I love my day job. Leading the Honors College and working with honors students and faculty is great fun. But by profession I am a historian, and the passion I discovered years ago for teaching, studying, and writing about history has never gone away. The part of history I like best is “the history of the present.” If that sounds like an oxymoron, let me explain what I mean by sharing two events from my undergraduate days.
In a course on American history I encountered a short-lived political movement called populism, which was made up of farmers and workers who felt that the big economic institutions of the day were rigged against them. They demanded that the government do something about this, and they had specific remedies in mind. I wanted to know more about these people from my great-grandparents’ era. Rather than giving me another book to read, my professor pointed me toward the archives and showed me how to discover them through their own words as recorded in letters and public statements. Then and there, I was hooked on historical research. And by the way, I discovered in the archives that my great-grandfather was one of them!
At the same time I was tracking the populists through the archives I was watching the civil rights movement sweep across the South. To my surprise, the civil rights crusaders sounded and acted a little like “my” populists: though seemingly powerless in the face of powerful institutions, they used skills learned in their own communities and churches to challenge the segregated status quo. And, like the populists of old, they often used biblical language to speak truth to power.
No two historical events are alike, but similarities often trigger insights which let us better understand both “now” and “then.” Put another way, history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometime it rhymes. Over the years many such rhymes have sharpened my interest in the history of the present. The Velvet Revolutions in eastern and central Europe which helped bring down the Soviet Empire rhymed with our own civil rights movement. I’ve taught an honors colloquium on the rise of modern conservatism, which brings to mind other rhymes. In an article I’m finishing right now I briefly compare historical populism and today’s Tea Party movement, which is often labeled “populist.” (Short version: Their beliefs on the proper role of government are polar opposites, but they share some methods for organizing people and spreading their ideas.)
Some people think history is boring. Maybe you do. My wife does, but she humors me by saying otherwise. I might have found it boring by now myself, were it not for the fascinating interplay between then and now, the history of the present.