Sarah Holtz interviews Marc Wortman, author of the article
“History Majors Are Becoming a Thing of the Past, Except in the Ivy League”

MW: First of all, I was reporting on some statistics that had been analyzed by the American Historical Association showing that there had been a tremendous fall off in the number of students choosing to major in history in American colleges. There were about 35,000, 36,000 majors in 2008 and that's down to about 24,000 now. And then there was a sort of interesting and in some ways disturbing counter trend, which is that at some of the nation's most elite colleges, there actually has been a significant rise in the number of history majors. So on the one hand, there's this serious fall off in people who think that they need to study history with any kind of depth. And yet, there's also this group that thinks studying history in-depth is really important. And I tried to figure out what that meant.

So what I think it says is that college, where enrollments have actually been increasing, has become viewed as essentially a pathway to a first job. People go to college because they think it's going to lead to employment primarily. In contrast, at these elite colleges and universities where people feel quite secure about their future, they look at college not as a pathway to a first job necessarily, but as college as preparation for career, college as preparation for citizenship and college as preparation for life. And that's become something of a luxury. And I really fear that situation. I think that nobody should be looking at their education as anything less than preparation for life and not merely as a stepping stone into a first job.

SH: In what ways do you think the study of history does prepare young people for life and for professional work?

MW: You begin to develop a sense of the complexity of the past, the complications that are there, that continue to be present. It's sort of remarkable that I think when we live solely in the present, we tend to see the world in very black and white terms. We tend to ignore the real complexity of things. And when you have the opportunity to look into, with any kind of depth, into history, at any stage, you begin to realize just how complicated things are, just how complex things are. And you can start to develop a sort of more strategic outlook on your own present situation.

SH: Yeah, that's so interesting to me, that idea that learning history can kind of create a gray area for people. Whereas, that kind of black and white thinking can maybe lead to the historical amnesia that you also discuss in your article.

MW: Yeah. We as a people tend to have amnesia about our past. We have had the good fortune as a nation of being remarkably prosperous and successful. So that we can often make mistakes in the past and then just move on and leave them behind and forget about them. I think even if we know nothing about the past, it's still present in us. If we don't understand our past, we're not going to be able to know how to treat our present ills.

SH: Do you think that there is a connection between studying history and peacemaking?

MW: Absolutely. If you want to have an understanding about relations with people with whom you are in either in conflict or in danger of having a conflict with, you need to understand where those conflicts arise, why they began, why they continue into the present. And you can't simply say, oh, that's the past. Let's forget about it. I can remember years ago I was traveling in Poland and there were some Germans who were on a train traveling through Poland, that I was overhearing their conversation. And they were talking about how they don't understand why the Poles still hate them, that that was war and that was in the past. Well, you have to understand what the origins of that hatred are and begin to seek ways to find reconciliation.

Reconciliation doesn't come about by ignoring the past. Reconciliation comes about by understanding the truths of the past, acknowledging the pain and hurt that can be left over from the past and working together to heal those injuries that are left over from the past.

Sarah Holtz interviews Charles Edel, co-author of The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order

CE: We start the book really with a puzzle. Because if you think about the ancient Greeks, if you kind of send your mind back to high school or college, whenever you were forced to read those Greek tragedies, there's this puzzle that comes out of it because the ancient Greeks, really the ancient Athenians, are such a high achieving culture.

They have a Navy that dominates the seas. They have an empire that straddles the known world in the Mediterranean. They have a relatively liberal, certainly a much more liberal political system than anyone around, which is the pride of their citizens and which we still take inspiration from today. And yet, at the heart of their civilization, they placed tragedy. They had tragic productions, plays, that they subsidized through the state coffers that they had all citizens go out to. And everyone would sit on the hillside and watch the great and the good fall, due to errors, due to ignorance, due to their own hubris.

And it was the Greek understanding that the best way to prevent tragedy was to think constantly about it, to keep comfort with one's worst fears. And that watching this would scare them, I mean, would really scare the bejesus out of them in some ways and propel them as a community to take actions that they wouldn't otherwise undertake, to make sure that their own society did not experience such an end.

And the interesting part is that even though they were willing to keep comfort with their worst fears, think about how bad things could get, stare disaster in the face, the Ancient Athenians were by no means a depressive people. In fact, they were very optimistic, forward-looking people. That's really what we're trying to capture with this idea of a tragic sensibility.

SH: From the little that I know about studying tragedy in school, I do remember that there's usually a protagonist and that protagonist typically has a fatal flaw or something that leads him or her to a terrible outcome. But these outcomes are largely avoidable. So what's the importance of that idea and how do you see that playing out in the present day?

CE: I think you've basically nailed it, that there is generally a tragic flaw in the heroines and the heroes throughout this book that leads them to not understand the circumstances in which they find themselves. Now, of course, as an audience member or even just as a reader of this play, you can see what's happening. You can see the storm clouds gathering and you know that they are struggling in the face of an unknown present where they don't have all the facts on hand to make sense.

And yet, I think we come to a slightly different interpretation in some ways than what you laid out in that this is not just the gods mucking around in humans’ lives, and that we can't have any volition. We can't have any control possibly. Because what seems to be celebrated over and over in these plays, which makes them actually, I think, acts of celebration, not kind of miserable, depressing plays that you're supposed to watch, is that people are willing to take action even in the face of an unknown future, even when they don't necessarily know that the outcome will be great, but they're willing to take actions to defend the values that they think are most important, even if they fall. That's what's the message.

And so in some ways, yes, the fatal flaw is there, but Aristotle who wrote about the ancient tragedies said, the key to this was this concept of Catharsis, right? That you would see your heroes fall. It would scare the living daylights out of you, and that would purify the audience and make them think, what did they need to wrestle with as a community? What did they need to think about as a society in order to stave off such an end for themselves?

SH: I would like at this point to kind of shift focus away from the Athenians and towards your discussion of the United States. Because you do spend much of the book discussing the United States and its relationship with other countries. And in the U.S., I feel like there's often this false narrative when we're learning about history and it's one of teleology that we're always moving towards greater progress. Do you think that idea in itself is a historical?

CE: I don't know if I think it's completely a historical, right? This is the Steven Pinker argument about the enlightenment, that things a through all their ups and downs are progressing to a more stable, more prosperous world. President Obama, I think, really encapsulated this in that very famous quote that he had that if you closed your eyes and wished and thought when would you want to live at any point in history to have a healthier, more prosperous and more stable life, you would undoubtedly choose the present. I tend to think that's correct.

But that doesn't mitigate the fact that we are watching in contemporary times the foundations of the order that we live in being undermined, being challenged. And simultaneously, and this goes to Steven Pinker's argument. It's true. We do live in a more technologically, more prosperous society. We also had to live through two World Wars in the 20th century that got us to where we are.

So I think your question about teleology is really a question about do things move on a straight line or do they tend to get punctured with enormous ups and downs? And it is a real Greek lesson, but I think it's a real contemporary charge. And this is one that we try to make in the book that to think that your own time is immune from breakdowns of the international order is a profoundly historical way of thinking about things. In fact, almost every age, if you kind of glance back, some of the leading, this is true right before the Thirty Years’ War breaks out, which we discussed. This is true before the Napoleonic Wars break out, before World War I breaks out, famously in the words of Norman Angell that it would be impractical for the great powers to go to war together in 1910 because their economies are so intertwined. In every age, the leading thinkers make the point that these foundations are becoming more stable as in fact it is crumbling underneath their feet.

And what we really see in the present, and this is where the book drives towards, is that you can really see the warning lights beginning to flash on the dashboard of really what are the drivers of international conflict, but really of great power competition and in fact great power war?

SH: These days we seem to view tragedy in this kind of kneejerk way, that it's simply depressing when something tragic happens. How do you think we can move towards finding inspiration in tragedy rather than just finding it depressing?

CE: It's a great question, Sarah. And in some sense, I think we closed the book with the image of it would be impractical to cram all of American society into theater benches and show them horribly scary plays. That's not what we're really advocating for. Although, we do think it's important that Americans get more cognizant of the fact that breakups are as much the norm as they are the exception. And the best way to understand this, short of living through this, is to read history.

But I do think your question actually touches on something of a deeper level about how do you deal with this? Because in some ways to open the newspaper is to be overwhelmed and sometimes to be very, very depressed. We all know what the news is like. They don't really celebrate uplifting stories.

And what we say are a couple of different things. The first is you need to be realistic about where things are and where things are headed. And we already talked about the metaphor of the warning lights lighting up on the dashboard. We think that that is true, despite the fact that the world is generally more healthy and prosperous than it's been ever before. If we think about kind of the democratic recession that's happening, the advance of authoritarian states, you need to be realistic about what's happening and that historically, this is a pretty bad combination. But even if you're realistic, you need to be careful not to fall into the trap of -- this is an argument against complacency. Understand what's going on, but don't fall into the trap of fatalism, that there's nothing that we can do about this because the gods are just mucking around or because our adversaries are overwhelming and powerful. There's plenty that we can do. We are not powerless to take action in the face of these things.

SH: Well, Charles, thank you so much for talking with me.

CE: Well, Sarah, thanks so much for having me on. This was a great conversation I thought.

Sarah Holtz interviews Jeffery Darrensbourg, creator/editor of online zine,
“Bulbancha Is Still A Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans”

JD: Well, the zine, Bulbancha is Still a Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans, kind of grew out of the friendship I have with my co-editor Ozone 504. We're both mixed ethnicity, native plus something else, people. We’re both like also 40-something aging punk rockers. And this kind of grows out of our frustration with the celebrations leading up to the Tricentennial of New Orleans. So, New Orleans is always in our zine in quotes. So the Tricentennial of New Orleans and our desire to have some sort of cultural counterweight to that.

SH: I'm wondering if you could, for those outside of New Orleans and outside of Louisiana, could you explain the title of the zine?

JD: Well, Bulbancha is Still a Place is our attempt to remain slightly un-colonized. We say that as long as people still use the word Bulbancha for this place, it is not completely colonized. And that is the original name. It is the only one of the native names that have come down to us from the pre-colonial era. And it means a place of foreign languages or the place of other tongues. Tunica Biloxi, Choctaw, Ishak or Ishakkoy, Houma. And so a lot of these people who would be trading would have to speak a language together, which would be Mobilian usually, which is known in slang as Yama. And so it became known as a place, hey, if you're going there, you're going to meet other people who speak other languages. And we always emphasize that that means that the original native place, Bulbancha, was already a cosmopolitan place. People often speak of how cosmopolitan New Orleans is, but that route did not arrive with ships from across the Atlantic. It was already kind of a place where cultures interacted.

SH: What does it mean to decolonize history?

JD: It means to tell it from the point of view of people other than powerful white people. So it means that people who are lionized as heroes are not heroes to us. Or things that are thought of as important events might not be that important to us. Or they might be important to us in a different way. So around here we always have a relationship with history. There's a lot of people who come here, have historical tours. And often times, the sort of tourist history leaves out important aspects. So, our World War II museum here in town is an advertising campaign that's called “The Arsenal of Democracy,” about the building of this war effort. And my native grandfather fought in World War II. But arsenal of democracy it was not. Because when he came back to Louisiana, he could not legally vote. So there was no democracy for him. He had the same voting rights here as he would have had in Nazi Germany.

 So things like that is what it means to de-colonize. It means to say like, look, this is not the only way to think about this. And so if we understand them in the typical way, like I was taught in history class growing up, we're going to understand them from a certain set of priorities and a certain set of values that I do not hold and that I think many other people should not hold as well.

SH: Could you tell us about your experiences teaching history in Louisiana schools?

JD: I did teach history here in high school and also taught English and Special Education. And the thing about history is that so often it does not include very much from the point of view of either native people or enslaved people or from people of color in the general narrative of American history. And then for some of us in the zine, especially those of us who are Louisiana Creole, I always like to put in elements of people who are both African and native, which I am.

So I think that that's an untold story. And it's kind of remarkable when we think of the things that we teach students about, say, westward expansion and so-called pioneers, people who went into places that were already very well populated and destroyed ways of life. And trying to understand American history from the native point of view means that you kind of have to teach some things that are not necessarily going to be on the state-mandated exams. And that's always a tension because the students need to pass those exams, and at the same time there's also a commitment one has to have to the truth at some point where one has to say, you know, there are things about this that are not being told that you need to think about.

For example, think of how influential the era of reconstruction is in the South and the formation of Jim Crow and everything. And Louisiana history in high school begins at 1849 and skips the Civil War. So that seems like a very deliberate attempt to avoid discussion of some of the uglier aspects of American history that passed through this place. And I think that it's important that the people in this country know a broader story about what happened and a story that encompasses more types of people of every sort. And that helps them not only get a better picture of the past, but also a better picture of current situations that people endure now.

SH: There's also such an element of power imbalance and continuing to structure things that way as well.

JD: True. That is so true. People who have often not had a voice, now I think that there is a sense that you can see more native culture and be aware of it. Maybe something was started with the American Indian movement around the late sixties and early seventies, just to put that back into American consciousness, which hadn't been the case since the conclusion of the Indian Wars in the 1890s.

And now we have famous native authors and celebrities and natives on TV, people like Adam Beach or whatever, Wes Studi and the new poet laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo. There are people like that who are now more visible and that's a great thing because they may be encourage people to consider, hey, maybe there's some culture here that you might be interested in even if you're not native. There might be something here that you can relate to and maybe should have a look at. I think that's a good thing.

SH: It reminds me of the quote, I think it's on the back of the first issue, “Nothing about us without us”.

JD: Yeah, “Nothing about us without us”. There was a long time where no stories or anything about native people were told by native people. And it makes a huge difference when the stories are told by the people that they're about. There's a complete difference of perspective and a difference of emphasis and nuance that you get. Similar to how any person could just have someone else tell a story about them and might not capture all the things that they understood about it themselves going through it. And that is a big thing now. And there are native people around to tell the stories.

Something I think any person can do wherever they live is to try to learn about the indigenous nations of their area and not only reading, but maybe if someone is speaking or whatnot or if someone is working on a project where the indigenous people could be relevant, find them. It's not that hard if it's what you want to do. And all it takes, if you find one native person in the area, believe me, no matter how obscure this area is, if you find one, they know another one. And if you want native people to be involved in something, reach out. There's never an excuse not to. And that's something I hope people will think about as the native aspects of so many of the things we celebrate, that those things had an impact on native people and native people might've been involved with it. And that's something that I urge people to emphasize, not only where I live in Bulbancha, but anywhere in North America.

SH: Thank you so much, Jeffery, for speaking with me.

JD: Yakoke, thank you for having me on.