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The Pleasures of Teaching History1
James Axtell
College of William and Mary
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IN LIGHT OF MOST of the national news about the state of both history
and teaching, my choice of topic might seem perverse as well as
quixotic. For neither teaching in general nor history teaching in
particular stands in especially good odor with the major media,
state and national assessors, conservative critics, or large portions
of the public who take their cues from the former. I'm sure we've
all been appalled—and somewhat chagrined—by the
level of historical ignorance or naïveté displayed by
young and old Americans (even presidential candidates) on media
pop quizzes, state standard-of-learning exams, and national assessments
of various kinds. But I would hazard that we have been equally if
not more distressed by too-large classes, low salaries and other
forms of public unsupport, immense diversity in our students' family
backgrounds, intellectual capacities, motivation, and linguistic
skills, and inept or misleading "historicizing" by the media and
purveyors of pop culture. |
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But I don't wish to criticize our collective performance nor to bewail our working conditions and the height of our pedagogical obstacles. Rather, I would like to suggest that, notwithstanding the former and despite the latter, teachers of history have not only professionally challenging and socially important jobs, but immensely pleasurable ones as well. I want to emphasize not the pleasures that all teachers, whatever their subject, enjoy from time to time, but those particular to teachers of history. Of course, my list will probably differ somewhat from yours, partly because I teach in the privileged setting of a relatively small but selective state research university, partly because I'm a pretty upbeat fellow. But I hope you will recognize and own the majority of pleasures, in some form, as our common legacy. |
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Because most of us deal largely with young people, teenagers or folks in their young twenties, one of our most basic pleasures comes from giving them some temporal orientation, some "time-line" sense of historical depth, periodization, and distinctions. (If this and many of the other pleasures I mention sound like challenges or goals, they are, because our pleasures come from meeting them, or attempting to meet them.) The wonderful and daunting thing about the young is that they live so thoroughly and energetically in the present, with much more attention to the future than to the past. And their personal experience of the past is so shockingly brief, as Beloit College's annual list of what eighteen-year-old freshmen have never heard of or experienced suggests.2 This is to be expected; but all human beings, like all societies, must eventually situate themselves in time as well as space, in their long and short pasts, if they are to avoid debilitating amnesia and to function as healthy and mature adults. Overcoming the young's foreshortened sense of time--which seems to correspond to their attention span--and helping them locate their relative place in the long course of social evolution is, I think, one of the historian's most basic pleasures. |
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Of course, the young can't all at once learn where they stand in cosmic context. It's enough to begin with their personal place in their own families, communities, places of worship, and perhaps regions as those have evolved, before introducing them to the temporally deeper, often more distant relations they have to nation, "race," or humankind. But our task is doubly difficult. Although we want our students to gain a greater sense of themselves as historical subjects, like all the other humans who have gone before them, we do not want their sense of historical continuity to rest too firmly on the assumption that people in the past were pretty much like us, only costumed differently. "The Past Is a Foreign Country," as David Lowenthal has reminded us, and we can take pleasure from our success in demonstrating to our students just how foreign and strange its denizens were, despite their essential biological humanness.3 |
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The task of what Clifford Geertz has called "alienating the familiar" can take different forms because our students tend to think they're already familiar with at least two large segments of the historical population.4 The first group consists of stereotypes, those warped mental simulacra of historical actors formed by the verbal and visual productions of advertising, folklore, popular culture, and the lazy human penchant for simplifications and scapegoats. We know we have our work cut out for us when our students begin the semester with confident assertions about "the Indian" (as if there were only one), "the black community," "Germans," "the European mind," capital R "Republicans," "dead white males," or "gays." One way I like to begin to combat the pseudo-familiarity of historical stereotypes is to ask the students to free-associate the adjectives they attach to their images while I list them on the board. Simply exposing the contradictions, superficialities, and grossness of their generalizations to the harsh light of chalk and the collective consciousness of the class is often enough to start the dismantling of their stereotypes so that our main job can begin. |
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But another challenge issues from students who also think they know people in the past because they happen to share with them a religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, or skin color. In identifying with superficially familiar actors or groups in the past, many students all-too-easily assume that self-knowledge is historical knowledge. And periodically they are aided and abetted in this thinking by some of their elders, who proudly and proprietarily declare that it does indeed "take one to know one." It seems to be a universal law, in history at least, that as soon as social groups or subgroups become newly politicized and discover that they have a discoverable past heretofore neglected, at an early stage in the discovery process some of their members will try to lay superior, if not exclusive, claim to their new historical subjecthood. Those of us d'un certain âge can remember when the emerging fields of black, Indian, women's, and gay history were serially reserved by and for the lineal descendants of those groups. Fortunately, we can also recall that in time such claims subsided and the whole historical profession was again persuaded that such thinking, if carried to its logical conclusion, would put most of us out of work. As a living, white, male historian of Indian women and men in the colonial period, I was glad to see the passing of the "proprietary" phase of ethnohistory, not only in the early '70s but again in the mid-'90s. I like to think that the native "proprietors" were equally relieved when I stopped insisting that, by their own logic, they had no right or ability to teach or write the history of my Puritan or South Carolina ancestors or any other non-Indian ancients. |
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But our job—and the fun—have
only begun when we start to disabuse our students of the notion
that they already know the past through stereotypes and personal
identifications. For our task is not only to "alienate the familiar"
but to "familiarize the alien," to introduce our classes to the
strangers and fellow travelers who once inhabited the worlds we
have largely lost.
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And in meeting both these challenges we are provided with manifold
sources of pleasure. |
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Perhaps the most pervasive pleasure we historians enjoy is that we get to call into daily play our imaginations. This cannot be said for all other intellectual disciplines, at least not to the same extent. For in their positive mode, historians have a difficult, two-fold job that draws upon the imagination with an urgent frequency that perhaps only anthropologists, novelists, and teachers of foreign languages would recognize. First, we must plunge into the dark recesses of the past, armed with relatively few and weak sources of light, in order to meet and to understand its peoples, societies, and cultures on, and in, their own, alien, terms. Then, after immersion in that ambient strangeness, we must emerge and translate our understanding into modern, though still faithful, terms that our students and readers can comprehend and appreciate. |
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As I once suggested in an inaugural lecture on "History as Imagination," we must employ our imaginative faculties throughout the historical process because, as Logan Pearsall Smith once wrote to Virginia Woolf, "People only exist for us in our thoughts about them. They float like slow, strange fish in the...aquarium tanks of our imaginations."6 One of our obligations is to ensure that our conceptions of those strange "others," especially past ones, approximate as closely as possible the rounded reality and self-image of the others themselves. But since we gain access to past people only through the piecemeal evidence they have left, we must use our imaginations to reanimate the known facts and restore them to life, to fill the holes in our evidence with informed guesses, to reestablish, in the face of hindsight's certainties, the choices that the dead once enjoyed in the past, and to discern the larger forces that transcended and patterned the individual lives of our subjects. |
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Another role imagination must play
in our daily routines is to help us find ways to demonstrate to
our students, by example more than exhortation, that the past is
not only interesting on its own account, but immensely useful
and potentially relevant. For at least two centuries
now, we historians have made some overblown and sometimes dishonest
claims for our discipline, particularly when we tried to sell it
to local and state boards of education and other patriotic groups
of various stripes. Many of our selling points have revolved around
the political value of teaching the history of our own states
and nation—what we might call the chauvinistic or enculturative
argument. There's certainly nothing wrong with this at the primary
and early secondary levels: all young people need to know something
substantial and true about the origin and evolution of their own
societies and polities. But for older students, in senior high school
and certainly in college, history education must go well beyond
socialization to prepare them for critical independence and full
citizenship in the wider society of humankind, the global
instead of the merely local village. We can easily take pleasure
in teaching history at both of these levels because both are necessary,
challenging, and rewarding when we succeed. |
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But at the older level where many,
perhaps most, of us work, we need to do a better—more honest,
more convincing—job of selling our discipline to our young,
savvy, potential and only sometimes captive customers. I can conjure
three main arguments we might use. First, history pursued the right
way (which I'll argue in a minute) engages better than most disciplines
the imagination and other creative juices that the young have in
abundance and seek to activate in fruitful directions, just as their
over-thirty teachers do. Second, the past is an invaluable storehouse
of vicarious experience, akin to but truer than fiction, which comes
without the emotional complications of parental experience or the
usual limitations and prodigal diffuseness of personal experience.
Like biographers, students of history get to eavesdrop on other
peoples' lives, secrets, and answers to life's perplexing questions.
With economy and some safety, we can take caution from our predecessors'
mistakes, inspiration from their accomplishments, and courage from
their persistent struggles to become fully human. |
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The third reason I might use is that
history is not only a storehouse of heuristic experience, but a
training ground for moral and philosophical thinking. For one thing,
the richness and completeness of the past allows us to clarify and
complicate our students' sense of causality. By showing them the
full range of impersonal forces and personal decisions that led
to historical events, which were once as potential and present as
our own, we can gain the satisfaction of reducing their reliance
on simplistic, one-stop explanations for events in their own time
as well as the past. They will also gain in moral subtlety by having
guides and a place largely free from consequences—because our
subjects are all mortally incorrigible—for practicing the making
of sound, fair moral and other normative judgments. To that extent
at least, history is, as Lord Bolingbroke said, "philosophy teaching
by examples."
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But not only can students deploy their own moral standards upon
the past, they can also be judged—with our help—by
peoples, cultures, and moralities of the past. They should not only
think in balanced, contextualized ways about the ritual cannibalism
of the Aztecs and the Iroquois, for example, they should also be
asked to consider Aztec judgments of Spanish warfare and Iroquois
views of the communion elements in Christian church services. No
one, I would argue, should graduate from college without a substantial
education in moral and cultural relativism. I like Scott Fitzgerald's
phrasing: "The test of a first-rate intelligence," he said, "is
the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,
and still retain the ability to function."
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All of these high-sounding goals and potential pleasures are well and good, but you must be restlessly asking, how do we achieve them? This, I submit, is where our job really becomes enjoyable. If you're anything like me, you are more comfortable doing than rationalizing your doing. So let me get right to some of the teaching practices that give me the most pleasure, day in and day out. |
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I think the biggest mistake we history teachers make is in not giving our students the experiences that drew us to history in the first place. Perhaps in doffing our commencement caps and propping ourselves up behind our new lecterns, we forget that it was unlikely to have been lectures, textbooks, or final exams that engaged our curiosity and imagination as undergraduates and graduate students, but concrete contact with our human predecessors through their verbal and material traces. So, in both my teaching and writing, I try to enable my audience to experience the past rather than just read or hear about it, just as I try to relive it when I write the books and prepare the classes. |
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This resolution entails three working
assumptions. The first is that I should treat my students as fledgling
historians who must make their own narratives, interpretations,
and judgments, rather than as "students" whose immaturity warrants
only paternalistic or authoritarian treatment. The second is that
I should put into their hands at the earliest and every subsequent
opportunity the widest possible range of primary sources
left by history's actors and encourage them to do their own historical
thinking. And, third, the best, most enjoyable way to develop their
historical thinking is to have them produce histories, normally
in written (and often illustrated) essays but potentially in film,
poetry, or other expressive media. From these mini-philosophies
most of my pedagogical pleasures continue to flow, even after thirty-five
years in the classroom. Let me count—and account for—some
of the ways. |
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My notion that history students should be more historians and less students had its gestation in my small, upstate New York high school where our eleventh-grade American history class was manacled to rote memorization, mindless multiple choice tests, and a puerile textbook that only a few years later was being used by seventh graders in New Haven. I obviously didn't cotton to the pedagogy: if Miss Salisbury knew that I was earning my living as a professor of history, she would undoubtedly perform some dramatic gyration in her grave. The only redeeming incident in that whole year was a lightly researched debate on "legalizing," or rather criminalizing, bingo, which my sweet little old grandmother played with great avidity every week in her church basement. I remember that, in addition to some passionate pre-Web research on the question, I employed my broadest satirical gifts to defeat the killjoys on the opposing side. |
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Needless to say, after a high school
experience like that, I did not intend to major in history at Yale.
But I found myself entering the history department by the back door
in my junior year after realizing that my early interest in philosophy
lay largely in the history of ideas, and that a couple of
American history courses with Howard Lamar and Jesse Lemisch were
more than challenging and engaging enough to erase the bad taste
in my mouth left by Miss Salisbury's class. Both courses—Howard's
introductory survey and Jesse's upperclass seminar on the American
Revolution—demanded that we do plenty of our own historicizing
after wrestling with primary sources. I know that I got my first
grateful inkling that I might be cut out for the historical profession—rather
than accounting or logical positivism—from the long paper I
did for Jesse on the New York Stamp Act riots. From an imposing
sheaf of primary documents, virtually the complete file of relevant
sources, we were asked to construct an interpretive narrative of
what occurred. When my essay came back, without Jesse's usual avalanche
of marginal comments and with an 87, the highest grade in the class,
I savored the intense pleasure of becoming a real, if neophyte,
historian. I also became a fan of non-inflationary grading, realizing
that the height of the professorial standard and one's relative
effort and success in meeting it were much more important than the
grade itself. |
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As the twig was bent, so grew the professor. In virtually all of my courses, lecture or seminar, I prefer informed, impassioned discussion and debate to (hopefully) informed, impassioned lecturing. I've written virtually all of my books for use in the classroom. My goal is to write so many of the right sort that I no longer need to lecture and can more pleasurably referee learned discussions based on them. I've declined to write textbooks because I wanted to pursue more original research and topics and to put both into the classroom in less daunting, more readable, and more resonant essays and monographs, which quote liberally from the primary sources that necessarily form their interpretive foundation; if readers want to disagree with my "take" on the subject, they have lots of wherewithal to fashion their own conclusions. |
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By the same token, I've had a great deal of pleasure in editing half a dozen sourcebooks for high school and college. One of them, The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes, has been in print since 1981.9 All of them were originally inspired by my work in the early '70s on the Yale-New Haven team of the AHA's History Education Project, a cooperative town-gown effort to improve school curricula and teaching. I learned as much about teaching and had as much fun on that team, editing two series of sourcebooks, and writing my volumes plus two how-to guides to the series as I ever have since.10 |
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But one thing I—and the now-defunct
publisher—discovered was that many secondary teachers of history
are leery of primary sources as a major pedagogical tool, unless
the documents come heavily fortified with contextual information
and interpretive suggestions, as well as lists of pregnant questions.
And their wariness is understandable, given their own relative lack
of experience in original research and their students' relative
lack of historical background. Happily, The Indian Peoples,
once a thinner, scarier volume in one of the series, was enlarged
and enriched to move it well into the comfort zone of both secondary
and college teachers. |
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When I can't use my own source-rich
books in class, I try to use books like them. Largely eschewing
traditional bluebook exams, I base my grades on class discussion,
especially in prepared debates, and on the students' mastery of
historical thinking in actual historians' activities. Most of my
assignments—and the basis for the largest part of the students'
grades—are essays based in whole or in part on primary sources.
A typical one in my lecture course on "The Invasion of North America"
serves as the basis for an always lively, often mind-changing debate
on whether colonial Indian males or females had the better life,
which requires some attention to what constitutes a "good life,"
then if not now. Another, using a feisty guide to undergraduate
life at Princeton written by two seniors in 1853, asks first-semester
freshmen to argue whether antebellum Princeton students were well
educated. This, of course, requires them to define what a "good"
higher education at that time was, or might have been, before culling
from 280-some pages pertinent evidence of both the faculty's curricular
and the students' extracurricular vehicles for achieving it.
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So far all of this sounds pretty traditional in its dependence on words, and I, like most history teachers, take great pleasure in their expression, encounters, and evaluation. One of my greatest ongoing pleasures is teaching students how to write well, by preaching and (I hope) by example but always by rewrites. Just getting them to use the simple past tense to talk about dead people I regard as a triumph some days. Yet the verbal tracers of the past, while essential, are not sufficient to illuminate all or even the most important of its dim corridors and corners. So, remembering my own most pleasantly indelible encounters with the past, I bombard all of my students' somnolent senses with historical sources of every sort. In nearly each of my eighty-minute lecture classes and in occasional seminars as well, I show half an hour of slides, to give the students, who are no more visually acute than we are (despite their video upbringing), vivid images of the historical strangers, events, and ways under discussion. In the straitened economy of the typical semester, even narrated pictures can save a thousand words. |
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I also bring in for "show-and-tell"
archaeological remains, Indian and European trade goods, period
music, a stuffed beaver, beaver pelt, beaver top hat, and dried
beaver cods, a slab of sun-dried cod, a monster double-barbed cod
hook, and a lifelike replica of a twenty-five-pound cod named—by
its student creator, the daughter of a Smithsonian ichthyologist—"Wilbur."
The fishy equipment accompanies my favorite (and somewhat notorious)
lecture on the sixteenth-century cod and whaling fisheries off Newfoundland.
But even less forgettable—as many alumni have assured me—is
the freshly baked salt cod, the two-or-three-year-old ship's biscuits
(handmade with an eight-pound sledgehammer), and the cod liver oil
that I make everyone taste at 9:30 in the morning. Perhaps nothing
in my teaching gives me more pleasure than witnessing the grimaces
and hearing the theatrical "blechs" that result from this particular
pedagogical ploy. |
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When I can't bring the sources to
the students, I send the students to the sources. My favorite assignment—and
the students'—in my graduate research seminar asks them to
reconstruct the "golden age" of Williamsburg solely from the eighteenth-century
gravestones in the Burton Parish churchyard, in the middle of Colonial
Williamsburg. In addition to the more obvious topics of demography,
causes, ages, and seasons of death, gender and family relations,
religious beliefs, and political and economic hierarchies, one bright
fellow (with a geological background) also traced the non-local
stones themselves from their American ports of entry as ballast
back to their specific English origins. For that one I dropped my
pose as a hardnosed grader. |
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Another considerable pleasure for
historians with at least local reputations is being invited to cast
their pedagogical pearls before students other than their own. These
opportunities are especially welcome just before and during splashy
historical anniversaries, such as the Columbus Quincentenary, the
quadricentenary of Roanoke, and the debut of Disney's Pocahontas.
For professional experts who care about bringing the all-too-pliable
and "usable" national or popular past into line with historical
reality, invitations to address the public, in whatever form, are
well nigh irresistible. So I have talked and shown slides to Cub
Scout packs and Boy Scout troops, Daughters of the American Revolution
and Sons of Colonial Wars, Rotarians and senior citizens in retirement
homes, Chinese scholars in America and European scholars in Italy,
primary, secondary, and college teacher groups, museum interpreters,
homecoming alumni, town-gown lunchers, and gifted fourth-graders.
But my most demanding audience, and one of the most rewarding, may
be the three- and four-year-olds at my wife's preschool. Every year,
just before Thanksgiving, I try to describe—without undue audience
participation--the first one at Plymouth and then tell what had
better be a riveting version of how my carved Iroquois Falseface
mask got its broken nose, that is, the Iroquois creation story.
I have to admit that some of the recaps of my tale that are retailed
at home over turkey equal in startling unfamiliarity some of the
versions of my lectures and books that students and reviewers have
been known to relay.
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Another opportunity to reach beyond one's own classroom, in usually pleasurable ways, comes from invitations to historicize through media other than vocal cords and slide projector. I've written "popular" articles for American Heritage and the Sunday magazine of El País, Spain's major newspaper, been interviewed (and often misquoted) by national and local newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and been a talking head and disembodied voice on American, Canadian, and British TV and radio. In my Luddite days, I even contributed a section on cultural encounters to a CD-ROM supplement to several high school and college textbooks, mostly to see how traditional the task was before the tech wizards waved their magic wands.13 |
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But some of my biggest kicks have
come from having several of my books recorded for use by folks who
are blind or dyslexic, and from helping to design and writing the
labels for two major museum exhibits.
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The Seneca Indian history exhibit at the Rochester (N.Y.) Museum
and Science Center and the new state museum at Jamestown Settlement
were inviting not only because they attract some 450,000 (often
repeat) visitors a year. For me the primary attraction was the chance
to try my hand at weaving an historical story-line largely from
and around material artifacts, with only minor support from pictorial
images and parsimonious wordage—a very different combination
from what I was used to in the classroom. But I recommend the exercise
to every teacher, especially those who are (in the words of a schoolchum
who was obviously studying for the SAT) "inebriated with the exuberance
of their own flatulent verbosity." Saying things in twenty-five
or fifty words or less is salutary practice for us who too-often
swoon at the sound of our own authoritative voices. The students
might even get a word or two in edgewise.
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Pedagogical pleasure comes not only from these various philosophies, audiences, and tools. It also comes from some of the ways I try to conduct my classes and to write my books and articles, what we might call my modus docendi (if I remember my high school Latin better than the history). My methodology can only be called eclectic. I'm one of those Coleridgean cormorants who snatch whatever approach or angle seems to work best with the sources and subject at hand. Like most humanists and historians today, I don't hesitate to cross disciplinary boundaries in search of perspectives or methods. Most of the time I'm happy to work the hybrid field of ethnohistory, raiding the plots and premises of both anthropology and history with equal heedlessness. Yet I'm not very fashion-conscious, intellectually or sartorially. In the early '90s I spent a lot of time reading around postmodern theory and eventually taught two summer seminars for ABDs for the Mellon Foundation. I decided that about eighty percent of what postmodernism had to offer was either useless or unintelligible, and that it was no longer worth the effort to discover which twenty percent was worth having. Hopefully, the saving remnant is "in the air" of graduate schools and postgraduate pedagogy. |
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As for my pedagogical and literary
style, it's as mixed and complicated from day to day as anyone's,
depending on the task to be done. But it tends toward—because
I derive the most pleasure from--irony, wit, humor, and devil's
advocacy. My goal as a teacher is to make myself dispensable,
to make my students independent thinkers who know how to ask good
questions of the past and how to handle with some finesse the sharpest
intellectual tools for answering those questions, through guided
and then solo practice; the answers themselves are less important,
though knowing some also gives pleasure. Accordingly, I do everything
in my power to foil their tendency to make me their answer-man,
their guru or authority figure; thus the irony, word-play, and devil's
advocacy. I love nothing more than to unsettle their certainties,
prick their pretensions, question their answers, destabilize their
ignorances, and dissect their stereotypes: in other words, to "alienate
their familiarities." |
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But this is the largely corrective side of our job. The more constructive side, where we "familiarize the alien," obviously calls for a slightly different style. Here I gently prod the students to confront the "others" in their own mirrors, sometimes emphasizing their human similarities, sometimes their cultural differences. Thus I talk frankly and have them read and write about things that initially might be discomfiting. I like the salutary squirming that results from introducing football linemen to Indian menstrual huts, sheltered young women to the savagery of war, fastidious fastfooders to Cree hunting and butchering practices, blacks to white liberators and Indian slaveholders, fundamentalist Christians to militant Muslims and tolerant native religions, rationalists to the supernatural. I like to referee class debates in which the sides have to argue the position directly opposed to the one they prepared or personally favor. I also like to encourage the students to toughen up their arguments by egging classmates to question their premises, evidence, or logic. |
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But throughout all these risky adventures,
I try to maintain a sense of humor—which is really a sense
of balance and proportion—and what I hope is contagious enthusiasm
for the whole process. Intellectual activity, whether teaching or
learning, is certainly serious business, but it should never be
solemn. I may be happiest in a classroom setting when I can deploy
wit or humor to good effect. I've even been known to devote a whole
presidential address to "Humor in Ethnohistory." Before a noisy
collection of ethnohistorians, I sought not only to describe some
of the things that historical contemporaries—Indian and European—found
funny or passing strange in each other's behavior, but also
to finger some of the things I found ludicrous or madcap
in our forebears' behavior and that of the academic tribe
to which the audience belonged.
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On second thought, I think I may find more genuine and recapturable pleasure in my writing(which is another form of teaching), especially when my pen trips over an unintentional pun or metaphor and I decline to delete it. I won't bore you with any of my groanable puns, but I might share an extended metaphor I recently committed. In a chapter on the history of the Princeton Graduate School (which I did not attend), I was describing the admissions process when a vision of the white fences and blue grasses of Kentucky's horse country floated over my roller-ball pen and settled into the ink. Here's what I wrote: "At the front end of process, the faculty is most interested in its top prospects. Impressed like most academics by sparkling credentials, they track their 'yields' from the top half of their ranked lists of applicants with the passion of horse players, willing to shower extra prizes and stipends on their favorites to prevent them from running to the competition. Frequently their bets pay off in timely degrees, publishable dissertations, and fruitful careers. But choosing academic winners in the gate is no easier than picking winning thoroughbreds; there are simply too many intangibles, and track conditions and trainers always affect the outcome. The best the faculty can do is measure the applicants' bloodlines, characteristics, and track records against its own and wager accordingly."17 |
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That's pretty much all I have serious
to say on the pleasures of teaching history. But before I close,
perhaps I should quickly add three more personal pleasures
that we probably all take from our jobs, but may be too embarrassed
to mention for fear of being thought unprofessional or, worse yet,
undeservedly privileged. One is that we, like most teachers, can
and probably should use our captive classes to spread our own enthusiasms
for and in history, some of which flow from our own youthful passions
in the past. What other discipline has as much freedom to enthuse
legitimately about as broad a range of interests—about favorite
countries, characters, tribes, parties, periods, social subjects,
cultural categories, writers, teachers, historians, music, food,
and fashion? |
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Second, we are blessed with an IRS
that allows deductions for professional expenses. One of the nicest
is travel for historical "research" or "education," which can mean
anything from dusty note-taking in the Bibliothèque Nationale
to dreamy wool-gathering in Gibbon's Roman Forum or Prescott's Machu
Pichu (though a few snapshots—minus the family—and souvenir
booklets to demonstrate our serious intent are advisable). Only
anthropologists and students of comparative literature have as wide
a field for professional "improvement." |
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But for my money (and not Uncle Sam's) the best deductions are for books. Since there is a history of literally everything under the sun, even Caribbean resorts, we are subtly encouraged to buy more books than our homes and offices can hold or our budgets afford. But as a lapsed member of Bibliolaters Anonymous, I have always argued (though none too successfully with my wife) that books make not only the best decorations but the best insulation. If collecting them, reading them, fondling them, assigning them, and even writing them do not constitute some of life's sovereign pleasures, we are probably in the wrong business.18 |
35
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Notes
1
This essay was first delivered as the plenary address at the annual meeting of the Kentucky Association of Teachers of History in Frankfort on September 23, 2000. My thanks to Melissa McEuen and Duane Bolin for inviting me and for southern hospitality beyond the call.
2
Class of 2004 Mindset List: http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/releases/Mindset-List-2004.html
3
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4
Neither I nor Clifford Geertz can pinpoint the source of this phrase in the large Geertzian oeuvre; I picked it up from a non-footnoted third party.
5
Ibid.
6
James Axtell, "History as Imagination," The Historian, 49 (August 1987), 451-62; reprinted in Axtell, Beyond 1492: Cultural Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3-22; Edwin Trimble, ed., A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984), 20.
7
Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 2 vols. (London, 1752), l:15 (Letter 2).
8
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up," in The Crack-Up..., ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69.
9
James Axtell, The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
10
The series were "The American People" (1973, 10 volumes) and "America Perceived" (1974, 4 volumes); both were published by Pendulum Press (West Haven, Conn.). The Teacher's Guide to each series was published in 1975.
11
James Buchanan Henry and Christian Henry Scharff, College As It Is or, The Collegian's Manual in 1853, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Libraries, 1996).
12
James Axtell, "Extracurriculum," in The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration & Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 147-73.
13
American Impressions [CD-ROM] (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
14
Four of my books have been recorded by Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic of Princeton; Beyond 1492 is also available from the Books for the Blind division of the Library of Congress (1995).
15
Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe, 155-63.
16
Axtell, "Humor in Ethnohistory," Ethnohistory, 37:2 (Spring 1990), 109-25; reprinted in Axtell, Beyond 1492, 171-93.
17
Willard Thorp, Minor Myers, Jr., Jeremiah Stanton Finch, and James Axtell, The Princeton Graduate School: A History, ed. Patricia H. Marks (Princeton: Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni, 2000), 326.
18
Axtell, "Confessions of a Bibliolater," Virginia Quarterly Review, 64 (Winter 1988), 134-47; reprinted in Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe, 101-114.
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