On Wednesday, Max Boot wrote about the state of history education in the United States. He started off making several good points. History is not as popular as it once was, and, in general, Americans are pretty ignorant about history. He’s also right that understanding the past is important for understanding the present and gives several illustrative examples to back up that point.
But then, he veers off from what could have been a bland but passable column on the good of studying history. Instead, he writes “historians may not want to admit it, but they bear some blame for the increasing irrelevance of their discipline.”
Drawing on an article published in War on the Rocks, a foreign policy website, he diagnoses the issue as historians having “retreated from public debates into their own esoteric pursuits” as well as too much focus on “cultural, social and gender history” and efforts to pay “greater attention to the experience of underrepresented and oppressed groups.”
He explains that such new interests have led to the neglect of “political, diplomatic and military history” which he argues are the very subjects that students need to study and that would draw more students to study history.
As a recent graduate of the History Department of the University of Michigan — yep, I was part of that group referenced by Boot of “fewer than 1 percent” of females that major in history — my own experience contrasts with Boot’s caricature.
First, drawing a line between cultural, social, and gender history and political, diplomatic, and military history doesn’t quite capture the nuance of any history class I took. One of my first history classes as an undergraduate, Human Rights in Latin America / Roots of Protest in Brazil, might seem at first glance to be a narrowly focused class on oppressed groups and cultural movements. But to delve into those issues in any meaningful way, you have to have a pretty good understanding of colonization and Brazil’s more recent political history in the first place. That means all of that military, political, and diplomatic history becomes the baseline contained in the assigned readings. The expectation is that if your grasp as a student of those subjects is not sufficient, then it’s your responsibility to learn it on your own and come to class prepared.
Social and cultural history did not supplant military and politics, but rather added new elements to it, asking more of students and, in my experience, helping myself and my peers engage more fully with the history we studied.
Of course, history is not relegated to classes on protest or policy. Indeed, as a history student, most of the classes I took would have likely met with approval from Max Boot, given his professed love of military, political, and diplomatic history: Conflict and Diplomacy in the Caucasus, Empires and Nationalism, and North African Politics all seem to fit the bill pretty well, to name a few examples.
There was no shortage of opportunities to take those types of classes. Students were interested, the professors engaged, and the material well worth studying.
But they were not the only classes. And the others, perhaps the ones Boot may have labeled esoteric (such as Anarchism: History, Thought, and Practice or a class on how the Holocaust was memorialized throughout Europe) added important context and, ultimately, helped me better understand and engage with ideas fundamental to history such as memory, narrative, and the politics of what counts as history and what doesn’t. In each class, as I mentioned above, I also had to learn a great deal about the underlying political history necessary to the coursework.
At least at the University of Michigan, history was very much a choose-your-own adventure. If you wanted the military history, no one was stopping you from taking as many of those classes as you liked. And like Boot, I happened to like it quite a lot.
But it was also a collaborative department. I wrote my thesis alongside peers who had a different focus, and it helped me, as they were able to offer different insights and perspectives. That helped me write better history and, I think, challenged everyone to look beyond our chosen subject matter. I would extend that challenge to Boot, who might find the types of classes he was so quick to disparage far more interesting than he thinks.
And maybe if he’d spent a little more time studying the cultural history plugging up the spaces between conflicts, he wouldn’t have spent so much of the last two decades advocating for wars and bombings, almost all of which have turned out disastrously. But then again, Boot is perhaps confusing his professed interest in military history with his passion for military intervention.
