On Using History

I was an English major in college and did one year of graduate study in English. This was at a time when literature was frequently studied in its historical context: discussing the Elizabethan worldview as precursor to reading Macbeth, say, or reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle along with accounts of turn-of-the-century urban life. There was, as well, biography: Melville’s life and work before he began writing Moby-Dick.

I also, mostly by default, was a history minor in college. My college required a minor, and history seemed closer to English than sociology or economics—I dropped the latter after two weeks of fearful incomprehension. So history it was, but with little rhyme or reason. One semester I took Byzantine history, the next American Constitutional history. I had a wagonful of history in unrelated bundles.

After that year of doctoral study in English, I left graduate school. For the next ten years I taught in a range of settings: elementary school, a program for Vietnam veterans, adult education and job training, and I ran an Educational Opportunity Program tutorial center and a freshman writing program. Then, with a clearer sense of why I might want to pursue a doctorate, I returned to graduate school, but in education, where cognitive psychology, specifically the study of teaching and learning, dominated my interest.

My first professional writing emerged from a blend of that ten years of teaching and administration with the study of education. I wrote about the cognitive processes involved in writing, about teaching writing, about working with at-risk or underprepared students, about the institutional tangles of developing programs for such students. And as I did this writing, I rediscovered history.

Or more precisely, I discovered history for the first time as a mode of inquiry and as a means to solve problems—or at least to understand them better. History became useful. To be sure, that immersion in literary history and my salad bar of history courses in college provided me with a lot of information and skills, and, I think, with a preliminary sense of historical conventions and how to read history. But when a particular course was over, my notes went into a drawer and the books onto a shelf.

Here’s what happened that began to make history more than a school subject for me. In the early 1980s my UCLA co-workers and I created a rigorous and coherent series of expository writing courses to replace the existing freshman composition curriculum. The courses were developed from the best we could find at other colleges, from research on writing, and from surveys we did of UCLA faculty drawn from a wide range of disciplines, with the aim of finding out what writing ability they expected of their students. In short, we developed the courses with the orientation and tools of a research university.

While many commended the new curriculum, I was surprised by the resistance we got from some faculty, particularly from several influential members of the academic senate, when we recommended a further course in writing or sought just partial credit for the first course in the sequence, the one labeled “remedial,” though our revision of it was anything but typical remedial fare. The resistance was protracted, and our opponents won the day.

I was new at this and naive, I’ll admit, but I was both puzzled and exasperated by the depth of the resistance and the dismissiveness, even scorn, that accompanied it. Wasn’t writing well a key marker of an educated person and integral to university life, to the very existence and promulgation of disciplines? Our surveys of faculty revealed how interlaced writing and thinking were, and what a struggle writing was for many of them. Yet the teaching of writing, freshman writing particularly, was often characterized as not belonging at a research university. What was going on here? I had before me a genuine and vexing problem, and it led me to want to know more about how we got to such a place. What were the origins of these attitudes and beliefs and the language used to express them?

I threw...