the Parkman, the Henry Adams. The named chair. The presidency of the AHA or the OAH. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The editorship of the American Historical Review or the Journal of American History, which lets a man decide what gets reviewed and by whom. And above the prizes, the crossover, the review essay in the New York Review of Books or the front of the New York Times Book Review, which carries a scholar’s name out of the guild and into the country. The currency is not money. The currency is the regard of the few hundred people whose regard the set agrees to count, and the feuds are fought in print, in the long review that runs three pages and lands its worst blow with a single adjective.
The deepest game of all is the fight over what counts as real history, and it splits the set down the middle. On one side stand the top-down men, the political and intellectual and cultural historians who study founders, constitutions, presidents, and the national mind. On the other side, the new social historians who came up in the sixties saying the story belonged to the crowd, the sailor, the slave, the millworker, the farm wife. Jesse Lemisch (1936–2018) called for history from the bottom up and called the consensus historians servants of power to their faces. Herbert Gutman (1928–1985) rebuilt the history of the working class, Eugene Genovese (1930–2012) the world the slaves made, Howard Zinn wrote the people’s history that sold by the million, and behind them all stood the Englishman E. P. Thompson and, in early-modern Europe, Natalie Zemon Davis (1928–2023). The fight was about honor and about who would hold the chairs. Kammen rode the seam. He took ordinary memory and popular taste seriously, which bowed to the bottom-up insurgents, and he kept the synthetic ambition and the civil manner of the top-down elders, which kept him in their company. He found a subject that let him belong to both camps and answer to neither.
That subject pulled him into a second circle, the one that studies how nations make their pasts. The Frenchman Pierre Nora (1931–2025) built the seven volumes on the sites of French memory. David Lowenthal (1923–2018) wrote that the past is a foreign country and spent his life on the line between history and heritage, where heritage is what a people selects from its past to feel good about itself. Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) and Terence Ranger (1929–2015) edited the volume that taught everyone the phrase invention of tradition. Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) gave them the imagined community. In the American wing, John Bodnar (b. 1944) studied public memory and commemoration, Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007) surveyed how ordinary Americans actually use the past, Jay Winter (b. 1945) wrote the memory of the Great War, and David Blight (b. 1949) showed how the nation remembered its Civil War by forgetting the freed slave. These scholars agree on a discovery, that the shared past is made and remade, and they police one fault line among themselves without end, the line between disciplined history and self-serving memory.
The normative claims, the oughts the set enforces, follow from the values. A historian ought to read the whole literature before he writes a word. He ought to master the archive and never let a rival catch him in an error of fact, because an error of fact is the one wound from which a reputation does not recover. He ought to write for the scholar and the citizen at once and treat the refusal to do either as a failure. He ought to avoid presentism, the reading of the past through the wants of the present, and he ought to avoid antiquarianism, the loving of the past for its own dust. He ought to serve the guild and mentor the young. He ought to guard the autonomy of history against the politician who wants a usable past and against the market that wants a flattering one. And he ought to study the founding and the Constitution with seriousness, neither debunking them as fraud nor worshipping them as scripture.
The essentialist claims, the things the set treats as given rather than made, sit underneath all of it and carry a quiet irony. The elders believed America had a real and distinctive character, that one could speak of the American mind and the American people as things that exist. They believed a craft-trained historian could reach a disciplined objectivity, a view earned by method and standing above mere opinion. They believed the archive holds a knowable past and that evidence settles questions. Lowenthal drew a firm border between history, which is disciplined, and heritage, which is self-serving, and treated the border as real. And the whole set treated the nation as a durable subject worth a lifetime. The irony is plain. A set that taught the world that traditions are invented and memory is constructed held its own craft, its own archive, and the nation it studied to be no inventions at all but solid ground.
The moral grammar shows in the praise words and the blame words. To praise a book the set reaches for magisterial, learned, judicious, humane, capacious, synthetic, definitive. To bury one it reaches for thin, tendentious, presentist, reductive, antiquarian, polemical, ideological. From the guild side, popularizing is an insult. From the public-history side, ivory-tower is the answer. The cardinal sin for the professional is the factual error and the special plea. The cardinal sin charged against the professional is irrelevance and contempt for the ordinary reader. The test that governs the whole grammar is civility. A man fights by reviewing the book, not by denouncing the author, and the sixties insurgents broke that rule on purpose because they thought the civility was a way of protecting power. The break came into the open in the public fights of the nineties, the cancelled Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1995 and the war over the National History Standards that Gary Nash (1933–2021) helped write, when the guild’s civil manner met the country’s heat and the professionals learned that the public would not sit still to be corrected. Eric Foner (b. 1943) at Columbia carried the argument that the past is always contested ground.
Kammen sat in the middle of every circle and quarreled openly with none. He took memory and popular taste seriously enough to satisfy the insurgents and kept the synthesis, the prizes, and the good manners that kept the elders close. He won the Pulitzer, helped found the study of American memory, trained his students, served his profession, and left a prize with his name on it. The set’s faith, which was his faith, held that the well-made book and the well-trained student outlast the man who made them, and that the republic is served by a people that gets its own past right.
The Voice
Kammen writes like a man who cannot bear to leave an example out, and his master figure is paradox, working at three levels at once: the title, the thesis, and the sentence. He opens by asking how the land of the future acquired a past, and the question is built on a pair of opposites, which is how his mind moves. He reaches for the doubled term and the balanced antithesis. A reviewer found his subject in the tensions of memory and modernism, populism and elitism, and the ambiguities and dualisms of a nation devoted to both past and future. The antithesis is not decoration. It is the shape of his thought, and it earned him the title the Professor of Paradox.
The diction is learned and Latinate, thick with abstract nouns. Tension, dualism, ambiguity, transformation, tradition. He prefers the noun that names a condition to the verb that shows an act, which gives the prose its weight and its slowness both.
The build is accumulative. He is a lumper, not a splitter. He piles instance on instance until the reader feels the whole culture pressing down. One book runs from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, from the origins of Independence Day to the Vietnam memorial, from the Daughters of the American Revolution to immigrant associations, and another sets The Simpsons beside jigsaw puzzles, Andy Warhol, and the Book-of-the-Month Club, with theorists like Raymond Williams (1921-1988) and Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) supplying the frame. A reader called one of the books an Encyclopedia Americana in narrative form, which is praise and warning at once.
The wit runs underneath rather than on top, dry and allusive. The New York Times found the style idiosyncratic and laced with wit. He loves the borrowed phrase, and the titles are where the bookish, playful, collecting side of him shows plainest. A Machine That Would Go of Itself lifts a line from James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) on the framers’ hope for a self-running Constitution. Mystic Chords of Memory takes the plea from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Selvages and Biases puns on the weave of cloth. In the Past Lane puns on the fast one. He collects phrases the way he collects examples.
The method carries a cost, the one every synthesizer pays. The prose is dense, and a reviewer warned that the uninitiated reader might find it hard going, the argument at times more theoretical than the examples require. The catalog can swallow the claim. When every page offers ten instances, the thesis hides under its own evidence, and the antithesis, used on every other page, settles into a tic. The same reach that makes him authoritative makes him long.
The speaking manner matched the page. His lectures filled large rooms, and students remembered the breadth, the wit, and the knack for tying together things that seemed to share nothing. That is the same mind, the one that sets the opera broadcast next to the theme park and the gossip column next to the poem. He connects. The pleasure of reading him and of hearing him is the pleasure of watching a man who has read everything find the thread from one odd corner of American life to another.
1. What coalition does he depend on for status and income.
The money comes from a chain of institutions. The Cornell salary and the named chair. The trade and university presses, Knopf above all, that paid for the synthetic books. The fellowship apparatus, Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the learned societies, that bought him the years to write them. The lecture circuit, two hundred and forty invitations across a career, each with a fee and a flattering introduction. The status comes from a narrower body: the prize juries that gave him the Pulitzer and the Parkman and the Adams, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, the major journals, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the working network of elite-university historians whose regard he needed and returned. A second base sat in the public-history and local-history world, the American Association for State and Local History and the circle his wife helped lead, which later put his name on a prize. The deepest part is easy to miss. He depended on the guild agreeing that memory, commemoration, and popular taste were serious history, because that agreement was the ground his whole career stood on. He helped assemble the coalition that then paid and honored him.
2. Who does he risk angering if he speaks plainly.
His own guild, first. If he said that the academic study of memory is itself a usable past, that the professor selects and arranges the national story to serve the professoriate exactly as the amateur does to serve the town, he would knock out the floor under his own authority. The public-history and heritage world, second. If he called the historic village a theme park and the patriotic society a memory club and the founding documents a set of instruments, he would lose the affectionate access that let him study them and would insult the public that funds and visits them. The two culture-war camps, third. When the Smithsonian fight and the national history standards turned hot in the nineties, a plain verdict for either side would have cost him the civil, centrist seat that let him belong to the top-down elders and the bottom-up insurgents at once. His position required him not to choose, and not choosing in public is its own discipline.
3. Who benefits if his framing wins.
The professionals collect first. If memory and commemoration and popular culture are legitimate history, the field swells, the chairs multiply, the dissertations and journals and the new subfield arrive, and the men who certified the expansion become the certified experts on a domain the public cares about. Kammen benefits most of all, as founder and as the name in the footnote that admits a newcomer. The museums and archives and historical societies benefit, because his framing rules their work serious and fundable. The constructivist claim, that tradition is invented and the past is made, benefits whoever wants to revise the inherited national story, which in his decades meant the challengers to the old consensus. And the liberal academy keeps its seat as the disinterested referee who sees all memories as data and stands above the partisans who hold them. The losers are the people for whom the past is received and not up for revision, the traditionalist and the believer, who hear in invention of tradition a solvent poured on the thing that binds them.
4. What truths would cost him his position.
That his own objectivity is a professional convention with interests behind it, not a view from nowhere, and that the craft-trained distance he trusted is the guild’s house style rather than a window onto the real. That ruling memory and popular culture into history enlarged his guild’s domain and his own income as much as it found anything true. That history belongs to the public is a line that keeps the gate while seeming to open it, since the professionals cede no actual authority. That the border his world patrols between disciplined history and self-serving heritage, the line David Lowenthal drew so firmly, is partly a status fence, and that academic history is heritage with credentials. And the largest one, the cost of a verdict. If he said the nation’s binding myths are basically true and worth keeping, he would have stood with the conservatives and lost rank in a liberal academy. If he said they are instruments of power, he would have lost the public-history world and the centrist seat. So he held the two readings in suspension, called the suspension paradox, and made a career of the refusal to land. The paradox was real in the country. It was also the exact shape his coalition required him to keep.
