Humanizing History

Steven Cromack

When I teach, I deliberately make an effort to connect big history to the personal lives of my students. At the heart of my world history curriculum are three main ideas:

Walker Evans' photo, "In front of 310 East
Sixty-first Street," 1938. Courtesy
of the Library of Congress.

1. How each individual sees the world matters.
2. Reality is a construction based on an individual’s worldview.
3. It is difficult to reconcile an individual’s interests with those of a society.

It is my hope that as we examine history with these ideas in mind, students can begin to think about their existence on a deeper level; that as they go about their daily lives, they have the skills they need to grapple and engage with their world; and that they will learn to face not only their own beliefs and sense of morality, but also those of others. In immersing oneself in the world, the individual turns information into meaningful enlightenment. For, as John Dewey once wrote, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” 

Reeling in the Years: The Up Series

Randall Stephens

It's been seven years. That means it's time for another installment of the perennial favorite UP Series, which has followed the lives of over a dozen English men and women since they were 7. (The latest is running on PBS this month.) Granada Television first aired the program in 1964.  Other updates came in 1970, 1977, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2005, 2012.  The brainchild of Michael Apted, the series has tracked the participants hopes, fears, interests, successes, failures, and more. It ranks as one of the best, most original documentaries of the 20th century.

Fifty years ago Apted hoped to shine light on the deep class divisions in England and to see how that would shape the lives of these individuals as the grew into adulthood.

Here's what Rebecca Mead writes about it at the New Yorker blog (January 9, 2013):

The series began with a political agenda. Taking the Jesuit maxim “Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” it suggested that the prospects of the participants were determined by the class into which they were born. To a certain extent, this turned out to be true, particularly for those participants belonging to the social and educational élite. John, the prep-school boy, became a barrister, while his classmate Andrew became a solicitor. . . Less predictable were the fates of the working-class and middle-class characters.