Category Archives: doing history

Change Happens

There are two endings to the story of Don Quixote. [Spoilers for a 400 year-old book and 60 year-old musical]

In both versions, Don Quixote is a country gentleman, Alonso Quijano, who loses his grip on modernity, or reality if you prefer, and lives as if he is part of the age of honorable knights and romances, castles and giants, magic and noble women. He is sometimes humored, sometimes even encouraged, but also beaten and defeated by people of evil intent (or just jobs to do). His sidekick, Sancho Panza, endures a great deal as well in the hopes of promised rewards and status. It is a comedy based on the idea that there are no longer any knights or nobility in the world, but living as if there are produces absurdity and drama.

In both versions, Don Quixote is defeated by his relatives and friends, forced to face reality, abandon his fantasies and identity, and return home for a time before he passes away.

The Man of La Mancha, the musical based on Cervantes’ book and life, ends in a tragic triumph: Don Quixote, having been broken by reality and returned home, is revived by the visit of his squire and lady, ultimately reprising “The Impossible Dream” with them (and the whole rest of the cast), reclaiming his name and declaring that his adventures will continue, and then dying. This was the version I grew up with: the noble, if mad, pursuit of virtue could provide solace for the world, and inspiration. Even the worst of society – the illiterate, the criminal, the poor – could see the value in striving for grace and healing; in fact, perhaps could only see it through the intervention of someone oblivious to the mundane, gross realities of life. [Or not oblivious, perhaps, so much as impervious, a choice, according to the character Cervantes]

Don Quixote, the original novel, ends in a complete defeat for romance and virtue in the modern world: Don Quixote, having been beaten and forced home without being disabused of his fantasies, falls ill and returns to his original identity, ultimately repenting of his adventures, banning his daughter from marrying any man who reads chivalric romances in his will, and dying as Alonso Quijano. There is no dramatic redemption, no constituency of loyal retainers, only a reassertion of modernity, sense, and cold, hard reality.

I’ve been thinking about those two endings lately. I’ve always identified a bit with Don Quixote (as well as Charlie Brown, but that’s a discussion for some other time), seeing myself as something of a dreamer, an idealist who believes in the power of truth, thoughtfulness, the perspective of knowledge and experience, and the value of seeing the world as a collective endeavor. Being an academic, and a historian at that, almost seems like an overdetermined result.

Now I am stepping away from that mission, that quest, that impossible dream: after nearly a lifetime in schools as a student and teacher, I have resigned my position at Pittsburg State effective this summer. The reasons are personal, family-related, and not terribly relevant, but an opportunity arose and we are taking it, though the risks and uncertainties are substantial.

The risks and uncertainties of staying in academia as a historian at a public institution in Kansas are also substantial. I don’t have to rehash the current discourse over generative language tools, the political climate of conservative revanchism, the fiscal collapse of universities, and a public sphere buffeted by algorithms and editorial distortions and attention-seeking. Kansas legislators considered a bill this last session that would have weakened or eliminated the protections of tenure, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t try again; funding has not kept pace with inflation and tuition is vulnerable to fluctuations beyond our control both demographic and political. The state now has a ban on “gender identifying pronouns or gender ideology…on state employee’s email accounts and any other form of communication” which is going to render my student information form illegal, not to mention my Canvas display name. Good thing they never discovered my social media feeds.

I remain convinced that the critical method of history is the most fundamental and powerful tool we have against propaganda and ideology, that a historically informed citizenry is vastly preferable to any alternative, that the truth matters and that we are nowhere close to answering all of the interesting and troubling questions that lie in our narratives, our analyses, and our archives. I have not abandoned the dream of a better, more historically sophisticated and humane world, though I am not at this time convinced that it can be achieved in our institutions of education.

But for all the tilting at windmills I’ve done – assigning whole books, discussion boards, having students write reviews and comprehensive final essays, hoping to break through the myths of samurai and geisha and mandarin and emperors with actual writings and lives, blogging and public writing – I don’t see a chorus of inspired folk around me. I don’t hear my students echoing the lessons I tried to teach in later semesters, or any kind of ripple effect. There are folk teaching history who have those kinds of successes and influence, but I don’t see it myself.

Not that I don’t have some students enthusiastic about history, even some who come back for more than one world history requirement. I feel some qualms, honestly, about the ones who apply for our master’s program in the hopes of a career in education or public history, or as a way-station to a doctorate; I tell myself that things may change by the time they are done, that it may be worth more than just the satisfaction of study and learning.

I don’t know what I’ve left behind or how to judge my work, but it feels more like the book: modernity wins, the sordid, concrete exercise of power and money, while virtue and striving are left behind. I said to my colleagues,

My thanks to you all for a productive and friendly environment, and support in our times of difficulty, as we have endeavored to make the world a better, or at least more comprehensible, place for our students and communities.

I say the same to my online communities, just as much my colleagues in this collective exercise that blends the faculty lounge with the public square, where we can commiserate as well as educate, or at least correct. I’m not really going away, but I’m going to have to adjust to being out of the cycle of semesters and academic years, to having no contemporary experience to share, to having no educational agenda in my consideration of new scholarship or technologies. I’m going to need a new schtick when my jokes don’t land on social media, since “This is why I don’t tell jokes in class” will not be true anymore.

Change happens because history is people.

Role Reversal

Something I wrote for an online Chinese History class:

There’s a kind of reversal exercise that is getting more common: it’s worth thinking about. What would American history and society look like if it were written the way that we write histories of other cultures? What would the history of the Civil War look like if we talked about it in terms of tribalism, religious sects, honor culture, caste systems, and magical thinking? What would an analysis of US history that took Puritanism or Methodism as critically as Chinese histories take Confucianism and Daoism? Remember: Harvard and Yale were seminaries until the 19th century; we still haven’t had a non-Christian president, and we added “In God We Trust” to the currency and “Under God” to the pledge in the mid-20th century. What if, instead of focusing on ‘pioneers’ and activists and breakthroughs towards a more perfect union, we focused on conservative and subversive forces and how each crisis revealed deep-rooted problems and how we failed to actually solve them most of the time?

Teaching the US Declaration of Independence in a World History context

Philly 2012 - Congress Hall - House DeskJoseph Adelman has a nice post on how he teaches the US Declaration of Independence in his early US survey — he reads it aloud; with the class standing, as in an 18th century church or town meeting — and I thought I might offer another perspective, since I use the same document in my World Since 1500 course.

For the last few iterations of the course, I’ve had students’ primary source readings focus on the rising tradition of rights in Western, then World, civilization.  So I have them read the US Declaration as part of a group, along with the English Bill Of Rights and the French Declaration Of Rights Of Man And Citizen. (Later in the semester, they read the UN’s Declaration of Universal Human Rights).  This is in the context of a discussion of revolutionary change, following one on the Western Enlightenment.

When we talk about the Declaration, it serves as focal evidence for talking about the American Revolution, and I talk about historiography. (I talk about historiography a lot in World History, as it turns out, but my favorite bits are this one on the US Revolution and the Fall of Rome, where the historiography just layers and layers….) There are many ways to see the US Revolution — I’m increasingly fond of the “creole” generational theory, myself, as it helps situate it in the context of the Latin American revolutions, and connects it to post-colonialism, a little — and I point out that there’s evidence for most of them right in the text of the Declaration itself.

In particular, I raise the question of just how revolutionary the American Revolution was. The famous preamble is a classic statement of Enlightenment principles about humanity and government, which suggests the power of new ideas and real change. The body of the document, though, lists grievances based, in large part, on the earlier English Bill of Rights, and the structure of the whole Declaration follows closely on that example, which suggests less revolutionary aims and more an attempt to conserve rights already in existence against changing circumstances. And, of course, I have to talk about the Seven Years’ War, the tax and mercantilist policies which were driving much of the tension between the colonies and the Crown, and the extent to which many of Founding Fathers were involved in import and export related businesses.

Philly 2012 - Liberty Hall - Liberty Bell - FrontI point out that the “all men” of the Declaration was limited in effect, and that the attempt to preserve the self-governance of the colonies against royal interference largely succeeded in the short term, as the states continued to govern themselves and only slowly to create coordinated or national policies. In this it was also conservative, rather than liberalizing. But the Constitution, when it came to be, embodied Montesquieu’s tripartite scheme, which is clearly foreshadowed in the complaints of the Declaration, and maintained an elected executive and legislature, a political experiment of the most ambitious sort. Well, ambitious if you discount the even more radical political experiments of the French, which began at that very moment, and the example of which helped to solidify some of the more conservative elements of American leadership.

I have little patience for those who would fetishize the Founding Fathers and the Constitution as written, turn them into an icon of secular faith in American Exceptionalism. But I’m always impressed, as I work through this material, with the way in which the intellectual and political resources of the moment were marshalled into the Declaration, and the tensions of the moment were balanced into an effective and productive evolving Constitutional system. But clearly my presentation cuts against the grain of American exceptionalism: the American Revolution shows clear evidence of Enlightenment thought, English civic tradition, post-colonial pride, economic competition, and a desire for social stability which meant that very little changed in most people’s lives as a result.