As a one-time graduate student of medieval history, I have spent a fair amount of time considering the relevance of historical study to the contemporary world. This issue of relevance becomes especially, well, relevant for scholars of chronologically or geographically removed time periods. For example, I studied 12th-century European monasticism while living in early 21st-century Louisiana. Even had I lived in Europe at the time, I imagine my feeling of irrelevance to the modern age would have been only mildly mitigated. Complicating my search for relevance was the insular intellectual culture of the university at which I found myself. And I do not believe Tulane to be wildly different from most other major American universities, public or private, in this respect (although I imagine private universities are the worst culprits).
I loved my chosen field, but still I looked with envy at the Latin American Studies students, for example, who were immersed in post-colonial theory while living in a post-colonial city. The issues they tackled daily, theoretical as well as practical, often pertained obviously and immediately to the world they actually inhabited as scholars. I eventually left academia, one of the few work atmospheres in which I have ever felt truly comfortable, for a variety of reasons but large among them was the increasing suspicion that my study of history would soon spiral into navel contemplation.
To be clear, just as I believe in art for art's sake I do believe in history for history's sake. There need really be no excuse to tell a good story about the past. However, to spend my entire professional life participating in historical research and writing that would only interest other professionals (or students of said profession) who research and write about history...well, that seemed narrow for a field that touches on every aspect of human existence and, I believe, should be better represented in our daily lived lives.
Since leaving academia, I have started to think about history not merely as a discipline, but as a true epistemological category. Just as spirituality, say, or science or mathematics constitute ways of knowing and thinking that overarch academic disciplines, I believe that history is more than the study of past events. It is a mode of thought and inquiry that leads to what we might call historical knowledge, that is, knowledge of past events, their representations and their historiographical meaning in a variety of contexts. History is a mode of thought premised on one single question: What came before?
Since I can remember, my curiosity about the world has taken shape in relation to that question. I did not just study history as a student, I thought historically as a person, always looking into the origins of things in order to explain their present. I have loved classic films since a young age and I recall in middle school checking out biographies and autobiographies of Katherine Hepburn, James Cagney and Charlie Chaplin because I thought information about their lives might enlighten my experience of watching their art.
In high school, I loved reading fictional accounts of Arthurian legend. I quickly grew curious about the factual basis, if any, of these stories and started reading non-fiction works like accounts of English archaeological digs. Eventually, this exploration from fiction to the facts behind fiction led to my choosing medieval history as my undergrad major and master's field. Academic study of history certainly brought nuance to my understanding of the limits and purpose of historical knowledge. For instance, I am now aware of the scholarly debates concerning the relation (or lack thereof) of an artist's life to her art and concerning the relation of primary source documents to "reality" or lived experience. Academic study has shaded and made subtle my understanding of what it means to think historically, but it certainly did not teach me how to think historically.
So I mostly intend this long, personal musing to gesture toward more complex questions about history's place outside of academia in our lived, quotidian lives. Whether we access history through what many scholars snobbishly refer to as "public history" (e.g., museums, tours, films, popular literature) or we do so simply by remembering and telling the stories of our own lives and our family's lives, history should be a living mode of thought rather than an ossified set of theories. History should speak to our own self-identities in a dynamic way; it should acknowledge ambiguities without resolving them; and we should not forget its most basic form is storytelling
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