The Great Turning Away

David Kaiser explains why contemporary students have turned away from studying history, and why universities have largely stopped teaching survey courses in the subject.  All of the trends he discusses were outcomes of the sociopolitical movements throughout the Western world in the 1960s, and they were strikingly present during the years of my doctoral study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1984 to 1991.

I suspect most readers will latch on to the statistics that Kaiser cites in his first paragraph about the startling drop in the number of history majors during the years of his career.  They are telling but, to me, a fact no less significant is this one:  as a result of the American Historical Association’s emphasis on gender issues in various forms and the political activities of the Left and the Right in the United States, we have, according to Kaiser, “practically no serious studies of US political and diplomatic history since 1980 or so today.”

Those forty years, from 1980 to 2020, unaccounted for and unstudied, amount to the development of the world we know:  the fall of the Soviet Union; the attempted unification of Europe; the development of machine culture for personal and political uses; the decline in the use of large military forces to achieve solutions to problems; the rise of terrorism as a means of compelling change.

The British historian J.M. Roberts had already noticed the movement away from broad studies of history toward smaller, more specialized works in the 1980 introduction to his one-volume Penguin History of the World.  He was jovial about the trend, saying that historians ought to be allowed to write on subjects that interested them.

There’s merit in Roberts’ view, of course, but the consequence of not teaching the survey courses, and not writing the broader books, such as Jill Lepore’s These Truths, about American history, or Mary Beard’s SPQR, about Roman history, is that we have raised a generation of fully-adult human beings who know nothing of the past out of which they’ve come.

They do not know, for instance, that the Soviet Union constructed the Berlin Wall not to defend against attacks from the West that never came, but to keep East Berliners from escaping the city.  In American race relations, many do not know about the Tulsa massacre of 1921, or the Watts riots of 1965, or the civil unrest in Philadelphia in the 1980s.  They may have heard about the protests after Rodney King’s arrest in Los Angeles in 1992, and it is certainly possible that they have seen the film of Michael Brown’s arrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Freddie Gray’s death Baltimore, and George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.  Yet without being able to fit those events into a larger historical context (and being taught what that larger historical context is),  the narrow, specialized polemics of contemporary historians in the classroom amount to little more than the indoctrination of students into a belief system whose roots they do not know, and the potential that the present moment of civil unrest has for moving society forward will be completely lost.

What has happened on the streets of Minneapolis and New York City and Los Angeles and Seattle–the deaths, the protests, the riots–is deeply tragic, all the more so because the loss of lives and property could have been prevented.  But the events are not new.  Those who know our history have seen them before, many times.  And, sad to say, the responses to George Floyd’s death aren’t exactly new, either.  We had dialogues among ourselves after the Watts riots, too, and calls to disband the police.  Federal funds poured into LA for months afterward back then, as they did in Missouri after Michael Brown’s death and in Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s death.  The occupiers of the Autonomous Zone in Seattle, although that area has since been renamed in an effort to find a unifying purpose for being there, have nonetheless taken their playbook straight from the New Left’s occupation of administrative offices of colleges all over the country during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s.  Those sit-ins sometimes lasted for weeks.  This one may last for months.  The Seattle mayor, herself a product of the New Left, when asked how long she expects the occupiers to stay, responded that we may all see “another summer of love” (1967).  She was being ironic, but she wasn’t kidding.

We’ve had utopian communities by the dozen set up here and there in the United States since the nineteenth century.  All of them faded because they couldn’t support themselves, either materially or philosophically.  Enthusiasm for the ideals waned; few joined the cause after the first wave of excitement.  The same fate will probably occur to the squatters on Capitol Hill. But if it does not, if they are able to establish and sustain themselves as a separate entity, that development will not be new, either:  the Republic of Texas existed within the contiguous United States between 1836 and 1846; and the territory of the Louisiana Purchase existed as the possession of Spain and France for 150 years before that.

The most interesting question to me is, where (and to whom) will the federal money go this time?  History is the record of the events and the artifacts which shape our lives.  American history shows that millions upon millions of dollars have been spent not only to arm police departments but also to rebuild neighborhoods and businesses after they’ve been torn down in civil unrest.  Yet, after all those millions spent, after a century of repeatedly repairing such damage whenever it occurs, poverty largely remains in many of those areas.  So does the distrust we have for each other.  Why is this so?  The answer likely does not involve only money.  If it did, we would have solved many of our problems years ago.  The answer, however complicated it may be, is more likely to be found in a broader, deeper understanding of our country’s history, an understanding that we have willfully shunned today, at the very moment we need it most.