Minor Matters
I was accepted into the Master of Arts in History program at Salem
State University in January 2013. I had chosen history as a major ten years
earlier as an undergraduate. At the time, I gave little thought to what I would
do with a history degree. I was interested in fascism, socialism, communism,
and American foreign policy, and so I chose a field where I could study those
topics. To render my degree of as dubious value as possible, I minored in
political science. By the time I entered the master’s program, such minor
matters as how I intend to earn a living with a history degree had finally
entered my consciousness. I panicked.
There are two things that worried me about teaching history. The
first is that there is a glut of history teachers. I was recently one of four
hundred applicants for a teaching position, not uncommon.
The second thing that upset me was my assessment of the usefulness
of history. I began studying history because I found it pleasurable, but now I
had to contemplate its usefulness to others, and I wasn’t very impressed. I
looked into becoming a math or science teacher, but the history master’s was
already within my grasp. I drifted forward into the program, resigning myself
to being one of a large pool of people with an unmarketable skillset and body
of knowledge.
The Use-Value of
History
I contemplated the commonplace rationalizations of subjecting
students to the study of history, but clichés about responsible citizenship and
learning from the past all rang hollow, hardening my disillusionment with the
field.
Here’s an example. History promotes critical thinking and fosters
good reading and writing skills. But so what? Take a creative writing class.
What discipline can’t check off those boxes? Math doesn’t foster critical
thinking skills? English doesn’t foster reading and writing skills? Phew, thank
god I didn’t study medicine—wouldn’t want to be without critical thinking
skills!
I wasn’t panicked anymore, I was mad. The entire field began to
appear entirely useless. Most of us intend
to earn a living off of wealth extracted from citizens via state coercion or by
teaching required survey courses to undergraduates who seem to invariably see
such classes as a waste of time irrelevant to their majors.
Were they right?
Were they right?
Throwing out the
Bathwater
I thought critically—I’m supposed to at least be good at that,
right?—about what history is and what it should be. My focus heightened by the
caffeine I failed to recognize would be in a recipe I whipped up for some Paleo
chocolate-covered strawberries, I dedicated a weekend to fleshing out a redefinition
of the field of history and its relationship to society. The culmination of my
weekend was an outline of an alternative to the Massachusetts Curriculum
Framework for Social Studies. I entitled the document A Contextualized Current
Events Curriculum.
It’s bold. It sheds everything about the field that I’ve grown
impatient with, especially it’s preoccupation with political history. Below are
some of the principles I designed the curriculum around.
Principles of a
Contextualized Current Events Curriculum
History is change
over time. The historian analyzes changes over time. These changes exist prior
to being recorded by the historian and regardless of whether or not they are
recorded by the historian.
All phenomena have
history. Math has a history. Language has a history. The Earth has a
history. The solar system has a history. Space, time, and gravity have
histories.
History begins
13.7 billion years ago. Stratigraphy, carbon-14 dating, ice core
samples, population genetics—the events of the past are recorded in countless
scripts not fashioned by the hand of man.
The objective of
the historian is to understand the present. Information that does not contribute
to understanding the world we live in is trivia.
History courses
should introduce students to a broad spectrum of human endeavors. Few of our
students are going to pursue careers as pharaohs, knights, privateers, presidents, or leaders of reform movements. They
are going to be social workers, city-planners, civil servants; bankers,
entrepreneurs, managers; they are going to coordinate disaster relief; they are
going to monitor fault lines to help predict earthquakes; they are going to be
lab technicians, helping to develop cures and treatments for cancer,
Alzheimer’s, AIDS; they are going to be nutritionists, nurses, physical
therapists; they are going to be engineers, masons, mechanics—it is the history
of these activities that matters to the lives of our students.
History classes
should prepare students to make wise personal choices. Few students will
ever be in a position to repeat the mistakes of Neville Chamberlain; all of
them will have the opportunity to abuse alcohol. Yet, though there is a rich
body of scholarship on the history of humanity’s relationship to alcohol, to
incorporate such material into the curriculum of a history course seems
eccentric.
Why?
History is always
multidisciplinary. Because all phenomena experience change over time, the field of
history encompasses all phenomena, but these same phenomena can be studied from
different vantage points. Because of this, the historian is always studying
phenomena that are also within the purview of other fields—politics or
economics, for instance.
Historians should
journey far beyond biography and politics. What we think of as history is
actually political history—wars, revolutions, reform movements. The formulation
of narratives of the past that most effectively bestow meaning and context to
the present requires that historians branch out well beyond the confines of
politics.
History courses
should be organized topically. Organizing courses topically would allow
teachers to provide context to, and bestow meaning upon, the present endeavors
of human beings. Such a course might be broken up into units on topics such
as agriculture, science, mathematics, medicine, architecture, diet, the rearing
of children, substance abuse. Rather than treating such topics as digressions,
it is political history that should be addressed as a digression from narratives
of these more relevant topics.
Concluding Bluster
Some history majors reading this (and lots of history professors!)
are likely to vehemently reject it on myriad fronts. “I’m a history teacher,
not a life coach,” they’ll say. “History is the narrative we construct of the
past, not the past itself,” they’ll insist. “I can’t calculate a tip in my head,
never mind teach the history of mathematics!” they’ll confide in private.
Some people are going to be enthused, though. Some people will
recognize that this is in fact a more intuitive understanding of history. Can
the universe not have a history because stars and planets do not compose
journals? Is Julius Caesar more important than Michael Faraday? Is
understanding the past more important than understanding the present?
The best historians have long abandoned a preoccupation with
political events. Guns, Germs, and Steel is
among the most celebrated histories written in recent decades—deservedly so—and
it’s written by a geographer utilizing an extremely broad spectrum of sources.
Alfred Crosby’s Children of the Sun narrates
the history of our extraction of energy from the environment from the evolution
of life to the domestication of fire to the fossil fuel era, concluding with a
discussion of nuclear fission and fusion and the science of global warming.
John Reader, in Africa: A Biography of
the Continent, explores geology, linguistics, and anthropology—and
many other disciplines. David Christian is currently launching a Big History curriculum.
I welcome feedback from anyone—historians, students, Joe Six Pack. My
hope is that this essay and the forthcoming document will
encourage a productive debate about the relationship of the field of history to
society without offending all of my instructors and getting me ejected from the
graduate program. I can be emailed at benford7@gmail.com.
(Cocoa has caffeine in it, fyi.)
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