Let me begin by saying that this is NOT a post about only history professors. It’s a post about the idea that all professors have a responsibility to mention and even to teach a bit of history, as far as that history relates to the subject matter of their course.
And all profs need to do it in a way that makes that history interesting, fascinating, curiosity-inducing, and even astonishing. Otherwise too many of our students are doomed to a life of disinterest and ignorance when it comes to the events of the past.
There are members of my own family who could care less about history because they never were delighted by the presentation of history as it related to their lives, their families, their thinking, and their culture. They find history insignificant and associate it with names, dates and events they feel they should not know about or care about.
And that is not only unfortunate. It is wrong. We owe it to all of our students to show them the what and the why of the past in ways that make those students both appreciative and curious.
Recently in the news in the United States there was a story about Jews in the Ukraine being forced to register with the government. Now to anyone familiar with World War II and with Adolph Hitler, this brings back thoughts of horrific acts of death and attempted extermination. And many college classes, when something like this is in the news, should bring up history and discuss it. The Holocaust is relevant to classes in history, mass media, psychology, sociology, English, political science, and film studies.
And the holocaust can be made devastatingly real by showing the 1951 French documentary "Night and Fog," created by Alan Resnais. There are very few 35-minute films as real as this one at depicting an event in history that should never be forgotten. And any student who sees it will remember it for years to come.
And it’s the same with many other subjects and events. Why not discuss baseball in early April by showing students a segment from Ken Burns’s multi-part documentary on its history, or the segment from Ken Burns’s documentary on the U.S. Civil War that discusses the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Show it on the date of the actual assassination. Or why not a telling of the story (in an interesting way related to your course subject matter) of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, which set off a diplomatic crisis resulting in World War I.
Obviously this list could go on and on. But the point here is not only the discussing of these things, but the discussing of them in ways that make history interesting.
Why?
Because maybe, as the saying goes, without a significant understanding of history, we are doomed to repeat its tragedies.
It takes a short time in any course to introduce and to fascinate a student about a historical event. It also shows students that there is a certain attraction in historical events, and that there is knowledge and wisdom to be gained from an understanding of those events.
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