"I hate history": Thinking of Ways to Get the Average, History-Hating Student Interested in the Study of the Past

Randall Stephens

I'm gearing up to teach a large West in the World since 1500, civ-style class. As usual, I know there will be dozens of students enrolled who care not a fig for history and think historical knowledge is, at best, useless trivia. "I'm a business major. Why do I need to know all this?" My work is cut out for me, as it is for other professors who will be teaching similar gen-ed classes in the fall.

I like to start off course like this with a general "Why study history" lecture. We study the past to know who we are and to know how history still shapes the present, I tell them. History is also our collective memory. Just as we think it is not best for a person to have amnesia, we also think it is best for a society to have a collective memory. I also usually touch on the chief contributions historians have made to our understanding of what it means to be human. And, I spend some time looking at the very different views various historians have concerning the same events.

This year, though, I was thinking about doing something a little different. I plan to pose some general questions/head-scratchers that might get them thinking historically about why things are the way they are and why history matters. So, for example:

In 1931 the historian Carl Becker said: "If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history." Do you have a family history? Do things that happened in your family in the past still shape how you interact with your mother, father, sister, brother, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles?

Show the students a map of the world. Ask: Why is it that the northern hemisphere has tended to contain the wealthiest countries in the world? What light might history shed on that development? Explain Jared Diamond's thesis.

Read them a mid-19th century law on the status of women as dependents. Ask: How do we got from that point A to point B today?

Draw a long timeline, spanning back 200,000 years, the starting point of modern humans. Ask: Why it is that only relatively recently--roughly 5,000 years ago--humans began to record their history?

The historian Mary Beard says that most people today would find the "brutality toward other human beings" in the ancient world to be abhorrent. Throughout most of human history slavery and rigid social hierarchies were taken for granted. Ask: Why do modern western societies value equality and humanitarianism?

Show students some maps from the early modern era and some from the modern era. Ask: What accounts for the fundamental differences in how cartographers drew these maps? What might history tell us about the changing perceptions those in the West and those in the East had of the world?

Quote Johann Gottfried Herder: "History is geography." Ask: Is history shaped or controlled more by geography than any other force? Why or why not?

Does history have a direction? Are we heading "somewhere"? Is society getting better? Is society getting worse? How could we know one way or the other?

Needless to say . . . I'm still thinking through these.

Liberal Arts, Humanities Roundup

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The following appeared in recent days. Just when you thought there could not be any more essays or forums on the decline in liberal arts education of the crisis of the humanities. . .

Nancy Cook, "The Death of Liberal Arts," Newsweek, April 5, 2010
. . . . But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up. For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.>>>

Richard A. Greenwald, "Graduate Education in the Humanities Faces a Crisis. Let's Not Waste It," Chronicle Review, April 4, 2010.
I was recently reading Dr. Seuss to my 2-year-old daughter, when, bored of The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax, I picked up a lesser book from the Seussian canon: I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew. To my surprise, the plot of that little-known children's book reminded me a great deal of the current crisis of American higher education.>>>

"Graduate Humanities Education: What Should Be Done?" Chronicle Review, April 4, 2010.
Does graduate education in the humanities need reform? By nearly all indications, the answer is yes. The job picture is grim. The Modern Language Association is projecting a 25-percent drop in language-and-literature job ads for the 2009-10 academic year, while the American Historical Association announced that last year's listings were the lowest in a decade.>>>

Simon Jenkins, "Scientists may gloat, but an assault is under way against the arts" the Guardian, March 25, 2010.
Which is more important, science or the humanities? The right answer is not: what do you mean by important? The right answer is a question: Who is doing the asking?>>>

Elizabeth Toohey, "The Marketplace of Ideas: What’s wrong with the higher education system in the US and how can we fix it?" Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2010.
The structure of the American university has long been a subject of contention, and now is no exception, especially given the current economic climate. Last year, Mark Taylor called for an end to tenure and traditional disciplines in The New York Times op-ed, “End of the University as We Know It,” and William Pannapacker’s column, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” was among the most viewed links on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website.>>>

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part I: Why Study History?

Our first post comes from Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at UMass, Amherst. Richardson is the author of a number of books on Reconstruction, the West, and 19th-century America. Her latest book, Innocence Lost: American Politics and the Road to Wounded Knee, will be published by Basic Books in 2009. Richardson is also director of the History Institute at UMass, which provides in-service training for K-12 teachers in Western Massachusetts through its weekday Conversations Series, day-long workshops, and summer seminars.

Here, Richardson offers up her thoughts on the study and teaching of history. This is the first installment of "Richardson's Rules of Order," a handbook for students. "I make no claims to represent how other scholars approach classroom learning," she says, "although some of what you find here may be of use in other courses."

"Richardson's Rules of Order, Part I: Why Study History?"
Heather Cox Richardson

History is the study of how and why things happen. What creates change in human society? What stops it? Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail?

These larger questions break down into smaller (but still big!) ones: Do great leaders create change, or do they follow popular trends? Is it economic prosperity that permits experimentation with new kinds of government? Do elites control society, or is it the less visible masses that move a nation one direction or another? How does the media affect the way we perceive others? Does someone’s gender change the way s/he sees the world? Are people motivated by power? By money? By religion? By a sense of fairness? By fear? How do societies come to embrace discrimination? What makes them break down discriminatory barriers?

Every single person needs to be able to think critically about these issues and the many, many others like them. You need to know how YOU think the world works. Your answers will be different than anyone else’s, since you have unique experiences that color the way you think about things, but you must be able to analyze your world intelligently in order to participate responsibly in society. When you pick a career, you’re making a statement about how you think society works. When you buy a car, when you send your kid to a certain preschool, when you buy a tube of toothpaste, when you volunteer your time for a charity… you’re making a statement about how you think society works. And when you vote, you make a very strong statement about how you think society works.

When you study history, you’re not just studying the history of, for example, colonial America. You’ll learn a great deal about the specifics of colonial America in such a class, of course, but you’ll also learn about the role of economics in the establishment of human societies and about how class and racial divisions can either weaken the stability of a government or be used to shore it up. While it’s unlikely that your boss in some high tech company is going to fire you if you can’t rattle off the events that led to the establishment of racial slavery in the American colonial Chesapeake, it’s extremely likely that, during your lifetime, you will see the members of some group here or elsewhere whipping up racial or ethnic fears in order to solidify their power. In that event, you must be able to weigh what you hear and see, deciding for yourself if those attacks are legitimate or are propaganda to preserve the interests of a certain segment of society. Why? Because your reaction to such a situation will help to determine its outcome, and it is highly unlikely that simply accepting everything you hear will lead to a good result. Learning to think through societal issues is critical to the establishment of a just society, and it is what history will teach you.

Besides, we have all the good stories.