Why Study History? A Personal Reflection

I’m fascinated by time—its past, its present, its future, its moments, its transcendences. Time, as we’ve all experienced, moves quickly at points, and agonizingly slow at other points. There is something quite mystical about the nature of time and something truly mystical in the relationship of time to eternity.

A few months ago, the history student honorary at Hillsdale College asked me (along with two other faculty members) to speak on the question, why study history. Given that, by choice, I am a professional historian, I should’ve been able to come up with some great (well, at least in my head, great) ideas as to the meaning of history, the philosophy of history, etc. Instead, somewhat to my own surprise, my answers to the question turned out to be deeply personal.

As I entered college back in the fall of 1986, I was obsessed with majoring in economics and with going into politics as a career. And, I do mean obsessed. Much of this desire had come from my four years in high school debate and forensics. For a variety of reasons, however, I found neither economics nor politics (in the practical sense; not in the philosophical sense) to my liking in college. I took one economics (for liberal-arts majors) course my first semester, and I enjoyed it very much, but I realized I wouldn’t do well with the technical side of the major. I desperately wanted to write essays like Milton Friedman, but I didn’t want to do the brilliant math behind those essays. And, as much as I had dreamed of being an orator in the U.S. Senate (yes, I had big dreams), I really didn’t possess the kind of personality—shaking hands, making deals—that such a career would demand.

Instead, that first semester of college, I immediately fell in love with my Western civilization class, and especially my professor, Jonathan Boulton, and the class’s T.A., Bruce Smith (who remains a very close friend to this day). Both professor and T.A. were incredibly witty and knowledgeable. Not only did they encourage me to write well and think well, but they further convinced me that history was the ultimate liberal art (even if not one of the seven). That is, if I wanted to employ economics, I could do so within a history major. If I wanted to study literature, I could do so within a history major. The same was true with politics, philosophy, and, well, you name it. As the slogan of the day went, “History is everything.” History was, at least in my undergraduate years, still the least infected with ideologies and theories. To be sure, I found all of this attractive. As it turned out, I came to cherish my history major at Notre Dame—not just classes with Professor Boulton and Bruce Smith, but also taking classes with and working with Walter Nugent, Father Marvin O’Connell, and Father Bill Miscamble. I can’t pass beyond Notre Dame without also mentioning my beloved American Studies professor and mentor, Barbara Allen, an incredible and joyful scholar, who made me fall in love with Willa Cather. My graduate-school professors—especially Anne Butler, Bernard Sheehan, and R. David Edmunds—continued to be grand blessings to me.

When it came time to write my senior thesis at Notre Dame (a two-semester project; with the first semester for research and the second semester for writing), I asked Walter Nugent to direct it, and he graciously did so. Again, Bruce Smith, wonderfully served as my unofficial advisor and research mentor.

This, I suppose, brings me to my second reason for being a history major. The history I wanted to study was, following the theme of his essay, not surprisingly, deeply personal. A bit of background—my biological father died in late 1967, just two months after I was born. Having never known him, I became quite taken with and turned my love (and search for identity) toward my maternal grandparents. They were the finest people in my life, and they come from a strange little segment of European life. They were known as Volga Germans—Catholics from southwestern Germany who migrated to Russia by the invitation of Catherine the Great, in 1763. They lived along the Volga River in Russia until 1876, when they migrated to six little towns in western Kansas. Tsar Alexander II had wanted to draft them into the military and force them to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. Neither appealed to my maternal ancestors, and, thus, they migrated across the Atlantic. I wrote my senior thesis tracing the history and culture of the Volga Germans.

My third (and, at least for the purposes of this essay, and final) reason for studying history is far more abstract, though it remains, too, deeply personal. I’m fascinated by time—its past, its present, its future, its moments, its transcendences. Time, as we’ve all experienced, moves quickly at points, and agonizingly slow at other points. As I age, though, I realize that for the most part, time flies! There is something quite mystical about the nature of time and, of course, something truly mystical in the relationship of time to eternity. Within time, I often wonder, how does free will work? What questions of moment are solved because of a decision, because of the unexpected eruption of a volcano, or simply because of the slipping away of time itself.

For me, no one has better captured the mysteries of time than great myth maker, J.R.R. Tolkien, especially in his scenes in Riverdell and Lothlorien in The Lord of the Rings, and the great poet and Christian Humanist, T.S. Eliot, especially in The Four Quartets.

All of these things, it seems to me, justify a major in history. To be sure, my life would’ve been radically different without such a course.

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