History and the Other Disciplines

I O Historically Speaking · November 2003 History and the Other Disciplines Michael Burger I've noticed an odd thing in the search for new history faculty at my school in the past eightyears or so. When asked what they wanted students to get out of their classes, candidates we interviewed often had Uttle to sayaboutwhatmightmake historical study different from the other humanities or social sciences. This became evident when candidates were asked: "You are on a committee to revise the core curriculum, that set of courses which all undergraduates at the universitymusttake. In the face ofcompeting demands fromthe manyother disciplines that claim they should be part ofthe core, would you take the position that history should be included and, if so, why?" The aim of this querywas notto ask, "Howwouldyou defend our turfifneed be?" The idea, rather, was to get candidates to define in a concrete way what they thought history had to offer students and how that related to other disciplines . As expected, the candidates thought all students should take at least one course in history. As to why that should be so, most candidates gave two reasons. The first concerned skills: a history class cultivates the capacity to use evidence to make arguments thathold water, to read with care, and to write clearly, not to mention correcdy. The second concerned subject matter: the past is a foreign country, and so to study the past means learning to understand "the other." Thus through historical study students develop a sensitivity which will help them understand other cultures in the modern world as weU. Neither of these rationales is objectionable . I, for one, agree with both ofthem. But neither really addresses the question about the core curriculum. After aU, many other disciplines claim to use evidence with varying degrees ofrigor. Certainly, forthatmatter, EngUshfacultyhelp students become better writers, even ifsome Uterary criticism gives cause for doubt. Moreover , historians are certainlynotalone in their attempt to understand the other: anthropologists have been busy at that effort for some time. Indeed, some ofthe current vogue for "otherness" in our field testifies to anthropology 's influence on the practice ofhistory. Strikingly, few candidates had much to say in reply to these observations, a fact which, I hasten to say, meant that their prospects were not much affected by the question. But the failure ofthe conversation atthis pointsuggests thatformanynewpractitioners in the field, and perhaps for many old ones, there may be no real difference between what historians do and what many oftheir colleagues in the other humanities or social sciences do. I amnotthe onlyperson to observe this. The authors of a recent retrospective ofthe first fiftyyears oíPastandPresentremark , in passing, that"some ofus think that nothing particularly sets history apart from other disciplines."1 Is this reallythe case? In asking candidates to explain what does set historyapartfrom other disciplines, wewere, in effect, asking them to provide that dread thing, a theory ofhistory, or, to be more precise , a theory ofhistory that is specific to history . It seems an unfair request ifthere is no such thing. Indeed, if I'm disturbed about how diese interviews went on this score, and I am, it is only right that I offer such a theory . The ways in which historians approach the past fall largelyinto one oftwo broad categories . The first type stresses the bond between past and present. This approach often produces what is disparaged as whiggish history, i.e., history that misleadingly projects present concerns and ideas onto the past, and so collapses the distance between past and present. The second approach is to focus on that distance between pastand present , and so to uncover the otherness of the past. Historians who do the latter tend, though perhaps not of necessity, to reconstruct a lostworld ofthought. R.G. Collingwood , for instance, defined all history as the history of ideas broadly conceived and stressed the foreignness of the past. A good example ofthe former kind ofhistorywould be a workUke WilUamMcNeiU's Plaguesand Peoples(1977), which reconstructs the origins ofthe modern distribution ofglobal population and power, and does so primarily by deploying an understanding of disease and nutrition informed bycontemporaryscience, while downplaying (though not entirely ignoring) the views of the historical...