tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post6765244169336367180..comments2024-03-28T02:46:03.227-04:00Comments on The Historical Society: What is it Good for?Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-4837871939120300792010-05-06T18:09:31.282-04:002010-05-06T18:09:31.282-04:00Bland: Your description of the skills history teac...Bland: Your description of the skills history teaches, I think, is right on the mark. It's certainly no small feat also to get students and the public to understand change over time.Randallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-4520326813214897272010-05-06T14:18:54.902-04:002010-05-06T14:18:54.902-04:00It's always a problem for the humanities when ...It's always a problem for the humanities when educators start assessing fields' cost-benefit ratios and the like. Though it's perhaps worth pointing out that the financial districts of any good-sized city are usually teeming with former history majors. My own dreadful experiences as a grad student steered me away from a career in teaching, but I still sometimes think about ways I could have better stressed the usefulness of historical study. To me it seems to boil down to a set of intellectual skills, which, though not unique to history, are critical to its study: writing/rhetoric, empathy (because of the exposure to those who are culturally, temporally, and/or socially alien), and the ability to connect seemingly disparate events and/or developments through a chain of cause and effect. Those are skills that one could deploy for any number of pursuits. Yet discussions of history as an educational field seldom touch on them, instead ceding ground to those who see in history a recitation of "one damn thing after another," the more obscure or distant, the more useless.Bland Whitleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15802989746004923085noreply@blogger.com