A Car made of People

Ah, Linked-In. I'm still not completely convinced that this Facebook for networkers is worth the time and the effort that I put into it, but I'd rather use it and not need it than need it and not use it. In any case, while updating my profile summary today I got my brain juices flowing, and now I can eloquently explain why I do what I do.

To get into the obligatory metaphor, ever since Henry Ford popularized the automobile for the American public, cars have been getting more sophisticated and more complex. A repair that a mechanic could have completed without incident 10 years ago now requires a specialist. In recent years, cars have incorporated increasing numbers of electronics, specialized equipment, and luxury items. One guy can fix your built-in GPS, but you need to see a different guy about the problem with your electric windows, or the gauges in your dashboard.

Likewise, humanity is becoming increasingly diverse and complex. In an increasingly crowded and competitive world, the struggle to succeed individually while co-existing with other individuals is getting more and more complicated. Billions of people all trying to exist together, and at the same time trying to improve that existence for as much of humanity as possible. And being social animals, they create millions of political, social, and cultural institutions, groups and organizations, sorting themselves into these different factions based on their unique personal outlooks.

If you think of the human race like an automobile, each person and faction of persons represents a part in an enormous machine that needs constant maintenance. Each part intersects with the others in different ways, and sometimes the gears don't mesh and the oil doesn't pump. When different portions of humanity have contradictory needs, you get wars, social unrest, decreasing resources, and all sorts of nasty things.

Seriously though, this is bad. To address these problems, you need to understand their causes. To understand their causes you need to study all sorts of interesting fields, like economics (it's interesting to some people!) psychology, sociology, and... you guessed it... history. Think of each one of these fields as a different bit on a souped-up spy car. Studying each one will help you figure out how a different part of human society functions. But to get a feel for the entire complicated blueprint of human existence, you need to crack open a history book, because this is a manual that will let you know how a tiny portion of those parts have interacted in the past.

I went into this field because I like to know why things are the way that they are. Studying the past allows you to understand the present, but also to make preparations for the future. The more I learn about the origins of modern institutions, the better equipped I am to plan my own life.

And this is exactly why the recent, persistent cuts to American humanities and social sciences are such bad news not only to social science majors, but to the nation as a whole. The human machine is not going to stop changing, or even slow the process. Governments and individuals are constantly blundering into situations that a quick review of the historical record would reveal as an easily avoidable mistake. Would you trust a mechanic who didn't understand how your car brakes function? Human society is infinitely more complicated, with more parts than the most technologically advanced car, and we're not even close to understanding how all of those parts work. It's going to take a LOT of mechanics to keep that work going, but that won't happen if these fields are continually being looted of funding.

Here's hoping that the brakes don't give out.

Medieval Spain and Me

The Origin Story

I was looking through some of my old college papers the other day when I found this: One Nation Under God: Religious Co-Existence in Medieval Spain. Fall 2007

It’s the first scholarly historical essay that I ever wrote, and I wrote it before I had even realized what I wanted to do with my life.

After high school, I enrolled in community college as an Art major, taking courses that specialized in oil painting, watercolors, sketching, and pastels. I thought that I would one day spend my afternoons painting by the seashore, exhibit my work in galleries and museums, and grow a little goatee. I enjoyed community college, and I enjoyed creating art, and I was good at it.

But I wasn’t great. With every class that I signed up for, I met new people and became better acquainted with friends from the previous class. And as I watched them work I realized something; many of my classmates had this innate ability to look at a subject, pick out exactly what they wanted to express, and instantly determine how to do it. Seeing this process unfold was, frankly, amazing. In these capable hands, a vase of flowers on a table became splashes of paint on a canvas, but these splashes contained a life and vitality that I could only envy.

In short, I realized that my classmates all possessed an ability that I lacked; I was good but not great, technically proficient but not inspired. I could make a painting look like the object that was being painted, but I couldn’t make it look like the image I saw in my mind.  That ability to take a subject and shape it however I wanted was lacking in me. Surprisingly, this realization came with a lot less pain and aggravation than I would have expected; I received an Associate’s degree in Art with pleasure and only a mild irritation that I had not had this epiphany before enrolling.

In the Fall of 2004, I began classes at Eastern Michigan University, still not sure exactly what I was interested in. Looking over the course catalogue, I began first to sign up for my General Education requirements, getting them out of the way and buying myself more time to choose a degree.

The fall after that, one of my courses was entitled “History 327: Europe in the Early Middle Ages.” My professor was a Renaissance historian named Ronald Delph, and the main assignment of the semester was to pick a topic relating to Medieval Europe, research it, and answer the historical question that the topic asked.

My topic was the Spanish peninsula during the Muslim occupations of the eighth century and onwards. I read the material, formed a question, and developed my thesis, writing and re-writing arguments and presenting evidence as I did so. And as I worked at all of this, a funny thing happened. I realized that the ability I was missing in my art classes was emerging in the school archives, albeit in a different form. I could take my subject and shape it however I wanted. I could analyze a large number of books and manuscripts—primary and secondary sources—and I could extract information from them to support whatever argument I wanted to make in my writing.

Not only that, but while I was doing this work, I lost track of time. I had always been interested in history museums and reading, but when I started to think seriously about the possibility of doing these things as a career, I found myself getting more and more drawn into my work. I researched Moorish Spain for two months, and after the research was complete it took me a week to write the final draft. If f it hadn’t been the end of the semester, I would have been happy to continue developing and editing for weeks afterwards. As enthralled as I was, and as new to the field, I entertained fanciful notions of writing a book on the subject.

I registered as a History major, and I signed up for more classes. I received my Bachelors degree in 2007, and then went to graduate school and received my Masters. I wrote many papers during these years, and I learned many things, and it’s just as fulfilling now as it was six years ago.

That’s why I entered this field, and it’s why I write this blog. And sometimes it’s nice to think back on the things that I’ve done. It reminds me that there are more things to do.

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Do you have a similar story that you would like to share, so we can compare notes and a bibliography? Did you think that this post would have something about a radioactive spider or solar flares? Comments left below will be posted as submitted, without being formatted for MLA.

History: The Hybrid Animal

I once read that History is a discipline that no one can quite pin down. Is it an art or is it a science?

On the one hand, art implies a medium where the artist has complete control over the final product. The painting’s too dark? Add some light. Not enough trombones in your operetta? You can fill the orchestra up with nothing but trombones, if you like. When practicing art, not only the style but also the content is completely within your control.

           

With a science, it’s not about style so much as it is about methodology. You are structured, disciplined, and analytical. The crux of good science is drawing conclusions about your questions logically, using evidence that you systematically collect. Theoretically, therefore, if two scientists examine the same data, they should arrive at the same conclusions, leaving a margin of error for miscalculation or personal bias.

The study of history lies somewhere in the middle. The historian of course has the freedom to choose their topic; their time period, person, or event. They can examine large portions of humanity or dissect one individual; their writing can be intimate or stay remote. Although they cover many of the same subjects, there is a huge difference between David McCulloch’s popular history 1776 and the cool legal jargon of Hiller B. Zobel’s Boston Massacre. In this way the historian apes the artist, and as with art no style is inherently better than the rest. To a degree, the final product is judged on the basis of personal needs and taste.

But unlike the artist, the historian has a predefined set of materials to work with. If you set out to write about the contributions of American women during World War II, you will read and analyze primary sources. Secondary sources will lay out the findings of other writers, which can be used to develop your own argument or find other sources to continue the process. With everyone working from the same materials, you would expect everyone researching WWII American women to arrive at the same answers to the same questions. If history was purely science. But while science relies on empirical data (information that can be sensed, experimented on and proven), history has no specimens that can be brought to a laboratory. Therefore, its conclusions are constantly being reevaluated and updated by new generations. It’s like a perpetual conversation, where the speakers get closer and closer to agreement, to uncovering the truth… but they never quite get there. Like a spaceship orbiting a black hole, to use a scientific analogy.

So, is history an art or a science? I would argue that it’s a bit of both, and many institutions of higher learning seem to agree with me. I’ve seen history courses listed in college curriculums as both Liberal Arts and Social Sciences/Humanities, and once they were in the College of Arts and Science (that last one was hedging their bets). The discipline boils down to a study of human structures and human nature, specializing in dead humans. As such, we need our scientific methods to measure the structures, and our inner artists to study the nature. It’s a system that will never be perfect, but that makes it compellingly human.

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Do you disagree with me about the nature of history? Would you like to argue for one side or another? Are you reading this while orbiting a black hole? Join in the perpetual conversation with a comment in the space provided below.
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Sources:

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Landscape of History. Oxford University Press, 2002.

"History." <http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/history.aspx>

The Pipe-dream, and Problems that Arise from it

THE IDEA

At Plimoth Plantation last November, several friends and I were between visitors and very bored. Massachusetts in the late fall doesn’t really encourage one to wander around outside, even in replica Pligrim clothing. Once the sun starts to dip towards the horizon and visitation dries up, everyone starts to congregate in three or four houses throughout the Colonial English village, and compete to see who can huddle up closest to the hearth without actually setting their clothes on fire. This particular day, a group of us started talking about what we would do if we were to find ourselves suddenly handed a blank check and told to use the money to create our own living history museum. Ideas were thrown around. Things got messy.

Fake John Alden suggested a first-person Pirate museum, somewhere down in the Caribbean. His fake wife Priscilla liked the idea of a Victorian house designed to showcase the history of the Spiritualist movement, complete with a séance. Someone else wanted to design a Revolutionary fort. Having just days before watched the classic Sergio Leone film “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I began to think about the possibility of a Wild West living history museum, where the first-person interpreters would all portray cowboys, gunslingers, and saloon keepers.

THE PROBLEM

This all started out as idle conversation, of course. But as November dragged on, we Pilgrims found that we would get a large rush of school groups in the morning, all of them eager to talk about Squanto and the first Thanksgiving. By the afternoon, these groups would be back on their warm school buses, and we would once again be huddled around our fires, talking to pass the time. And we began to expand on our original ideas. Given the opportunity, how would we organize these museums? How would they teach us about history? How authentic would they be?

This last question is one that living history museums struggle with constantly. The whole idea behind first-person interpretation is to immerse the visitor in a different world, a different time period. You’re half historian, half actor, and you play your role without a script. You dress, work, and eat the part, doing most activities in the same way that the people you represent would have done them. But sometimes the 17^th century is just too… extreme for a modern person. A New Plimoth resident in 1627 would have relieved themselves into a clay pot the size of a tea kettle and then chucked the contents into the streets. If a museum today tried to be that authentic, the Department of Sanitation would close it down and chuck the staff out into the streets.

A Wild West museum comes with its own set of problems; some very similar, some completely unique. Chamber pots and outhouses would still have to be present, for the sake of appearances, but the Muzees would probably choose to use modern facilities, cleverly hidden in a barn or something. There would still be the conundrum of nineteenth-century prejudice; how authentically should the interpreter portray period attitudes towards women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other frontier minorities? How much affected bias can you get away with for the sake of education? How much should you be able to get away with?

Then there’s the constant balancing act between authenticity and the pop culture perception of a period. I guarantee that if this Wild West museum ever becomes a reality, every male staff member I hire is going to have seen the same Clint Eastwood films that I have, and they’re all going to want to be the Man with no Name. Given the chance, everyone is going to pass up roles as blacksmiths, telegraph operators, missionaries and common laborers. They’re going to dress up in a white hat and a poncho, and spend their days playing poker and ogling prostitutes at a saloon. A Most visitors would probably want their Wild West museum to have a daily event where gunslingers face off in the main street at high noon. Tumbleweeds blow by, revolvers are drawn, in a life and death contest to find out who’s the faster shot.

These are issues that every living-history museum must face, where the educational experience you’re trying to present must compete with the expectations of the public that finances your operations. And they’re issues that must be revisited, year after year, to determine whether your mission is focused more on changing a perception, or catering to it.

Come back in a few days to read more about my vision of a living history museum devoted to the Wild West. If you can’t wait that long, visit this site to see how an existing museum in Kansas has recreated one of the most recognizable periods of American history.