Why study history? It’s a question which often gets asked, and the historian R. G. Collingwood’s answer – that history should enable us to ‘see more clearly into the situation in which we are compelled to act’- is one of the best responses. The idea that the study of the past should be applicable to the present has directed the career of Niall Ferguson, who was recently bemoaning the degradation of the subject. Discussing the current focus on race, class and gender in history faculties in a recent speech, Ferguson argued that undergraduates are being robbed of the chance to study events of real significance. Faced with a list of politicised options, American students are turning their backs on the subject altogether: the number of undergraduate history students has fallen at three quarters of U.S. universities since 2012.
The decline in student numbers has not been mirrored in the UK, where history is as popular a degree choice as it has ever been. But nonetheless, Ferguson’s concerns have been echoed on this side of the pond. One ally is fellow TV historian David Starkey, who has complained about a ‘feminised history’ that puts Henry VIII’s wives, rather than the king himself, centre stage. When I began my history degree at Oxford I was similarly sceptical. In Sixth Form I had studied British politics from Elizabeth I to the Restoration and China since 1949: the speeches were long, the wars were numerous and the women were scarce – aside from Elizabeth, only Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, got much of a look in. I was convinced that my degree would offer more of the same. Four years on, I’ve become a cultural history convert.
Of the seven essays I wrote for the course ‘American History since 1863’, two were on race, one was on feminism and another was on popular culture. I took a course on the history of the emotions, and another on the history of art. I wrote an essay on women for every single one of the eight examined courses I took during my degree. I have no regrets. Niall Ferguson wants history students to learn about the historical topics most frequently mentioned in the New York Times – those which can be viewed as part of a train of events that led to specific modern problems. But many of these problems are not nearly as specific as they seem. People have behaved in similar ways for centuries, and cultural history is valuable because it teaches students to think about these patterns.
Critics of cultural history say it is too niche to be applicable to modern day problems. In his speech, Ferguson gave the example of a Yale course entitled ‘Witchcraft and Society in Colonial America’, which has an Oxford counterpart called ‘Witch-craft and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe’. While I can see how such courses might seem overly niche to Ferguson, a man who has published books entitled ‘Empire’ and ‘Civilisation’, this seems to me like an eminently relevant course. What could be more useful for understanding how the recent child sex abuse investigation descended into a witch-hunt? Or the mob mentality that has led to those with doubts about climate change being denounced like heretics?
I wrote my dissertation on the masculine performances of William the Conqueror and his sons, and am frustrated that Oxford’s gender history options continue to focus solely on women. But courses like Cambridge’s ‘Masculinities and Political Culture in Britain, 1832-1901’ show students that cultural history and elite-focussed political history can, and should, be reconciled. Princeton’s Joan Scott laid the foundations for modern gender history in 1986, when she called for historians to consider the ways in which deeply ingrained power dynamics between men and women shaped how historical figures attempted to form all their relationships, including those of vast political significance.
Take Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, during which he attacked far more than Obama’s policy record: to emphasise his difference from his would-be predecessor, Trump performed an inversion of Obama’s brand of masculinity. During his Presidency, Obama was at pains to emphasise his credentials as a modern man: an involved father and supportive husband, he was vocal in his support of women’s issues and unashamed to cry on camera. Trump, in contrast, once alluded to the size of his penis during a presidential primary debate. Implicit in Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Great Again’ was a promise to reinvigorate American masculinity, with a macho America on the world stage and a ‘real man’ in the White House. This was far from a peripheral issue: for many voters, it defined Trump’s candidacy.
And it is my course on emotional history, the most unlikely of them all, that the real world most frequently prompts me to think back to. During the course I considered historical fluctuations in empathy across social divides: it is striking to a modern audience of Macbeth, for example, that the murder of Duncan’s two chamberlains is, in a play so dominated by guilt, treated with such fleeting callousness. Thinking about the historical limits of empathy is useful for understanding the intellectual frameworks that made slavery, Jim Crow and the Holocaust possible. In an increasingly international world, a consideration of the historically-rooted emotional norms of other cultures is essential to diplomacy – why do American presidents get so much more personal in their speeches than our prime ministers, and what is the best way to negotiate with the Chinese?
Cultural history often descends into the ridiculous, but if you strip back the politics, the pedantry and the incessant use of words like ‘problematise’ (studying history nowadays requires disabling your spellchecker), you are left with ideas that make sense. A history degree is never going to teach students everything they need to know about the foundations of the modern world, but it can teach them how to think about the world in which they find themselves. It is a various place, and it is right that history is a various subject.
Carola Binney is a history student at Magdalen College, Oxford
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