Why History Matters

Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle

The decision of leaders at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point to eliminate the history major, among other humanities fields, recently became front-page news in The New York Times. One student asked, “What is a university without a history major?” The decision at Stevens Point is not just the story of one rural university facing problems. History enrollments are in steep decline at colleges across the country. By one estimate, the number of history degrees awarded between 2008 and 2017 dropped more than 30 percent, exceeding declines in any other field.

The reasons for the latest falloff are easy enough to imagine: More students have turned to courses and majors in STEM fields with an eye toward employment after college; as colleges began eliminating core or distribution requirements, fewer students were introduced to the history field; history departments became increasingly specialized in their course offerings, making the major less appealing to the broadest spectrum of students.

None of this is new, and it is incumbent on historians to provide historical perspective. A headline in the Times once reported, “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen.” The date was April 4, 1943. The article bemoaned that “82 percent of the colleges of this country do not require the teaching of United States history for an undergraduate degree.” The results of a questionnaire administered to 7,000 college students showed, for example, that 25 percent did not know that Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War.

While it is lamentable that Stevens Point is eliminating the history major, history has a long history of being ignored, in part because a persuasive case for why history matters has not always been made. Many Americans intuitively share Henry Ford’s irreverence for the past. “History is more or less bunk,” he said.

Studying the past has also lost credibility because of continuing culture wars over what should be taught. An attempt to write National History Standards for public schools in 1992 led to controversy over the amount of material devoted to figures such as George Washington, as opposed to, say, Harriet Tubman. More recently, the Texas State Board of Education decided not to eliminate a unit on Hillary Clinton and to emphasize that slavery played a central role in the Civil War. The teaching of the past is constantly changing, and, for some, this is reason enough to abandon the enterprise altogether.

An argument has to be made for why history matters, one that moves beyond the philosopher George Santayana’s well-worn adage that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which seems mistaken at best. Time and again we remember the past and yet nonetheless seem to repeat it, whether going to war or shutting down the government.

One valuable insight into why the past matters comes not from a historian, but a novelist. In a memoir about his upbringing, Richard Ford writes, “entering the past is a precarious business since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.” That seems right. We are not our parents, but we can see how we are related.

So too with the nation. We are not where we were 50, 100, or 200 years ago, but there is no doubt that the past speaks to us now. Just as we should want to know the history of our family to gain a sense of where we come from, so too should we want to know the history of the nation to grasp how we got here.

We study history not because of proximity, but because of distance, because once upon a time people lived differently than we now live. There is a foreignness to the past that we must seek to take on its own terms.

At the same time, stories about the drama of life long ago might give us pause, a chance to contemplate our common humanity with those who came before. At its most purposeful, examining past lives can lead us to examine our own.

This returns us to the purpose of a college degree. “The function of the university,” proclaimed W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African-American to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard, “is not simply to teach breadwinning.” In embracing the vocational, universities such as Stevens Point are neglecting the educational.

Students should take STEM courses, but they should also be required to study history. In humanities courses, they learn to think critically, to write analytically, and to work across disciplinary lines. Students also hopefully develop empathy and understanding. This is part of what Du Bois meant when he called higher education the “adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life.” These are skills and traits that will prove beneficial regardless of a student’s vocational pursuits.

It is unlikely that the undergraduates in 1943, who could not identify Lincoln, knew that Lincoln said that “we cannot escape history.” He was not offering a reason for why history matters. Instead, he was looking to the future and the judgments that would be made about the past by those who studied it. “We shall be remembered in spite of ourselves,” he predicted. Not if history disappears from the curriculum.

Louis P. Masur is a professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.