"So Matt, you’re getting a PhD in History… what are you
going to do with that?” Whenever I hear that question—and as you can imagine,
I’ve gotten that question an awful lot over the years—I kind of laugh it off.
I’ve known for a long time that what I wanted to do was to build a career in
the academy, even though for the last decade or so that has increasingly become
a seemingly poor life choice. I want to find a spot at a state university where
I can lecture, work with graduate students as they develop and pursue their own
research interests, and, of course, to write. As I’m (ever so slowly) ramping
up to this dissertation, I’m just now beginning to think about what kind of
histories I want to write, and that’s a philosophical adventure all its
own. But what I want to write about
today is the other question I hear every time someone asks “what are you going
to do with your degree?”—“so just why do you even want to be a historian
anyway?”
What’s funny is, despite all this time pursuing this path,
it hasn’t necessarily been a question I’ve really tried to seriously answer
until now. My idea for this blog post actually came from one of my middle
school age students at Boys and Girls Club (yes, that’s how long ago I started
this damn post) asking for help on her history homework. She was having trouble
because, to paraphrase her, “History is boring and pointless.” Myself, taken
aback, replied “I’m a historian, I do history for a living!” to which her completely
candid response was “Gross!” This is not an entirely uncommon conversation, I
have learned, to have with middle and high school students. I understand a bit
that it’s a matter of perspective: when you’ve only lived 10 years, everything
seems pretty static and unchanging. It’s hard to see yourself as a part of or a
product of history. Also, if you’re a student living in the First World,
history seems to have worked out pretty well for you up ‘til this point so why
bother to ask how we got here, right?
I’m a little loathe to admit that until my sophomore year of
high school (2003-04?), I was largely the same. I was a good student, so I got
good grades in history, but much of it didn’t particularly peak my interest.
From what I can remember, I did a pretty fun diorama about the Battle of Bunker
Hill when I was in 5th grade, had a blast making a model cross-bow
(non-working, obviously) with my dad and grandpa for a 6th grade
world history project on the medieval period, hated the Kansas history unit we
were forced to do in 7th grade (though I do have a distinct memory
of this class discussing the 2000 election, where I learned that the electoral
college was a thing and that everything I had been told about American politics
up to that point was complete bullshit). I honestly can’t remember much from 8th
or 9th grade, but around this time I was becoming invested in the
other love of my life, the one that would ultimately lead me into History’s
open arms: that’s right kids, I’m talking about communism.
“Just why in the world are you interested in Russia/the
Soviet Union, Matt?” Because I get this question a lot too, I’m going to try to
piece this together as best I can, well, historically. I really want to say
that it all started with watching Enemy
at the Gates (a film I later learned rankles the hackles of actual historians
like no other, and I hope to return to this soon to illustrate just why that
is) one fine afternoon with my good
friends Derek Payne and Britt Dahlstrom.[1]
Little did I know it, but this would be the start of a life-long love affair
with the country, the city, and the history of the Soviet Union. Even with the
still relatively uncritical mind of an 8th grader, I was nonetheless
captivated by the film’s aesthetic, of the story of the city’s heroic
defenders, and the depiction of the struggle between these two political
systems that, at the time, I still couldn’t really properly understand. I also
thought that snipers were obviously super fucking cool and that a war movie was
dope and there’s even that one sex scene even though you don’t see boobs and
you know, 8th grader stuff. That year I would even try to recreate
battles from the movie using plastic army guys and 4th of July
fireworks in my driveway, using old textbooks from middle school and cardboard
boxes as buildings (which were of course very historically-accurately burned to
the ground). But this was just the start of obsession with the Soviet Union,
because to understand it, I would need to figure out just what this “communism”
thing was.
That same summer that I recreated the Battle of Stalingrad,
I also went to the McPherson Public Library and checked out the only copy of
Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto.
Now, I fully admit that I had no fucking clue what dialectical materialism
actually meant, and I most certainly pronounced “bourgeoisie” in my head as
“borg-ee-osey.” However, even though I had to chew through like, 80 super
confusing pages to get to it, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to
lose but your chains” still struck a chord. Engels really knew how to sell an
idea, even to a 13 year old kid well over a century later. I had found a means
of grappling with all my questions regarding the complexities of human nature,
and I was pretty smug about it.
I think its worth noting here, too, that as a kid raised in
a small Midwest town, brought up in a Methodist church, created some pretty
stubborn paradoxes for my early political thinking. Upon learning what
socialism was all about, combined with how derisively it was still talked about
by nearly everyone around me, despite being pretty verbatim all the things we’re
supposed to do anyway according to the Bible… I’ve never been one keen to
tolerate hypocrisy well, I guess is what I’m saying. Even while away at church
camp that summer I found myself talking about socialism with other kids at camp—there
was one older kid named Karl (I shit you not) who had a similar obsession, and
he and I bonded pretty quickly discussing the contradictions between the
teachings of the church and actual American politics.
Really though, in the grand scheme of things, this was all a
lead up to sophomore year of high school when, as a good student, I enrolled in
AP World History with the man, the legend, John Lujano. How to explain Lujano
to those of you who don’t already know him? He was a demanding teacher who
taught a demanding class, but under his harsh demeanor, he really cared about
his students learning history. He was genuinely fucking hilarious, but he could
also be absolutely terrifying, both in controlling the room and in detailing
his high expectations for us. For those of you who didn’t take AP Hist in high
school, the class is designed to culminate in an exam that actually gave
college credit. The test is graded on a scale of 1-5, and you have to get at
least a 3 to “pass.” From the first day of class, we were told that if we
didn’t focus, that if we didn’t take this shit seriously, we would not get a 3.
We started writing practice exam questions in the first month of class, just to
show us what it entailed.
I think one of the things that instantly made AP World my favorite
class of my sophomore year was that it was so challenging. I was a student
where most subjects came easily for me. This didn’t. It was a whole new way of
compiling, processing, and making sense of information, not to mention really
having to develop my skills as a writer. In addition, I’m so glad that the
class focused on WORLD history. When so much of the history we’re fed as kids
is so focused around American History or Western Civ… HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT? ASIA
AND AFRICA HAVE INCREDIBLY DYNAMIC AND IMPORTANT HISTORIES, TOO! So many more
stories were out there that I had never heard of before, so many incredible
stories. Go look up Ibn Batuta (who was basically the first anthropologist who
walked all over Africa just to observe its diverse cultures), or Xiang Hi (who
was a eunuch, commanded a fleet of ships that would have made Colombus cry, and
brought a fucking giraffe back to the court of the Emperor of China). I still remember these stories so vividly,
because Lujano put them front and center. We were critical of topics other
history teachers would have rather have not talked about: the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, European colonial practice, American internment camps… what have
you. Not only that, but we talked about history not so much in terms of linear
development to the present day, but rather an extended set of logical consequences
stemming from broad scale human interaction over time. I learned more about the
way human beings work that year more than my whole life prior. While I didn’t
quite fully understand why just yet, I was definitely hooked on history. As a
subject, at least. Still didn’t think of it as a career. That come’s much later
in the story.
I made it through AP World and got a 4 on the exam. That
meant that I could cash it in for college credit later, which was great I
guess. At the time, I assumed I was knocking out one of my gen eds. Because
until my freshman year of college, I thought I was going to be an architect. I
loved drawing, and I was pretty handy with CAD (even if I spent most of that
class in high school playing Unreal Tournament/NES games/Impossible
Creatures/Halo). It wasn’t until I got to K-State and saw the sheer amount of
math and physics and tedious time spent in a studio to get that degree that I
began to have second thoughts. I ended up falling back toward the subject that
I had been fond of in high school, for really no other reasons than it
interested me and I was good at it. I started taking Arabic as well, because
when people used to ask me “what will you do with a Bachelor’s in history?” I
thought to myself “well… work for the state department? I guess?”
Arabic ended up being a bust, and so did Mandarin Chinese a
year later. I don’t have a particular knack for languages, so maybe trying to
pick of two of the hardest ones possible for no other reason than it might come
in handy down the line if I try to work for the government wasn’t the best
idea. Especially as it became apparent, the more political science that I took,
that my personal input into state affairs would be valued less than game theory
and real politick—observing U.S. foreign policy abroad both then and now has
made it very apparent to me that there is no place for idealism in neoliberal practice.
As my disillusion became more acute and I became more and more critical of the
state and politics in general, the less I could reconcile the idea of being an
imperialist stooge for a living. Every time I’ve gone to a professionalization
talk and hear from an academic turned policy advisor, I give Past Matt a
high-five for bailing on that when he did.
(It was late in my senior year of high-school that I got
into Against Me! and the political punk music scene—the theme for this blog post
might very well be Propagandhi’s “A People’s History of the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OihwaWQOI54)
It was ultimately my junior year before I was able to take a class dedicated strictly to the study of Russian history, taught by none other than my former professor now friend David Stone, a military historian wunderkind with a passion for Russian history to match my own. I threw myself into the class, getting I think some of the only 4.0/A+s of my undergrad career. I chewed through our readings, had my hand up in every class discussion (where I got to debate and argue with the future friends Ashlyn Yarnell, Gloria Funcheon, and Ben Harkins), and devoted more time and effort to papers than I knew myself capable of. It was clear then that I had found my area of study, and beyond that, that there was still so much I needed to know. I would need to go on to grad school, that’s all there was to it. In Dr. Stone’s words: “when you get there, you’re going to feel like you know nothing. It will be absolutely true, but it’s OK. You just need to read more. And you will read… lots more.” And that has been exactly what I’ve done for the past 5 years, and I’m certainly not done yet!
It was ultimately my junior year before I was able to take a class dedicated strictly to the study of Russian history, taught by none other than my former professor now friend David Stone, a military historian wunderkind with a passion for Russian history to match my own. I threw myself into the class, getting I think some of the only 4.0/A+s of my undergrad career. I chewed through our readings, had my hand up in every class discussion (where I got to debate and argue with the future friends Ashlyn Yarnell, Gloria Funcheon, and Ben Harkins), and devoted more time and effort to papers than I knew myself capable of. It was clear then that I had found my area of study, and beyond that, that there was still so much I needed to know. I would need to go on to grad school, that’s all there was to it. In Dr. Stone’s words: “when you get there, you’re going to feel like you know nothing. It will be absolutely true, but it’s OK. You just need to read more. And you will read… lots more.” And that has been exactly what I’ve done for the past 5 years, and I’m certainly not done yet!
There are so many people I need to properly thank somehow
for pushing me to keep going with grad school even when the going got tough—Dave,
for his sound advice of “what do you mean you haven’t taken Russian language
yet?? Do that! Do that now!”; Sirs Ken Yohn and Peter “TheLibrarian,” who
taught me how to ace an admissions process while we were all hungover on a
sidewalk in front of a church in God knows where Iowa; Eve Levin, who’s
infinite knowledge of the comings and goings of the Russian field not only
pushed me to reach my full potential and even matched me with the perfect
advisor at UW… So many others, not nearly enough time to do them all justice. I’m
aready freaking out about how many books I’m going to need to write just to
dedicate them to everyone possible (and the inevitable +1 I’ll have to do to
devote to my patient wife and loving family… ughhhhhhhhh). Basically though,
grad school has been a process of solid reinforcement and continual challenge,
the environment where I thrive, and in pursuit of doing something I love.
Looking back, it’s hard to see how anyone could have talked me into doing
anything else.
Now though, as the realities of adult life press in on all
sides, and my dissertation has all but come to a halt even before it could
begin due to a lack of funding, I’m really pressed to answer the question.
Would I have been better off learning a trade? Should I have sought out a job
right out of college and put those skills to use, even if it’s not actually
doing history? Who really is actually going to benefit from my work? Why even bother,
when the average middle-schooler’s and, hell, the average adult’s first
reaction to me talking about what I do will be “Gross!”
I’ve tried to look at this in two parts: the benefits of my
being a historian to myself and then to society. They’re definitely somewhat
interrelated concepts, obviously, because what I subjectively think is good for
society might not always be what others (or society itself) thinks is good for
it, but whatever. From my own standpoint, the decision to make history, and
therefore academia, my career was a sort of process of omission. The more and
more I looked at the world around me and the paths that I could take as I made
my way through it, I came to see jobs that I simply couldn’t reconcile myself
to do. I couldn’t work for a state that would regularly violate my own
principles. I certainly couldn’t work in the private sector—to make a buck
within the current system to me seems predicated on the exploitation of
someone, somehow, somewhere down the line. Though this is no means the case,
the onerous nature of the alternatives somehow made the academy seem like a
bastion of neutrality, a port in the storm where I could nurture my own values
and find a way to make them reach out into the world.
Beyond that—and this is something I’ve known for a long,
long time—if there’s one thing in this world that I love and can appreciate, it’s
the telling of a good story. Whether it be a funny anecdote, a powerful lived
experience, or the unbridled imaginary creation of entire worlds for my D&D
group, I have always been able to tell a story. (To put this further into nerd
terms, revealed above by my Dungeons and Dragons confession, at heart I’m a
Bard—CHA has always been my highest stat, no question). Not only do I love a
good story, but I’ve come to appreciate now just how stories shape our selves,
our ideas, our cultures, and our societies. Stories play such a central role in
the way we form our worldview, that all of a sudden I feel that my calling as a
storyteller is imbued with a power that is hard to access and few will
appreciate, but nonetheless it’s still there. The one thing I want to do for
the rest of my life is be a story teller, like the priests and shamans of old,
a keeper of knowledge and wisdom who can, through my words, pass this gift on
to others.
Which I guess brings me to the value of my work to the rest
of you. Before I get to why I think my particular research is important, just
in general, I’ll take a page from the idea of the “Life Boat Debate” (for those
who haven’t heard me expound on this yet, I first heard about it from a
fantastic This American Life story
that aired back in 2010.[2]
Basically undergrads pack a lecture hall, which is then sealed to form the “life
boat” of all that remains of humanity after some disaster, while 9
representatives from various academic departments sit on stage and try to
convince the students that theirs is the discipline that will be most important
to human survival.) My argument to the kids would be “WELP history shows that
odds are one of you is going to emerge as a despot after all this, and you know
what really helps to have on your side? The people who write this history books.”
This is of course, my joke answer, and in no way reflects what I would actually
do, but it point to something I think is important: so much of the darkness
that permeates American politics today is the subscription and cover of bad
histories. Why would we need Black Lives Matter? (because 300+ years of
slavery, oppression, and systematic targeting of minority groups by the United
States government didn’t have that much of an impact, you see) We can’t have
immigrants coming in and ruining the country! (Worked out really poorly in the
past, clearly, we let in a whole lot of white supremacists who keep spouting
jingoistic bigotry) Japan would have never surrendered if we didn’t drop not
one, but two atomic bombs on cities,
not military targets or installations but civilian
populations. We HAD to do it! So it’s totally not a war crime.[3]
The problem is, just as often as not, the bad history isn’t
coming from outside the discipline. The
call is coming from inside the house, so to speak. If there’s one thing I’ve
learned from reading a lot on Soviet and Modern European history, produced for
and by all corners of the political spectrum, it’s that there is a culture war
going on in the pages of text books. The past itself is up for grabs, and
historians are the foot soldiers trying to stake claim on not just the past,
but the future. Because how we remember the past matters a whole lot, a lot
more than probably you’ve been willing to think about up to this point if you
haven’t devoted your entire career to it for the last 10 years. But I have.
I hate bad histories. I hate what subscribing to them might they
engender in the future. The whole “those who forget history are doomed to
repeat it” is bullshit. We willingly wipe away the truth again and again so we
don’t have to face it, and precisely so we can do the exact same horrible shit
in the future. We practice selective amnesia so we can sleep at night. Those
who preserve history make it less likely for the same kinds of people who did
horrible things in the past won’t get away with it in the future. That is our
job.
Still though, many of my readers living here in the States
might yet be asking, “why the hell should we care what happened in Stalingrad
after they beat the Nazi’s? What use can that possibly be to us?” My answer to
that is fairly straightforward, though perhaps not entirely convincing. The
experience of those Soviet men and women who survived the war was an entirely
human one. These were people that looked into the open, waiting jaws of
annihilation as they knew it, and only just pulled back from the brink. They
had hopes and dreams for their future, their children and grandchildren’s
futures, and they all had a past, one that you could both be proud of and
conflicted about at the same time (and surely that’s relatable to some of us,
right?). They struggled, together, to rebuild a community that was lost, and to
in turn produce something entirely new. They strove to achieve socialism,
whatever that might have meant to them individually, even while confronting
some of the harsher realities of what the revolution had produced. Through
their trials and tribulations, their joys and their sorrows, I hope to learn--as well as to show
others--something about ourselves as human beings.
There’s definitely something this little hiatus from doing
history has taught me: there is no other work in this world that I would rather
be doing than doing research and telling stories. A combination of factors has
been really wearing me down lately, and it doesn’t look like the funding
situation is going to get any better anytime soon, so it’s hard to say when I’ll
get to go back to the actual work I want to be doing. I’m trying to get things
moving that direction, but… the process, in light of reality of circumstance,
is going to be slow.
Anyway, thank the Gods for their rainy intervention this morning to finally give me the time to get this damn post done and posted. Hopefully I’ve answered my own question, and, finally, all of yours. Perhaps I’ve revealed a window into what it is that makes me tick, or if you know me well, maybe this is all old news. Either way, its good to finally get it all down on paper. Next time someone asks, “Hey Matt, so why are you a historian?” I can just push my imaginary glasses up my nose, geek snort, and say, “well, if you go on my blog…”
Until next time, comrades…
-MC
Anyway, thank the Gods for their rainy intervention this morning to finally give me the time to get this damn post done and posted. Hopefully I’ve answered my own question, and, finally, all of yours. Perhaps I’ve revealed a window into what it is that makes me tick, or if you know me well, maybe this is all old news. Either way, its good to finally get it all down on paper. Next time someone asks, “Hey Matt, so why are you a historian?” I can just push my imaginary glasses up my nose, geek snort, and say, “well, if you go on my blog…”
Until next time, comrades…
-MC
[1] I
would like to point out that, too this day, I still prefer the light, buttery
taste of Nestle Town House Crackers over Keebler Club Crackers
[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/402/save-the-day (The Life Boat Debate is Act II, skip ahead to about the 42nd minute if you don't want to listen to the full episode).
[3]
This is becoming an increasingly disturbing refrain from the American
government, apparently you can only commit war crimes if you don’t have the
backing of the world’s largest and most invasive military. See http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476178817/pentagon-report-says-airstrikes-on-afghan-hospital-wasnt-a-war-crime,
or https://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/06/the-enduring-myth-of-hiroshima/
