As the semester winds down, particularly the one before summer, professors and students anticipate the end with relief and a sense of gratitude. I taught my last class Thursday evening. It was the first time I had taught a late evening class, not the time slot that best fits my natural rhythms. I blew out of there at about 10 p.m. The day had been unseasonably hot and it was still warm. I rolled down the windows, cranked the music, and drove home. School’s out for the summer!
Not quite – there’s that small matter of all those papers to grade. I sat down today with a set of short essays that I had asked my students in my graduate seminar on Advanced Historiography to write, reflecting upon the kind of historian they were or hoped to become. I had assigned a similar exercise at the beginning of the course and was curious to see what, if anything, had changed. As I read these personal reflections, I found myself genuinely touched, amused, and moved by turns.
Having taught theory for some time to both undergraduate and graduate students of history, I know that it often produces a crisis of confidence. After a few weeks in my class, one student began to seriously consider giving up the study of history altogether. She was reminded, however, of childhood incidents that convinced her she was a born historian: a fascination with graveyards, genealogy, King Tut, the Titanic, the Holocaust, the history of the saints. She persevered despite my class, not because of it. Another student compared her trajectory through the course to the process of grieving: denial (surely I am intelligent enough to grasp this, right?); anger (how could these theorists expect me to understand their jargon – “long durée, thick description, structure, superstructure, etc. – I was drowning in a sea of words”); and finally, grudging acceptance as thoughts like “what would Marx say about this?” began to creep unwittingly into her brain. One more ruefully promised to give Hegel, Kant and Marx, “another visit once I’ve recovered from them.”
So was I engaging in a form of inhumane historical boot camp? Putting them through hell in the form of never-ending impenetrable prose and expecting them to be grateful for it at the end? Certainly, that was not my intent. However, I did notice early on the development of the course a kind of esprit de corps and camaraderie derived, perhaps, through a sense of shared suffering. Hmm, maybe I could pitch this as a reality show? “Survivor: Historiography,” anyone? Who will get voted off this week? I know, me; then everybody could go home and read something else.
Not quite. For some students, there was no crisis of confidence at all. One student began his semester as a self-defined “conservative, religious, organized, military, teaching historian” and remained so, with the caveat that he now has a better understanding of why that is so. Another confidently rejected nearly every model discussed in the class. In an essay entitled “ I am not that name,” echoing the title of a book I had assigned, she defined herself as an historian by what she was not: “I am not a universalist, an objectivist, an academic, an archivist, and most of all, I am not a theorist!” She concluded, “ I am part of the great loss of center to which Novick so disparagingly referred. I know as well, I have little or no interest in writing history just for other historians. And I don’t put much stock in false binaries.”
Other students found the study of theory empowering. Said one: “I am an agent… I am part of the construction, deconstruction and production of knowledge.” She also saw theory as a window into the psyche; rather poetically writing: “ I am but a body imprisoned by the constructions of my soul…. The insights of these scholars help me begin to take bricks out of my invisible prison, allowing for a window to a more conscious reality. Yet the walls still stand, and I remain enclosed…. Deconstructing the prison of my Foucauldian soul allows me to better see myself as well as the world around me.”
In a quieter and more humorous vein, another student admitted to some initial apprehensions, having been told previously by another professor that he was “a content person rather than a theory person.” He asked: “Would I learn that I was in fact a crusty, scaly antiquarian, who was better suited to do history in an earlier century? Would I have to read an occasional book by Robert Utley to maintain my intellectual hygiene in the anticipated swarm of obfuscatory theoretical pontifications by bald French philosophers? I discovered the answer to both of these questions is a singular, resounding ‘no’!” And finally, one student who first described himself as an “historical mutt,” asked suggestively, if inconclusively, “ is it possible to teach a new dog old tricks?”
They also mused on the age-old question, “what is history?” Art with rules? A discipline that “prompts and undergirds that which is inhumane”? An antiquated form of storytelling that has been disrupted by the “elitist wankfest” of deconstructionism? Had deconstruction enfeebled the body of history: “inconsistent and scattered, flailing about without a backbone… a bunch of randomly piled vertebrae trying to survive?”
In the end, however, nobody lost faith in the power of the historical narrative. Most expressed an unwillingness to write only for ourselves, “that by writing to an exclusively academic audience we run the risk of turning our field, which is populist and democratic in nature into a bastion of elitism.” There was a strong preference for simplicity of language and clear and accessible prose. And for those that teach children for a living, an awareness of historiography would inform their teaching in the future. One teacher asked if state standards require her to teach on 19th century industrialization to high school students and has only one week to do it: “what do I emphasize? Do I teach about the robber barons and other great men? Do I teach about the horrors of child labor using the photographs of Lewis Hine? Whatever I decide, it needs to be a purposeful decision with some idea of historiography inherent in my choice.”
Unexpectedly, these short meditations provided for me a vivid composite portrait of a diverse group of people who spent sixteen weeks dealing with challenging intellectual material in each other’s company every Thursday night in the spring semester of 2009. So I have taken the liberty of preserving this experience into a composite historical snapshot, a micro-history if you will. I felt that this class was memorable enough to commemorate in some sort of durable form. See, it really happened! Depending on your preference, call it a “fact” or a “linguistic trace.”
I found myself humbled as I read these short meditations. Aside from including some mighty fine and highly personal writing, they also suggested that struggling with this material changed the way that the class (myself included) thought about history and about themselves. No teacher can expect more than that. To conclude: one student reflected “ I sometimes wondered why my professor chose to torture us.” She added, “my mantra throughout this class was the professor’s promise to us on the first night of class that we would feel smarter after taking this class. She was right.”
What can I say?
Thank you all.
