For a Classroom Craving Certainties, a Theory of Importance

Why is an event, an individual, or a concept worth remembering? Survey texts brim with one-thing-after-another narratives—a little of this, a little of that, with only the occasional hint as to their significance. Facts and factoids spill from pages and columns in a seemingly endless parade, but are only cursorily explained with reference to themes and ideas. Often the sole guide is the chapter heading and, just as often, the importance of the facts themselves—and why they merit inclusion in the first place—must be guessed at.

In missing the forest for the trees, the textbook version of history also misses the point of "doing history." It chips away at the foundations, perhaps the very raison d'être, of the field itself. The first commandment of the historian, after all, is that "facts" must be marshaled: they should either corroborate or demolish an "argument."

If instructors are bewildered by this laundry-list approach, with a mention of Rousseau here and an aside to Robespierre there, what are students to think of it? Brought up by high schools as "concrete thinkers," conditioned to look for "correct" answers in a world of standardized testing, lacking the skills to distinguish among fine shades of meaning, students have come to expect certainties. As a result, they enter higher education unprepared for the task of sorting things out and making sense of them, of interpreting data, of designing their own arguments, of extrapolating arguments from the facts of the case, and of anchoring generalizations in evidence. In their hour of need the one-thing-after-another textbook version of history offers little comfort or consolation.

Is there a remedy? Can students bring textbook narratives in line with the demands of the discipline? Yes, possibly—if they can develop a theory of importance. The principal object of this theory of importance is to answer the question: What is it that makes an event, an episode, an individual, a concept important, and, hence, worth remembering?

Of course any theory of importance cannot stand in isolation. It must be part of a larger process, which, for our purposes here, I will call an "internal dialogue" by which students intellectually engage the academic disciplines that they study. Of each discipline, students will need to ask themselves: What is its purpose and what does it seek to explain? How is it structured? How does its purpose shape its structure, and vice versa? Conversely: What can it not explain because of the limitations imposed on it by its very structure?

The search for a theory of importance should take place within this big-picture context. As far as history is concerned, students have to understand that, as a discipline, its structure (or rather lack thereof) makes it fundamentally different from chemistry or economics or psychology: it is chaotic. Expertise in one subfield cannot necessarily be portaged into another; a historian of colonial Latin America may not feel comfortable teaching Chinese history, even in a survey. Ideologues aside, historians do not subscribe to a general theory of history, do not agree on a one-size-fits-all approach, and differ in their answers to the question: What is history?

Dumbarton Oaks conference, August 1944. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-90119].

Because different things are likely to matter to different people, students must know that they may have to serve different masters (not just their own curiosity or their instructor), and that, accordingly, they have to cast their nets widely. The depth of their knowledge and their ability to argue multiple points of view will make more credible the point of view that they happen to hold. Hence, the more yardsticks, criteria, or categories they have for measuring importance, the better.

Surprisingly, the notion of a theory of importance has attracted few writers. Whereas the literature on "what is history?" is immense, and while debates raging over subjects such as postmodernism in historical discourse or moral judgment in history show no signs of abating, the core question of historical meaning is not high...