Thoughts on Historical Study in a Time of Change
Kirkendall, Richard S. & Vaughn, Stephen
Richard S. Kirkendall & Stephen Vaughn Thoughts on Historical Study in a Time of Change A symposium on History. In 1976 a prominent historian declared, "We find ourselves at this Bicentennial,...
...Robert Hutchins observed some years ago that the rapid advance of knowledge gave modern man a false sense of security in breaking with the past, while Gilman M. Ostrandcr, in his study American Civilization in the First Machine Age, suggests that by the 1920s the impact of industrialism had led Americans to reject the past "as being absolutely out of date...
...We have our choice...between the gradual reconciliation of the old and the new and the more violent processes which destory much that is good along with much that is evil...
...Early in this century, Irving Babbitt noted that Americans have long been attracted by ideas of man's perfectibility and by evolutionary concepts of progress...
...The Industrial Revolution and accompanying scientific developments added new force to this tyranny...
...Those individuals who are unhappy with the present can deplore the elements of continuity-the forces of resistance and the representatives of the past-but they are realities that must be recognized and that cannot easily be brushed aside by a champion of a vision of the future...
...In any event, as C. Vann Woodward remarked several years ago, "A profession that sets itself up as custodian of the past among a people...that has characteristically sought identity in the future would seem to have little ground for complacency-about either the future of the past or the future of the craft that deals with the past...
...the present is better than the past and contains the seeds of a better future...
...Some writers offer an explanation for history's changed status based upon the dynamic character of our time, maintaining that change has been occurring so rapidly in our society as to render the study of history irrelevant...
...It can stimulate and enlarge our imaginations, improving our ability to comprehend increasingly complex problems...
...History's chief value, Carl Becker once said, "is that it is an extension of the personal memory," an extension that many people can share...
...Mankind is always more or less storm-driven," Allan Nevins wrote, "and history is the sextant and compass of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position...
...And a third agreed that "past, present, and future are linked together in the endless chain of history...
...RichardS...
...The best use of history is as an innoculation against radical expectations and, hence, against embittering disappointments," says George F. Will...
...Such attitudes, Babbitt believed, resulted in a tyranny of the present...
...It can help people overcome their tendency to learn from one set of experiences at a time, those supplied by the recent past, a tendency we seem to be repeating now as we substitute a "Vietnam analogy" for a "Munich analogy.'' Many people now assume that the American experience in Southeast Asia teaches all that we need to know about the ways in which the United States should behave in the world...
...It is a hindrance, he believes, to "the romantic idolization of ignorant spontaneity" exhibited by many of today's undergraduates...
...It is the historian's duty to alert people to the elements of continuity, just as it is his duty to point out that all things cannot remain as they were...
...Moreover, this disowning of the past has intensified the importance of the present...
...As Reinhold Niebuhr saw, the more we know about history, the less present realities appear "in the guise of irrevocable facts of nature...
...History is, after all, the discipline that specializes in the study of change in human affairs...
...A third element is "the rapid pace of change, so rapid that social institutions have great difficulty adjusting to it...
...Only an affluent society has the means to allow the experimentation inherent in the now model to exist, to delay the entrance of large numbers of persons into the labor market, or to underemploy them, and to create the variety of institutions, many temporary, in which nowness finds its home...
...William H. McNeill notes that history tells the young how much more complicated things are than their own personal experience implies...
...There are several explanations for this preoccupation with the present...
...As one historian put it, "the immediate sudden appearance of something, its creation by an individual or a group at some one moment of time, is unknown in history...
...History supplies people with a rich body of experience from which they can draw conclusions about behavior, combatting the narrowness of the lives of individuals and of generations...
...Although human affairs are dynamic, not all parts of the past pass away...
...Historical study has several virtues, including some of practical value...
...Businessmen agree with the elder Henry Ford that history is bunk...
...Intellectuals turn their backs on history in their enthusiasm for the ahistorical behavorial 'sciences.'" To speculate on the causes of history's changing status is to touch upon issues that tell us much about America...
...To be sure, doubts about history's usefulness are not new...
...No trained historian can possibly put himself in the position of the thick-and-thin exponent of the static," Perkins insisted...
...History gives us a chance to obtain a much needed sense of perspective which will allow us to rise above the temporal flux...
...Indeed, if there is any one subject with which it is concerned,'' David Potter wrote some years ago, "that subject is change-how things ceased to be as they had been before, how they became what they had not been...
...Furthermore, the historical process, even when moving at its most rapid pace, does not leave all features of the past behind...
...Stephen Vaughn is a visiting assistant professor in the department of history at Indiana University and Historical Assistant for the Organization of American Historians...
...In 1976 a prominent historian declared, "We find ourselves at this Bicentennial, for all the show-business clatter of the Fourth-of-July celebrations, an essentially historyless people...
...If it is true that many individuals can work and live without knowing much about history, it is equally true that society's leaders cannot forgo the study of the past...
...The inevitable result, said Carl Bridenbaugh in 1962, was the "substitution of an artificial environment and a materialistic outlook on life for the old natural environment and spiritual world view that linked us so irrevocably to the Recent and Distant Pasts...
...The student of history should constantly consider the possibility that several pasts are relevant to the present, and that the "lessons of history" should be drawn from more than one set of experiences...
...We neglect history at our peril, for as Cicero said 2,000 years ago, "to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child...
...Instead, as another mentioned, "each event is harnessed to the other, and the present emerges from the past...
...Individuals who subscribe to this argument, however, understand neither the nature of historical study nor the character of the historical process...
...Hazel W. Hertzberg of Columbia Teachers College has observed that societies like ours, in response to the rapid advance of science and industrial production, have come to define time and change as linear, as moving forward: Change is both inevitable and good and therefore synonymous with progress...
...Shortly before the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln remarked that "if we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it...
...But continuity, what John Jay two centuries ago called "the continuing tie," is also a "law of life...
...Kirkendall is Executive Secretary of the Organization of American Historians and professor of history at Indiana University...
...Thus, it is impossible to understand the present without understanding the past...
...History should also innoculate against the expectations of the champions of the status quo...
...History thus has a "generally conservative, stabilizing, and inhibiting effect...
...When correctly undertaken, it can be the most useful, humanizing, and broadening of learned endeavors...
...Affluence is certainly one of the most basic," Hertzberg writes...
...While there does seem to be a connection between the pace of change in our times and the decline of interest in historical study, it is not true that the pace has destroyed the usefulness of historical study...
...Edwin O. Reischauer has observed that often the other branches of the humanities and the social sciences "tend to produce a static view" while history '' is focused on change...
...His latest book, A Global Power: America since the Age of Roosevelt, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf...
...If there is one thing clearer than another," Dexter Perkins observed, "it is that change is the law of life, one of the deepest and most inevitable of all human phenomena...
...History can free us from the bonds of the present, liberate us from the limits of time and place, and open a dialogue with men and women of other ages...
...The material circumstances surrounding contemporary life so sharply contrasted to those of past generations that we had ceased to believe that earlier generations could speak with relevance to the present...
...His book, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in the fall, as part of the Volumes Supplementary to The Papers of Woodrow Wilson series...
...Then, too, there is the effect of television with "its intense focus on the new which often blocks out the past...
...The young no longer study history...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
