History 398

As if I really needed it, I have another stark reminder of my age:  a former student has asked me to advise his son about a degree in History.  What makes this worse is that it is not even the first time this has happened.

 

Naturally, my first thought was to tell the student to change majors.  I love studying history, and I have no complaints, but the honest truth is that there are far, far too many students getting liberal arts degrees who will never have jobs in their chosen fields.  The vast majority should be more practical and look for majors that will offer better chances of a decent career.

 

There’s even a simple test:  there is an inverse relationship between the number of math courses a major requires and the chances of receiving a paycheck above minimum wage.  If, as in the College of Education, the only math course required is a farcical course the faculty privately refers to as “Hooray for Numbers”—a course that Clever Hans the Counting Horse could pass—then perhaps you should change majors.

However, if the only thing in the world that will make you happy is to earn a degree in history, then go ahead and scratch that itch.  There are more important things than a paycheck.  Well, a few, anyway.

 

I had this conversation with the student, thinking that (since he was a freshman) he could easily contemplate a new major...only to learn it was too late:  he was a senior, close to graduating!   He only wanted advice about a specific course, History 398, which was required by the department for a history degree.

 

Immediately, I understood the problem:  I had taken that course myself, and can only compare it to attending a Mexican bullfight while tripping on LSD. 

 

To be fair, this is one of the few courses in the department that I have never taught, and it has been a while since I took the course, so maybe it has improved?   Maybe.  Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that there is a general trend in life that when something truly sucks, the people who have the power to change it generally refuse to do so.  “I had to do it, and I got through it, so these students can do it, too.”

 

History 398 is a course on Historiography—that is, the study of the best ways to interpret historical sources and the ways history is written, as well as the history of the changing paradigms of historical theory.  (At least, that was what the course was supposed to be).  When I took it, it was a series of strange disjointed lectures by emeritus faculty, a few of whom were a little past their sell by date.

 

The only professor teaching this course was….well….a jackass, with whom I had previously had a  less than happy experience.  We didn’t like each other, and he didn’t want me in his class any more than I wanted to be in it, but since the damn course was required, we put up with each other.  (Come to think of it, after this old-woman-in-pants retired, he opened up a private research business and proudly sent one of his new business cards to the department.  When I discovered the card tacked to the department bulletin board, I used a red pen to correct the spelling errors on the card, gave it a grade of D, and mailed it back to him.)

 

One particular guest lecturer droned on for two hours straight, seldom finishing a sentence with the same topic on which he had started.  In his prime, this professor had been a real firebrand who had led student protests against the war in Vietnam, had staged sit-ins at the Administration Building, and had been arrested numerous times at demonstrations.  That particular day however, his talk was borderline incoherent and put the audience to sleep.  Literally.  This is the only class I have ever heard of in which the professor fell asleep. 

 

This didn’t stop the speaker, who went on with his lecture, bouncing from one topic to another so fast it was difficult at any given point to determine what he was talking about.  A tiny little man with a wild head of long white hair, he seemed to bounce as he talked, waving his arms in the air while pouring out a steady stream of dates, events, and ideas that just didn’t seem to connect in any meaningful way.   Suddenly, he made a reference to a man sleeping with a Nazi spy while living in London:  a brief statement that caught my attention, so I inadvertently spoke out loud.

 

“JFK,” I said, pleased that I had finally deciphered something the man was saying.

 

“Ah!” the speaker said, obviously pleased that someone in the room had finally responded.  He stopped and pointed a finger at me.  “I see you have heard of Jack the Zipper!”

 

My laughter woke up the professor, which I still think was one of the all-time great moments in education!

 

The major requirement for the class was an extensive research paper on an assigned topic.  Students spent the entire semester researching and writing the paper, which formed the sole grade for the class.  Depending on the topic assigned, this could make the experience either enjoyable, or, as it was in my case, an absolute living hell.

 

The professor was obsessed with the multivolume set of slave narratives published during the depression by the Works Project Administration.  During the Great Depression, so many people were out of work that the government created jobs for people, and (inevitably), some of those jobs were of questionable value, prompting some people to say that WPA actually stood for We Piddle Around.  Someone in Washington noticed that the population of living ex-slaves was dying off at a rapid rate, so the government hired people to interview the surviving elderly freed slaves and record their experiences, eventually publishing ten thousand pages of interviews.

 

Far from being the historical treasure trove that you might imagine, the multi-volume set of books have always been a questionable source of information.  First, the former slaves were interviewed 70 years after the events they were describing, and everyone interviewed was at an advanced age and so, frequently not in very good physical condition.  Those interviewed had no incentive to provide accurate or detailed history.

 

Additionally, the WPA workers were white, were usually Southern, and were frequently interviewing former slaves who were now living as sharecroppers on the plantations where they had once been slaves.  You can just imagine an interview:

 

“How did your master treat you?” asks the suspicious white government employee.

 

The former slave thinks to herself, “Well, that evil bastard raped me, worked me half to death, and sold our children down the river so I never saw them again.”  That might be going through her head, but she answers, “He was okay, didn’t treat us too bad.”

 

The WPA interviewer nods her head, and writes down, “Our master was wonderful to us.  He always treated us like family.”  Later, other southern white people typed up the documents, editing them still again.

 

Collectively, the slave narratives, as historical documents, are fairly worthless and are about as fun to read as the Hong Kong phone book.

 

The professor assigned each of us a specific topic—I think mine was slave music—and mandated that our sole source for the paper was to be the Slave Narratives.  I read thousands and thousands of pages of highly censored and suspect testimony.  I had to wade through more than a hundred pages just to find a single brief reference to music that allowed me to finally make a brief note before I started reading again. 

 

I read those damn narratives for months (that seemed like years) and, after a while, it began to warp my brain.  Long before that paper was finished, I started having nightmares about life on the plantation, where I was the evil slave master.  If I had been forced to read those damn narratives for another semester, I might have been forced to do something truly desperate—like change my major to education.

 

My eventual paper was some forty-odd pages long, not counting the footnotes.  I sincerely doubt the professor did more than weigh it in his hand before awarding me an ‘A-‘.  I never picked up the paper and did not keep a copy. 

 

No, I didn’t tell the student any of that.  I just told him to start work on his paper as soon as possible and to try to work on it as often as possible.  If I had told him the truth, he probably would have changed his major to sociology, and that’s even farther downhill than education.

 

By the way, If you would like to read a few pages of those slave narratives, in the intervening years since I was forced to read them, they have all been put online—you can download all 34 volumes.  Have fun.