History Department

Listen to NPR story on importance of researching & writing about History for your post-college career
(broadcast on Morning Edition, 12/03/02)

History Matters

In Requiem for a Nun William Faulkner observed that, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." Faulkner believed that the past lives, inescapably, within each of us, determining our present being. Just as individuals are a collection of their personal history so too are cities, states, regions, and nations a construction of their collective history. And just as people cannot escape their past, neither can nations. Who we are shapes who we will become.

If Faulkner is correct (and he is) then how one understands the past possesses an awesome power to shape the present. Historians are keenly aware that controlling how people and nations think about the past often determines current decision making of individuals and countries. History has often been used as a weapon to justify current action. Unfortunately, as those who argued in favor of Jim Crow segregation in the American South or for the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany have demonstrated, the twentieth century alone is replete with examples of history being used to justify the worst abuses of people. Such abuses of history demonstrate the essential need for all of us to understand the past. Sadly, polls reveal that many high school students have no interest in history. Minority students in particular do better in subjects other than history because they feel that American history has no meaning for them.

However, if history can enslave, it can also liberate.

During the summer of 1964 in Mississippi civil rights workers labored not only to assault the entrenched political power of segregationists by registering blacks to vote they also opened Freedom Schools. There, in the preverbal one-room schoolhouses, black students were taught their history for the first time. African-American students read about slaves who planned, plotted, and revolted against their white masters, slaves like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. They also read about Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian slave turned rebel who led a successful revolution against the French on the Caribbean island and established a democratic government. If Louverture could succeed against the French, black Mississippi students reasoned, then African Americans could overcome the entrenched forces of segregation in America.

The moral of this story is clear: understanding your own past as well as our collective past can inoculate you from those who would abuse history. Will you wander through your college career confirmed in your ignorance of the past? Will you let others tell you where in history to find meaning and thus set the course for your future and the nation’s? OR will you assume mantle of responsibility and forge your own understanding of the past?

History matters.

History is not simply a collection of names and dates. Nor is history the background tapestry of life that explains artistic or literary masterpieces. History is a rigorous discipline for the serious minded student who wants to learn how to develop a critical perspective on the past.

At Queens University of Charlotte history is presented as contested terrain, an intellectual battlefield where scholars grapple with one another over interpretations and analyses about the meaning of the past. Students are required to join the fray and form their own judgments about important past events. Doing so requires risk-taking, sober thinking, and sophisticated analytical skills. By introducing students to the rich mélange of primary sources from the past, by encouraging students to view evidence from a multiple of perspectives, by demanding that students think and write clearly and articulately history professors at Queens help students develop essential critical thinking tools. Such tools are necessary not for history alone, but for all aspects of modern life. When students learn to make intelligent judgments about historical interpretations, they are also learning to make judgments about the television news, about which candidate to vote for, and even their own ideas.

History Matters.

                                                                                                        

 

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