D 16 .3 .B6 Copy 1 RECENT HISTORY: TO WHAT EXTENT TO THE EXCLUSION OF OTHER HISTORY BY MILLEDGE L. BONHAM, Jr. Rephinted from the Proceedings of the MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, Volume VIII 3 ^-3 36 RECENT HISTORY: TO WHAT EXTENT TO THE EXCLUSION OF OTHER HISTORY? By Milledge L. Bonham Je. This topic suggests a conversation I had some years ago in the Virginia State Library with a high-school pupil. "What are you doing here, Henry?" I asked. ''I am collecting data for my graduation essay." ''What is your subject?" In all seriousness, he replied, "The Human Race." My topic, then, needs to be defined. What is meant by ' ' recent history ' ' — the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies? European history since the Industrial Revolu- tion? Since 1900? Since the outbreak of the present war? And where is the "exclusion" to occur — in the high school or the college? In the curriculum or the course ? Naturally the type of institution, the size of the history department, the library facilities, and the like will affect all of these questions. For the purposes of this paper, I shall include in the term "recent history" everything since the Franco-Prussian War. I shall glance briefly at the questions of exclusion from both course and curriculum, in both high school and college. Since history, like Henry, has for its subject the human race, I must endeavor to be equally liberal. It is a truism that no subject is entitled to a place in the curriculum unless it does two things, namely, gives useful information and supplies mental training. His- tory, properly taught, does both of these, but its proper teaching depends largely upon the facts selected for presentation. To tell this audience in what way history 308 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION supplies useful information would be superfluous and impertinent, but we cannot too often and too strongly emphasize the fact that the most useful historical data are those which explain existing institutions. Such data are valuable in direct ratio to their recency, as a general rule. Of course the origins of many of the present institutions may be traced through medieval history to the ancient world, but the most important contributions have been comparatively recent. To illustrate from the domain of economic history, the United States, in her brief life has issued about half as many patents as all other nations combined. Since, then, the recent contribu- tions to civilization are generally the most important, they should be stressed in our history courses; usually they are not. So far as I know, the plan I shall propose is not in use, in its entirety anywhere, though I have no doubt all of its various items may be found in one place or another. Tradition, the demands of other departments, lack of texts, lack of journals, lack of time, 3,11 the familiar argu- ments will be urged against it, so I am merely putting it forward as a scheme which I should like to see tried, and hope some time to try myself. As far as the high school is concerned, the history courses are pretty well fixed, and seem likely to remain so for a while. We cannot expect to make any radical changes in the curriculum, so we shall have to try to mod- ify somewhat the content of the courses. If the Report of the Committee of Seven be followed as a whole, even the content of the courses cannot be altered very much, but frequent opportunities will appear for contact with recent history. For example, in the course in ancient history, compare the desert march of Xenophon's Ten Thousand with the recent Turkish attack on the Suez Canal; compare the purpose, construction, and effects of the Nile-Red Sea Canal with those of the Panama ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 309 Canal; oompare the economic and political causes of the Punic Wars with those of the present struggle. Nat- urally, the course in medieval history will offer more such opportunities, and that in modern history still more. It seems to me that in the year assigned to the period since 800, instead of devoting approximately half the session to the Middle Ages, about one-fourth would be sufficient, if the time were spent on those features of medieval civi- lization that have had important effects on present-day society, such as the Church, the Empire, etc., while by contrasting the economic and social life of that day with that of today the work might be vitalized. In the words of Principal Nelson of Salem, Oregon : The pupil who begins to study what is going on around him finds that most of it is intelhgible in the light of what has gone before, and will realize for himself that only by the study of the past can we understand the present. Most of us could without appreciable injury introduce more of the inductive method into our teaching of history. We begin at the wrong end and take too long in getting from the remote past down to the living pres- ent, of which the pupil is himself a part. Most of us have ex- perienced the sudden vitalizing of historical facts that has come to us when we have stood on a battlefield or before a great his- torical monument; but we too often treat our pupils as if the mere textbook could be trusted to arouse the same absorbing interest.^ If, as suggested, one-fourth of the session be given to medieval history treated as I propose, another fourth should be sufficient to bring us down to the French Eevo- lution. The rest of the year, that is, about a half session, could then be devoted to the last century and a half, with the accent on the half. Similarly, in the course in Eng- lish history, most of the time should be put upon the part since the accession of Henry VII, every occasion being seized to connect the events therein with analogous or re- sultant ones of today; for instance, the Penal Code of ^History Teacher's Magazine, VI, 85. 310 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION William III and the Ulsterite opposition to Home Rule ; the Instrument of Government of 1653 and the Parlia- ment Act of 1911. Events since the occupation of Egypt should be studied in more detail and their results noted more carefully. Time could be saved in American history by paying little attention to the details and military events of the various wars, but rather stressing their causes and re- sults. Two of the best and most recent secondary-school texts in American history give about one-fourth of their space to wars, although these wars occupy only about one-ninth of the time covered by the books. In one case more space is given to the Civil War than to all others combined, yet these texts are far superior to some of their immediate predecessors, in which as much space was given to the Civil War as to all the rest of our his- tory! Since distinguished historians and scholars like Hart and Van Tyne cannot agree on the merits of Se- cession, it seems futile to attempt to get it settled by high-school students. Jackson's Valley Campaign was a wonderful piece of strategy, but its economic, social, and political effects are not very apparent today. Such phases might well be omitted almost entirely. Fidelity to principle as illustrated by the soldiers and civilians of both sides, the economic, social, and political effects of the four-year struggle are the things to dwell upon, and it might be profitably noted that emancipation is the lin- eal ancestor of the Jim Crow laws. The military aspects of the Spanish-American War seem trivial when com- pared with the fate of Belgium, or the strategj^ of von Hindenberg and Grand Duke Nicholas; but a considera- tion of the attitude of the Filipinos towards us after seventeen years of American rule might throw a valuable light on the question of intervention in Mexico. The time saved by omitting such things as military and other nonessential occurrences could profitably be spent on ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 311 such things as tracing the evolution of the Sherman Act and connecting it with the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission. Likewise, Balboa's discovery, ro- mantic and interesting as it is of itself, can be made of personal moment to our pupils if we show the connection between Balboa and Goethals. Where, as in Louisiana, the suggestions of the Com- mittee of Five are followed, and only three years of his- tory given in the high school, the same suggestions would apply, mutatis mutandis. So much for the high school. When we turn to the colleges, we find that most of them require a course in medieval and modern history as a prerequisite for all other history courses, and frequently this is all the his- tory positively demanded of college students. Hence our first problem is with the amount of recent history to be included in such a course and how to get it there. Per- sonally, I have never been able to find a satisfactory text for the freshman course, and doubt my own ability to write one. What I should like to do, is to spend about three weeks on the contributions of ancient society to modern civilization, emphasizing such items as Greek art and philosophy, Hebrew religion, Egyptian science, Phoe- nician commerce, and Roman law. Next, might be treat- ed the Germanic invasions, the Church, feudalism, the Empire, with some attention to the economic and cultural features of medieval society. Little time need be spent on the events of the Crusades, the Hundred Years ' War, the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles; slur the events and dwell on causes and effects. In this way the Eenaissance could be reached before the end of the first term. After a brief consideration of the Protestant Revolt as partly one effect of the Renaissance, with emphasis on the causes, leaders, and results, we could then turn to ex- ploration and discovery as another effect of the Renais- sance, including, of course, the other factors which ne- 312 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION cessitated the expansion of Europe. Most of the second term could be devoted to the last century and a half, and all through the year, as was suggested for the high-school courses, the connections with current civilization should be insisted on. This assumes, what is usually true, that the introductory course is the only one required in his- tory ; a corollary of which is that many students take no other course in that subject. Therefore, if they are not made to see the functioning of past institutions in the present, in that initial course, they stand an excellent chance of never realizing it. A colleague of mine once asked a student, **What influence had Rousseau on cur- rent educational practice ? " * ' None, professor, Eousseau is dead. ' ' We are all familiar with that tendency of the student to interpret Longfellow's injunction as to the self-interment of the defunct hitherto to mean that all history is dead, and unless we can connect it with his own interests, we run the risk of his dropping history after the first year. Connect the past with the present by means of recent history and we stand a better chance of increasing the number of those who continue history. ''We have found," says Mr. Chadwick, of Gary, Indiana, ''that if the work can be made of social value, the inter- est of the pupils is enlarged, and the greater the interest, the greater is the incentive to work, and to do better work. If a pupil is led to see that his work will be of value to his parents and to other men and women that he knows, then his desire to do good work is kindled. " ^ If Mr. Chadwick be correct (and I submit that he is) a priori, I should say that the more recent history the stu- dent gets, the more potential value will he perceive in the subject. This will tend to make him elect other courses in history and pursue them more zealously. Where more than one year of history is required of college students, certainly more time should be devoted 2 History Teacher's Magazine, VI, 112. ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 313 to modem history, and of the modern period the last fifty years should get the most attention. If two years is re- quired, I should devote one to European history from ancient times to about the Industrial or the French Rev- olution, treated as I have suggested. The second year, one term could be given to Europe since 1815 and the other to American history since 1876. The first year would serve the purpose of laying a foundation for the second and of giving the desired background for the courses in literature, philosophy, politics, etc. Of the term spent on European history, one-third might be de- voted to the period of revolt and unification, the rest to the events of the last forty-five years or so. It is desirable that electives be offered in recent his- tory, but the number and nature of these courses will de- pend largely on the organization of the history depart- ment in each institution. The question of exclusion scarcely comes in here, as only other electives would be excluded and they might, of course, be offered in alter- nate years. From the foregoing it must not be supposed that I am opposed to having a considerable amount of remote history in the curriculum. On the contrary, I recently said that we need more ancient history at Louisiana State Universitj^ Courses in remote history, as those in re- cent history, might be offered as electives, and the plan already in use in some colleges might be extended. That is, cooperation with other departments where there are instructors qualified to give the desired courses. These should be so ordered that they might be accredited to either department, and this would tend to attract many desirable students who would not otherwise elect history. A similar effect would no doubt be felt by the other de- partments. For example, a course might be offered in Roman History, which could be counted either as Latin or as Histoiy. If the former, much if not most of the 314 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION parallel reading should be done in Latin sources, pre- scribed by that department, and vice versa. Whether the professor of history or the professor of Latin should give such a course would depend on local conditions. The same plan could be used for a course in nineteenth-cen- tury Europe, to be coordinated with the courses in com- parative politics, in economic history, in French, Span- ish, English, and Italian history and the corresponding literatures. No doubt, in many cases this plan would not be feasible, but in others it would, and w^ould, I think, have the highly desirable result of bringing about a better coordination between different departments, as well as arousing the interest of students. But since there is little probability of the complete adoption of ray scheme, let me say a word more about recent history in connection with other courses. My col- league. Doctor Fleming, gives a course entitled ''The Civ- il War and Reconstruction. ' ' We should naturally expect an authority in that period to be rather bigoted as to its importance and apt to dwell overmuch on it, especially when he is the head of the department. The contrary is true in this case. Professor Fleming treats this period from the viewpoint of national development, tracing the various factors, personal, economic, and sectional which made for Secession, together with the results of the en- suing decades. By passing over nonessentials, he saves enough time to trace the effects of this period down to the present, concluding his course with a study of Beard's text on contemporary American history. In other words, he includes "recent history" in "other history" rather than excludes other history to make room for recent. A student in political science asked me recently if any engagement of the Revolution took place on Louisi- ana soil. (In passing let me explain that I do not give the course in Louisiana history; the above-mentioned colleague has it.) When I suggested that the student go ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 315 to the statehouse and read the tablet commemorating the capture, in 1779, of the British post at Baton Eouge, by the American and Spanish allies, she was dumf ounded. This merely illustrates the general neglect of local his- tory in our schools and colleges. However, that ques- tion was suggested by the celebration of the centenary of the battle of New Orleans. It is doubtless imprac- ticable to offer separate courses in local history, but a considerable amount may be taught by dovetailing it with more general courses. The more recent the topics treat- ed, the greater likelihood that the students will be inter- ested. Having aroused their interest, we can lead it back along the lines of institutional development. The part that biography would play in such a course is obvious, so I will illustrate from the field of political history. The Louisiana Supreme Court has recently decided a long- contested appointment of a state-bank examiner. Taking that as the point of departure, I found it comparatively easy to arouse the interest of some of my students in the origin of national banks, proceeding by way of the Fed- eral Reserve Act. Apply the same method on a broader scale, ever widening the student's horizon, by connecting local and recent occurrences with those more distant in time and place, and you stand an excellent chance of really vivifying his work. Suppose the recent McManus indemnity be taken for example ; we can compare the kill- ing of McManus with the destruction of the Maine, with the pretext for the Mexican War, with the war of Jen- kin's Ear, and a dozen others, and they may, in turn, be correlated with each other. Again, the dedication by Wil- son and Taft of the Red Cross Building may be used not merely to introduce the women of the Civil War, but also Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War. The phi- losophy of the whole matter is contained in a saying of Dr. J. W. Nicholson, the beloved dean of our college of arts and sciences — ''An ounce of illustration is worth a 316 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION pound of explanation. ' ' If that be true — and it is — evidently the more recent the illustration, the more com- prehensible it will be, ceteris paribus; and the more com- prehensible, the more efficacious. Assuredly, we must not ignore the fact that our view of recent history is likely to be astigmatic, perhaps biased, and many of our data will not be based on docu- ments. But Professor Muzzey is right in saying : For all the gingerly caution of historians not to come so close to the present as to spoil their perspective, we find very lit- tle evidence that remoteness in time from the events chronicled lends any great probability of agreement on either facts or the interpretation of facts. There is as much controversy over Julius Caesar today among Roman historians as there is over Roosevelt among modem politicians. As for the credibility of our facts in past history, there is little reason to think that they were selected or recorded with as much faithfulness and ac- curacy as are the facts of the present. There is scarcely an his- torical event recorded, whose credibility has not sometime and somewhere been called in question.^ This simply means that we must be careful, when teaching recent history, to inculcate open-mindedness. Personally, I agree with Gathany that : The further back we go in history, the fewer big things do we find that have a bearing on the present world of thought and action. Such things should receive serious and intensive study. Thus content would be put into those things worth while, and it would be rather difficult to forget them. Put in another way, this process of elimination means that considerably less time would be given to pre-nineteenth century European and Amer- ican history, and much more time given to the study of history from the nineteenth century to the present day, the last twenty years of European and American history receiving considerable attention.^ Too many students are apt to get the idea of the old 3 History Teacher's Magazine, III, 27, 28. * History Teacher's Magazine, V, 225. ANCIENT fflSTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 317 professor in one of Richard Harding Davis ' stories, that no event which had occurred within his own recollection was historic. Instead of realizing that the more recent and personal an event, the more likely is it to be germane to their lives, such people fall into the error of which Henry Sydnor Harrison's "Queed" was accused by ''Sharlee.'' You recall that on the memorable evening when he went to discuss with her his discharge from the Post, she said : You are a failure as a sociologist for the reason that you are wholly out of relation to life . , . You know absolutely nothing about human society except what other men have found out and written down in textbooks. You say you are an evolu- tionary sociologist. Yet a wonderful demonstration of social evolution is going on all around you, and you don't even know it . . . On the one side there is the old slaveholding aristocracy ; on the other, the finest democracy in the world; and here and now human society is evolving from the one thing to the other. A real sociologist would be absorbed in watching this marvelous process; social evolution actually surprised in her workshop. But you — I doubt if you even knew it was going on. A tre- mendous social drama is being acted out under your very win- dow and you yawn and piUl down the hUndl I hope there is no danger of any history teacher's making the same ghastly mistake. There is little differ- ence of opinion, I presume, as to the desirability and ne- cessity of teaching that phase of recent history known as current events, or contemporary history. There is room, however, for disagreement as to whether such work should be done daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly; whether in class or out, by recitation or by report, by assigned topics or by the student's own selection; in a certain class or in all classes. Preferably, it should be done in all history classes, as frequently as practicable and by various methods. This is not the time for a dis- cussion of these methods, which are well treated with re- gard to the high school by Nelson, in the article I have 318 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION quoted above, in the History Teacher's Magazine for March, 1915, and by Gathany in the number for Novem- ber, 1914. In the same journal for February, 1910, Dr. Hayes discusses the question from the standpoint of the university. The ''laboratory of history" which he there describes is of course out of the reach of most of us, but the parable of the talents will apply here also. To summarize, in conclusion: By recent history, I mean the last fifty years, especially the last fifteen. This I would stress at the expense of the nonessentials in other periods. In all classes, high school and college, I would seek to vitalize the past by bringing the events studied into the closest possible touch with the lives of the stu- dents, particularly by comparing remote occurrences with recent and familiar ones. LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 018 487 066 6 #