If nobody can expect to earn a decent living researching and writing history, then vast swaths of our past will be unknown to the future, and the history that is written will suit the whims of the rich hobbyists who can afford to do the work.
The hosts of these shows, including historians Nicole Hemmer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Walter Isaacson, and Erik Larson, use the past to help us understand our difficult present.
The Pulitzer committee described McDaniel’s work as “A masterfully researched meditation on reparations based on the remarkable story of a 19th century woman who survived kidnapping and re-enslavement to sue her captor.”
To Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard, history involves storytelling, and historians, like novelists, should aim to depict a coherent world. But the historian, of course, must obey constraints that the writer of fiction naturally ignores.
Let’s show students that studying the past is far more than memorizing. It can be thrilling, and can help them make more sense of the world in which they live.
Truth to tell, the word historic does get tossed around rather loosely these days. Just about anything that happens at the White House, for example, is deemed historic.
In his book “Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide,” author C.J. Alvarez explores 150 years of border-barrier history.
Once a bastion of English and History departments, the British studies discipline is waning as American students increasingly put career goals over their love of Charles Dickens, writes James Jeffrey.
Louisiana Tech University briefly removed an instructor of history from teaching over class discussions on race and other topics before reinstating him this month.
"I’m more much analytical as a result of law and try to immediately make an assertion and back it up with evidence when I write; I think it’s a very effective way of writing but I’m not sure that I would have mastered it had I not gone to law school."
Choosing to become a history major is a future-friendly investment. A history degree teaches skills that are in short supply today: the ability to interpret context, and — crucially — where we’ve been, so as to better understand the world around us today and tomorrow.
As faculty in history departments delved anew into explorations of the economic system, the American case in particular, students took leave of instruction in history at an acute rate.
“All too often, we look at history as these singular events that happened long ago. We sometimes try to connect many of those events to the present, but we fail to realize sometimes that the events that are unfolding around us every day are historic, too."
