"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" Historians Rethink Teaching History at the University Level

Randall Stephens

The History Department at the University of Indiana is reexamining how history is taught/modeled in the classroom. According to a piece in the Chronicle (“A Teaching Experiment Shows Students How to Grasp Big Concepts,” 15 November 2009): “All too often, undergraduate history students make a hash of essay questions . . . They fill their blue books with disconnected strings of names and dates. Or they sketch a plausible argument but leave out supporting evidence.” Do history professor’s expect too much of students who search in vain for a thesis? Does the average student in a history class have much of any understanding of change over time, contingency, or how to read a primary source document?

“Several years ago,” writes David Glenn, “a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.” Glenn goes on to explain some of the interesting assignments and exercises history students at IU are doing in and outside of the classroom.

I buy it. And I hope to implement some of the techniques pioneered by the IU faculty.

Mea Culpa

Lisa Clark Diller

While attending the North American Conference on British Studies last weekend, I was pretty sure I heard one of the most unexpected phrases to be uttered in such settings: “I was wrong about that.” In this case, the historian in question appeared to be attempting to end a long-term feud regarding the importance of religion in the Glorious Revolution. He explained that he had changed his mind about his characterization of the events of 1688/9 as a continuation of the Protestant Reformation.

This got me thinking: To what extent do we make it possible for historians to say they were wrong? Part of the pain of publishing is setting ideas down in print with something one might later change one’s mind about. We all know that with more research we might have to revise our ideas. But sometimes we build our reputations by making very strong claims—even creating a binary within the field, which allows scholars to join one “side” or another. Young scholars decide which side of the historiographical debate they want to be part of. These binaries make it especially hard to admit when one has been wrong.

Nuance and carefully hedged assertions don’t sell books or recruit graduate students. They also don’t play as well in the classroom. But they are often more honest. In order to build our standing within our sub-fields, do we unnecessarily go further than we should? And where and how do we admit we are wrong? Later work may demonstrate that an author has changed her mind, but in few places can she admit it in black and white. Is this just part of the temperament of those who become scholars or do the structures of the academy prevent us from undermining the edifices of our academic status?

I found Tony Claydon’s words to be the most interesting part of the NACBS last week. On the “other side” of his earlier position I, of course, welcome him to what I might humbly call the more “enlightened” view of the role of religion in 1688. But I began to think about what it might take to change my own mind in the face of the evidence. My beginning assumptions, the respect for other scholars’ whose work is similar to my own, and my ideological commitments, may often keep me from admitting that my framework for a particular problem is mistaken or slightly distorted.

What does it take to change one’s mind on that scale? How much evidence is required? I’m curious about the experience of readers. Have you had to change your mind regarding the fundamental framework of the problems in your field? Would you have to look at all the primary evidence yourself or would a compelling piece of scholarship push you in another direction? Does the personality or reputation of scholars on either side of a debate affect you at all? What are the most “famous” examples of scholars changing their minds? Do we have space for those of us who are not superstars to admit our mistakes and still be taken seriously as scholars? What should we do in these situations?

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part XI: A Note About Professors

Heather Cox Richardson

Please remember that your professors are human and it’s hard work to stand in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and talk for an hour. In the last decade, students seem more and more to regard us as if we’re behind a screen, and seem to think they can talk, read, sleep, or just stare at us glassy-eyed without it having any effect on our performance. This is a shared enterprise. It’s hard to lecture to an apparently disinterested sea of eyes. If you don’t think a lecture hall is intimidating, take a minute after class some day to stand behind the podium and look at all those seats. Then imagine holding the attention of everyone in those seats for an hour, two days a week. Wouldn’t it be easier if the people there seemed interested? You don’t have to act like you’re watching U2, but do try to make it clear your heart hasn’t actually stopped beating.

Please don’t let the anonymity of a large classroom make you feel like you can use an evaluation form to be vicious. While you can walk away from that form, remember that your teacher is going to live with whatever you say on it for the rest of his or her career. Your bile, spilled on a page, can devastate a junior professor, while even older scholars would rather not have the chair, the members of the personnel committee, and the dean (all of whom read our evaluations), read commentary on our personal attractiveness, our choice in clothing, or on what professions would suit us better. Criticize when it’s appropriate, yes, but do so constructively. It doesn’t hurt to mention things that have gone particularly well, too.

Remember that for many history professors their university jobs dictate that only about a third of time and energy should go into teaching (although it always takes way more time and effort than that!). We have significant responsibilities outside of the classroom. We’re supposed to sit on the committees that keep the university running, as well as to manage national and international scholarly and educational projects. In addition to teaching and what is called “service,” we’re also supposed to maintain a prominent profile as scholars and writers. These three parts of our professional lives mean that we are usually trying to manage three different kinds of schedules, as well as three different kinds of work, all of which take place in widely different locations and settings. If we cannot meet you at a time you think is convenient, it is not because we’re being jerks, but because, for example, we have to be in another city that week to help evaluate a university. We will try to make things convenient for you, but please do remember that we have other professional commitments.

Finally, you might want to Google your professors to see what they do outside the classroom. You will probably see that your school has an extraordinary faculty. You might find that your school has national leaders in nanotechnology and sports medicine; or Pulitzer Prize winners and consultants to the State Department. Go meet these people, talk to them, work with them. When an extraordinarily famous professor agreed to work with a friend of ours on her undergraduate thesis, we were shocked. “How did you get HIM?” we demanded. “I just went and asked,” she answered. “He says no one ever asks him to do anything anymore because he’s too famous, and he misses students.” A professor can’t work with every one who asks, but it’s certainly worth talking to someone whose work you admire.

"Military History: The State of the Field" in Historically Speaking

[The full forum will be available at Project Muse. Subscribe to HS to read more.]

The uncertain status of military history in the academy has been the subject of considerable debate over the last decade. With John J. Miller’s 2006 National Review Online piece, “Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retired,” the debate went public. It surfaced again as part of a broader assessment of the discipline of history in Patricia Cohen’s June 2009 New York Times article, “Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?”

Here several leading historians assess the state of the field of military history. Brian Linn and Dennis Showalter, current and past presidents of the Society for Military History, offer their opinions. Prominent military historians Robert Citino, Victor Davis Hanson, and Roger Spiller respond, followed by brief rejoinders from Linn and Showalter. This forum is funded by a generous grant from the Earhart Foundation.

MILITARY HISTORY: REACHING BEYOND THE TRADITIONAL ACADEMY
Brian McAllister Linn, Historically Speaking (November 2009)

Military historians occupy a distinct position within the historical discipline. Some university faculty, particularly those in history departments, regard them with suspicion. At best they are wannabe generals, at worst warmongers and militarists corrupting the nation’s youth. In contrast, the public and the armed forces turn to military historians for entertainment, for insight, and for explanations of current events. Whereas many academic fields grow ever more specialized and narrow, the interests of military historians are as broad as in the days of Herodotus and Thucydides. Their purview remains the study of war and the institutions that fight it, a definition encompassing everything from a naval air squadron to a Stone Age tribe, from weapons development to national mobilization, and from the individual experience of combat to how societies memorialize their war dead. Marxists believe that history reflects mankind’s relationship to the means of production; military historians believe that it reflects mankind’s relationship to the means of destruction.

Military history defies academic trends in other ways as well. Despite much rhetoric about multidisciplinary approaches, academic history is becoming more exclusionary and inbred. Some historians are so specialized that their writings are all but incomprehensible to another historian, even one who studied that subfield two decades ago. And there are academics who would restrict the title of “historian” to the doctorate-holding faculty. In contrast, military historians are a wide and diverse lot—the more than 2,400 members of the Society for Military History range from graduate students to three-star generals—and some of the field’s most popular and influential authors are not academics at all. This has always been the case, for alongside its own “cuttingedge” and “paradigm-shifting” scholars, military history has also relied on “amateurs” such as Livy, Teddy Roosevelt, and Bruce Catton, as well as on warrior-scholars like Carl von Clausewitz and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Indeed, if today’s readers can tell a Mauser rifle from a javelin, they can readily immerse themselves in two millennia of military writing.

Much of the debate about the current state of military history has focused entirely on the distress of military historians who are faculty or graduate students at universities. Commentators as diverse as Professor John Lynn and the National Review’s John Miller have drawn attention to the perilous state of “the embattled field.” They note that for decades the two most prestigious professional journals essentially embargoed articles in military history (in fairness, recently the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History published review articles and the OAH Magazine of History did a special issue on teaching military history). They argue that universities are not replacing their retiring faculty, and the corollary, that graduate programs at top-rated universities are disappearing. They warn that if universities cease training students in military history, the public, the armed forces, and the nation’s policy makers will have to rely for their critical analysis of defense policy and war on ideologues, social scientists, former officers, and the ubiquitous celebrity historians.

Certainly the state of military history in the ivory tower is cause for concern. But what characterizes a successful historical field? For far too long, academic military historians have judged their specialty by the opinion of their colleagues and their deans, and then publicized their dismal findings. The result has been a widespread perception that the field is in precipitous decline. But is ephemeral and subjective academic prestige going to be our sole criterion for judging the state of military history? Perhaps as the child of an academic I was born cynical, but I often wonder if the average college department is capable of establishing consistent and verifiable indices for excellence. If there were such standards, why have so many departments hired so many faculty whose dissertation topics went from “cutting-edge” to “traditional” in the time it took them to come up for tenure? Why are faculty who “popularize” history, whether to enthusiastic students or the reading public, regarded as lacking in academic rigor? And why is publishing a 400-copy monograph that is favorably reviewed by another specialist in a journal with a circulation of a few hundred other specialists seen as the apex of scholarly achievement? I could go on, but the academic readers already know why so many murder mysteries, dramas of dysfunctionality, and vicious satires are set on campus, while the rest of you still would not believe what passes for normal in most departments. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of picking the battlefield, so why should military historians not heed their illustrious ancestors and look outside of the narrow confines of college departments to judge the state of the field? . . .

>>> The rest of the forum will be posted at Project Muse and available in print.