The Perfect Discipline

My life changed forever in an undergraduate U.S. History class.

My professor, the late Irving Katz, had interrupted his lecture to address the issue of a late student arrival.  My classmate had come in about 10 minutes late, due to her work at the Indiana Daily Student (the IU-Bloomington campus newspaper).  Her arrival had disrupted the class because the only seat available in the small 40 or so seat room was her usual one, about 3 chairs into a row.  Prof. Katz asked her why she was late, and she told him that she had lost track of time while working on the next edition.  He stopped her and asked a follow up, why was she wasting her time seeking a journalism degree when History was the perfect discipline.  Not only, he said, does it inform us of the past, make sense of our present, and shape our future, but it also is the only thing a person can ever study that is the foundation for every other discipline.  Because, he noted, everything and everyone has a history -- and no other academic area, from Accounting to Zoology could make such a claim.  It was, at that moment, that I decided I didn't want to go to law school anymore.  I wanted to go to graduate school and become a professional historian.

I share that story or some variation, with every new class that I teach.  And I believe it today just as strongly as I did when Prof. Katz first said it.  I was thinking about that today, not because we are at the start of a semester (thankfully, Spring Break -- if not spring itself-- is nearly upon us), but rather because as events have unfolded this week, both near and far, I hope my students have taken that very lesson as their own.

Like Prof. Katz, I am an Americanist by training.  But, because I'm an Americanist, I also know a few things about European History as well (from Colonization to the Present, you really can't understand American History if you also don't understand at least the basics about what is going on in Europe).  And maybe that's why I was not shocked to read this morning that Russia is essentially carving out the Crimea (at the very least) from the Ukraine.  If anyone is shocked by this, then they simply are ignorant of History (and if they happen to be policymakers, so much the worse for us all).  Any pretense that Russia, is a functioning democracy (and that Democratic State Theory -- which was once all the rage amongst Political Scientists, and that states that democracies don't make war on other democracies) should have been banished long ago.  No, Russia is an empire.  And it is behaving just like an empire (indeed, just like the Soviet Union was an empire, and Tsarist Russia was an empire).  Perhaps our problem is that we don't know how to deal with empires anymore.  And if that is the case, it is because those who lead have neglected the lessons of History.

I hold out hope that this won't be the case forever, or at least not with my students (and I hope others at other institutions are learning this lesson as well).  Earlier this week, Laura Bush came to the campus of Butler University and spoke as part of a lecture series.  Part of her remarks, which were filled with humor and family stories, was geared towards one of her passions:  promoting literacy.  As the Butler Collegian noted, and as my email inbox can attest, part of her remarks centered on Uncle Tom's Cabin and how one book helped change the course of American History.  As someone who teaches an entire course dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe's book and the coming of the Civil War (complete with discussion of if Stowe "got it right" via the reading of slave narratives -- something that is quite "cool" right now thanks to the Oscar nominated "12 Years a Slave"), it was nice to hear another voice reminding students of the power that can be found in both words and in the past.  It was equally gratifying to read those emails from students, who talked about how awesome it was to the former First Lady talk so passionately about a topic they knew something about because they had studied it.

As George Santayana noted, in words that were on the wall of my high school history teacher, "those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it."  If we don't study the past, there is little hope for us moving forward.  If we reject the perfect discipline, then when evil empires rise, whether to conquer or enslave, we'll be powerless to stop them.