Lecture series and new classes aim to rethink teaching history

Young people may see history as the stuff of moldering books, but a BU lecture series argues that it’s relevant to our lives today.

As they study for their futures, college students often shun courses on the past. The Wall Street Journal, which lumped history among the humanities, found that only 7 percent of college graduates in 2010 majored in the humanities, half as many as in 1966.

Jonathan Zatlin believes the disinterest may reflect the appeal of more career-oriented fields. Beyond that, “We detect a larger intellectual crisis that began well before the current economic one,” says Zatlin, associate professor of history and associate director of Kilachand Honors College. In particular, he says the West’s triumph in the Cold War established for today’s youth the superiority of democracy and capitalism, so why study the last century’s debates over them?

Zatlin and his BU colleagues find that indifference worrisome, and they’ve struggled in recent years to make history—the 20th century’s in particular—relevant to 21st-century students. New courses with hoped-for pizzazz have been introduced into the curriculum. And thanks to an unusually-large-for-the-liberal-arts ($175,000) grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a John E. Sawyer seminar series this fall is exploring the topic of reinterpreting the 20th century.

The goal is to challenge the teaching of history about a century that itself challenged the teaching of history. (Remember critics in the 1990s questioning history focused on “dead white European males”?) Tentative topics in the lecture series include a feminist rethinking of World War I and the development of distributive justice.

The series, also funded with $10,000 from the history and international relations departments, will bring outside lecturers to BU on eight Tuesdays through April (the first of those lectures was last month). Tonight’s second lecture, The Phoenix Century: Myths of Rebirth from the Ashes of World War II, will be given by British author Keith Lowe, who has written two critically praised histories of that war.

The evening lectures are free and open to the public; the day after each one, a small group of historians from BU and other local universities and colleges will meet to discuss ways to make the 20th century “more relevant to new generations of Americans and speak more directly to their concerns,” Zatlin says. “We aim to gain new insights into how to teach the history of the 20th century.” History enrollments are down across the country, he says, so the foundation’s support “is an important model for those of us trying to rethink the basic propositions of our field.”

One example of that rethinking: the study of the history of a variety of cultures and places is necessary, Zatlin says, but it also represents “the geographical and linguistic boundaries of our discipline” that impede “larger, more capacious narratives.” So this spring he and Brooke Blower, associate professor of history, will offer a reimagined version of a BU graduate seminar, Problems in 20th Century History, which will address those boundaries.

Meanwhile, the department’s first-ever postdoctoral fellow, Gene Tempest, whose appointment is funded by the Mellon grant, is teaching two spring courses, Intimate Histories of War and Animal Archives, the latter exploring “how we write the history of animals,” she says. Tempest’s PhD research at Yale, which won that university’s prize for outstanding European history dissertation, detailed the uses of horses in World War I.

“We have to realize that more oats and hay than bullets were shipped to the western front,” she says. If that’s an unusual line coming from an historian, it demonstrates the unconventional approach that drew her to BU and its Sawyer Seminar Series organizers. Says Tempest, “They were interested in challenging accepted notions about the past in ways that deeply interested me.”

All of the Sawyer Seminar lectures begin at 7 p.m. in the Photonics Center Colloquium Room, 8 St. Mary’s Street, 9th Floor. Tonight, London-based writer Keith Lowe will give the second in the series, The Phoenix Century: Myths of Rebirth from the Ashes of World War II. Future topics: Development and the Global History of Distributive Justice (Nov. 18); The Somme, the Suffragists and the Gatling Gun: A Feminist Rethinking for Today of the 20th Century’s “Great War” (Jan. 27); The World Historical and China’s 20th Century: Perspectives on Globalization and Globality (Feb. 10); The Advent of the Anthropocene: Was That the Big Story of the 20th Century? (March 3); Empire, Federation, Union, Globe: Power beyond the Nation in the 20th Century (March 24); and a topic to be announced for April 28.