I'd like to share my understanding of what is different about Up from History. As I see it, Norrell responds to two major problems with historians' treatment of Booker T. Washington.

One is the fact that historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Louis Harlan championed protest as the way to deal with mistreatment of African-Americans. Their "presentism" (viewing the past through the lens of their times) made Booker T. Washington's efforts to accommodate Southern whites look like a weak and losing strategy, even though it may have been the only one that could have enabled an institution like Tuskegee to survive.

The second and related flaw is that historians interpreted Washington's strategy not merely as unwise but also as morally wrong, even cowardly--and thus Washington himself as morally lacking. He was, said Harlan curtly, "schooled in slavery, trained to moderation, accustomed to compromise." Harlan also described Washington as a "feral, power-hungry" man, head of the "octopus-like Tuskegee Machine," a man of "multiple personalities" and "no quintessence. At the center of his intellectual maze was a hall of mirrors...."

To Norrell, however, the evidence about Washington's life is consistent with quite a different character--that of an upright man committed to doing what he could to make former slaves a secure and successful part of American society in the South. Norrell believes that the historians overlooked the viciousness of the environment in which Washington lived.

It is strange that Woodward and Harlan should take so little account of the dangers that blacks risked in the South, but that seems to be the case--just as W.E.B. Du Bois and other detractors challenged Washington's strategy from the comfortable distance of a northern city. The South was anything but comfortable for blacks. There were 200 lynchings per year--Norrell describes the gruesome details of one--and race riots in Atlanta and Wilmington (that is, riots in which blacks were the victims). Local whites held the power; many whites fiercely resisted any education of blacks; the federal government made clear it was not going to step in; and humiliating stereotypes filled the press of the day. Yet in this hostile atmosphere, Booker T. Washington was able to provide education--and hope--to American blacks. Surely there is an element of heroism there.