How can we prepare students – and reorient culture inside and outside the academy – to appreciate the value of human history and experience and the long-term? How can we make our case for how early modern history prepares citizens to think past quarterly returns and think about our actions today as part of human history in the long-durée? And most importantly, are we hindering or helping this process as we cleave to traditional education models? As we train graduate and undergraduate students, we need to not think in survivalist terms, but rather about how we teach to cultivate allies and more compassionate citizens.
Fundamentally, I believe that these problems span both undergraduate and graduate training, and I feel deeply invested in both worlds as I see one directly translating into the next. This is the case both in the academic trajectory of undergraduate majors, as well as in propagating a non-major audience that appreciates the value of humanistic thinking and can carry that appreciation into other careers and fields. I deeply believe that it is the non-history undergraduate majors and non-graduate studies tracked history majors that will become the field of early modern studies’ greatest allies and champions. We must look beyond the binary questions of major versus non-major, academic versus “alt-ac,” and instead follow our own advice that history is about training students how to think. For this reason, I strive to use my classes as a platform to teach students how to reason inductively rather than strictly deductively, how to approach complex and often changing data, and how to communicate clearly, effectively, and based upon facts. These are skills that will make our students better leaders, researchers, analysts, and citizens. With historical perspective on why it is crucial to educate compassionate and accurate leaders, we have a duty as historians to teach these skills, and we must be transparent about these goals with our students.
Writing and reading are the Januses of our profession, both serving as the attractors to new students who make a habit of these skills already, while also turning away bright students who take shelter in the STEM fields for their promise of short readings and shorter writing assignments. Yet even for those students who will not make a career out of a humanities education, teaching students how to read accurately and quickly, and to write honestly and clearly is one of the greatest gifts we can give our students. Consequently, I use a variety of methods to make my classes accessible to all students. For my lower division courses, rather than assigning 20-page research papers, I find that my students benefit much more from a joint tutorial and portfolio model. In my Freshman course Pirates, Explorers, and the Frontiers of Empire, for instance, I assign three short papers that direct students to experiment with three different kinds of historical writing, including primary source analysis and creative writing. I require students meet with me to read through drafts and discuss our combined observations about what works as we read their work aloud. In addition to these three papers, I also assign a book review, a prospectus, a historiography paper, and an annotated bibliography: essentially, all the elements of a research project but without the final paper. Taken together, these form a research portfolio which prepares students to plan and undertake a large research project, much as they might do in a future upper-division class or in their chosen career field. Moreover, this model allows me to periodically communicate highly individualized feedback to my students, which leads to significant improvement in writing and analysis over the course of the semester.
Likewise, I believe another skill that we must teach our students – and which will ultimately make them better researchers as well as better citizens – is compassion and historical empathy. Microhistory, in particular, asks students to engage deeply with people of the past, and I make frequent use of microhistorical studies across my classes. I also ask students to think deeply about the motivations, anxieties, and drivers of people of the past by introducing anthropological and sociological frameworks and asking students to make cross-cultural and trans-historical comparisons. In my Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe class, for instance, I begin the first day of class with a short news article from the 1994 peacekeeping mission to Haiti in which US soldiers were asked by locals to adjudicate a werewolf problem. The soldiers resisted, insisting that they could not put someone on trial for a crime that was not real; consequently, the locals refused to help them with their primary mission of disarmament. At first glance, my students wanted to agree with the soldiers, yet as we pushed further, they themselves suggested that had the soldiers taken the werewolf accusations seriously (and by extension, taken the local informants seriously), they could have created allies. Instead, my students eventually decided, the soldiers had approached the problem from a western and modern mental framework, which had ultimately not served their purpose, causing them to miss critical information. This exercise helped students begin thinking about the value of approaching early modern deponents and witnesses on their own terms, as well as taking accusations of witchcraft and heresy seriously since they meant something real to the people that made them. This re-orientation of thinking helped guide our discussions and readings throughout the semester, while also reminding students about the historical relationship between past and present persecutions.
Moreover, I also believe that we have a responsibility to make our course offerings, assignments, and in-class discussion relevant and responsive to the issues and anxieties that engage the current generation of students. At the moment, my students seem most drawn to topics including gender, immigration, fiscal crisis, and ethnic tensions. Orienting material to focus more on these topics does not mean ignoring those that traditionally guide early modern history, nor divorcing the past from its context, but rather it means guiding students to see the parallels as well as divergences. In the first degree, this helps students see the immediate relevance of the material and the assignments, but at a deeper level, this also seeds them with an appreciation of history and the ability to think historically. For instance, early modern Spanish history provides one of the most striking (if troubling) parallels between modern US crises and how we are currently addressing issues such as the scope of empire, equity and taxation, education, and private versus public ownership of infrastructure. In my Age of Spanish Conquest I follow a standard political chronology of the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire. By the time we reach the seventeenth century and begin looking at topics such as the expulsion of the moriscos, the ballooning fiscal crisis, restrictions on travel, and the implementation of protectionary tariffs, students are prepared and excited to introduce their own observations about the parallels between our world and that of Habsburg Spain. The lessons that can be drawn about the connections between decline, ethnic scapegoats, and widening class divisions are no less correct for being associated with modern contexts, and if anything, students imprint and remember this period of history all the more vividly.
As teachers training the next generation of historians, but also the next generation of broad-minded and compassionate citizens, we have a duty to make history both relevant and compelling. Through selection of topics, activities, and guided discussions, we can help students appreciate the value of the humanities outside the humanistic disciplines, and in doing so, create allies and proponents for historical study.