The Study of the Past:
Always Directly Related to Our Understanding of the Present
Dr. Cynthia M. Patterson
Former Dean of Academic Advising and Co-Curricular Life at SweetBriarCollege
Opening Convocation Address
by the 1996 recipient of the excellence in teaching award
SweetBriarCollege
First, my gratitude to the students of Sweet Briarfor honoring me with this award. Given the fact that I have always learned as much from students as I believe I have taught them, I accept this award in gratitude to the women of Sweet Briar who have reminded me that teaching and learning are always a mutual enterprise.
Twenty years ago, during the fall semester of my senior year in college, I decided to become an historian. Up until that moment, I had never really considered pursuing a doctorate and devoting my career to the study and teaching of history. I still recall vividly the expressions of both shock and celebration on the faces of the two history professors with whom I had studied as an undergraduate, when I told them I wanted to go to graduate school. To give you all some appreciation for the suddenness of my decision, I will never forget Professor Lane responding to my announcement with the words, "Let's get you to graduate school before you change your mind!" Beyond providing some of the seniors here today with some sense of relief...that others have entered their senior years without really knowing what they were going to do when they left college...I retell this story to set the stage for my comments. I want to share with you why I believe the study of history matters.
It has been my custom for the past 15 years to begin each course by asking the same question on the first day of class: "What is your first historical memory? When was the first time you remember being aware of the world beyond the confines of your family and friends?" Fifteen years ago the number one responses were: the day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon; the Watergate scandal; and the end of the Vietnam War.
During the last four years while I have been teaching at Sweet Briar, the students have cited the assassination attempt on President Reagan and the Challenger disaster as their most distinctive and earliest historical memories.
As the answers to this question began to change over time and become increasingly more remote in time, my first reaction was, "Boy, these kids are getting younger every day" – until I realized the obvious. The students weren't getting younger, I was getting older.
But, on a more serious level, the differences in time and place between my first historical memories and those of my students help to explain why the study of the past is always directly related to our understanding of the present. The question of when historical events first enter into our consciousness is important because it begins to define what we think of as history, and how we all view the past from the perspective of the present.
As a child of the '50s who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, my interest in history began when I realized that the America I had been taught to believe in was not the America I was seeing on the evening news. The American history I had been taught told the story of a great, democratic nation where equality, social justice, and righteousness were the defining characteristics of the Republic. From the founding fathers to Dwight Eisenhower, American history was the story of a great nation, a land of progress, prosperity, and rugged individualism. The events of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the war in Vietnam, and all of the social, cultural, and political turmoil of that decade left me bewildered, confused, and disillusioned.
The only way I knew then, and still know, to come to terms with the present is to explore the past. Recognizing the importance of an historical perspective for understanding the present does not mean that history repeats itself. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Every moment in history is unique. While all of history leads us to understand the complex interrelationships between both change and continuity, history cannot repeat itself, any more than today represents a carbon copy of yesterday.
I remember one of my former students asking me why we have to study history. After all, nothing changes; what happened, happened. While it may be true that the past doesn't change, our understanding of it does. For example, up until the 1960s, the vast majority of historical scholarship and teaching focused on the experiences of elite, white males. The experiences of women, minorities, and working class Americans were virtually excluded from this particular conception of history. As Americans in the sixties became more interested in issues of gender, race, and class, our understanding of history was dramatically redefined.
The study of women, for example, has resulted in the re-conceptualization of almost every aspect of American history, including our definitions of historical significance. The struggle of women to achieve their rights as citizens no longer remains invisible, but now contributes to our understanding of the development of a democratic society. Where once we believed that the most important events in our history occurred in the realms of political and economic life, we now understand that family and social life have exerted an equally significant influence on the evolution of American society.
Over the past four years, I have listened to many students who lament the fact that they were born at a time when nothing "big" was happening in the world. An equally widespread contemporary view holds that we can, as individuals and as a nation, return to a simpler time, when the problems and challenges we faced were simpler, or at least less daunting. While we are certainly not the first Americans to engage in romanticizing the past, or to use the past as a place to seek refuge from the present, our desire to do so reveals another insight into the value and meaning of the historical enterprise.
The study of history forces us to examine not only how the realities of the past have influenced the present, but also how we use the past, and especially myths about our past, to structure our understanding of our individual and collective identity.
As the historian James Oliver Robertson has observed: The truth about a people, about America and Americans, resides both in American myths and in American realities . . . Myths are stories, they are attitudes extracted from stories; they are 'the ways things are' as people in a particular society believe them to be; and they are the models people refer to when they try to understand their world and its behavior.
For historians, therefore, myths are realities. What people believe happened is as important as knowing what actually happened.
Recognizing the fact that inequality has always been a fact of American life, for example, does not mean that the ideal of equality and the myths Americans have created and believed in to support that ideal are lies or historically irrelevant. The task of the historian is to identify both the public record and the public memory, and to try to explain their relationship to one another.
Throughout our history, myths have served as a means for both rationalizing and eradicating the gaps that have existed between our ideals and our actions. For example, in 1896, the myth of the American Dream helped white America justify racial discrimination on the basis of the doctrine of separate but equal. Almost 70 years later, Martin Luther King would stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and draw on the power of that same myth to convince Americans that racial discrimination must end.
Does it really matter that we know that George Washington never cut down a cherry tree, or that the North fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, rather than to eradicate slavery? Yes. But what might matter more is explaining why and how those specific myths became realities within our historical memory.
Let me shift gears, and for a few moments share with you some of my thoughts as an American historian on the election of 1996, and on the dawn of a new century.
First: Vote. One of the most popular beliefs permeating contemporary discourse is that voting doesn't matter, that special interest groups and big business have all the power, that the individual has no control over either government or politics.
This belief has become so widespread in recent years that I am often amazed that we still purport to believe in either democracy or individualism. Today I ask you to think about this myth of individual political disempowerment, and to ask the question an historian 50 years from now will ask: Why did Americans who clearly had the right to vote, forfeit that right, at the very time that they also claimed that government and politicians were one of the major sources of America's problems? Why did Americans in the 1990s lament the lack of accountability in the political process at the very moment that they failed to utilize the power of the ballot box?
Second, remember that history is both reality and perceptions of reality. Whenever you hear phrases such as "History tells us," or "History proves," step back and think like an historian. Ask yourself if you are being told an historical fact, or being asked to believe in a myth. If it is a myth, try to figure why that myth has power, why it is being told at this time, and what purpose it serves.
Human beings, Gerch Lemer has written, have always used history in order to find their direction toward the future. To repeat the past or to depart from it.
Today as you students prepare to become the first generation of women who will come of age in the 21st century, I invite you all to remember that every generation gets to write its own history.