I was never planning to be a history major. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, so I knew that was the path I wanted to follow when I got to college. Plus, I figured my creative writing major had traumatized my parents enough. But I had loved my AP US history class in high school, where we did things like go over the arrest records of Emma Goldman (featuring busts for things like speaking and getting on a train). So I took a history class when I go to college, and immediately got sucked in. The reaction I get from most people when I tell them my major is pretty much what you’d expect.
“I could never study history. It’s too boring.” This is usually accompanied by a very specific expression of polite boredom that just makes me want to smack people over the head with Howard Zinn. It also makes me incredibly sad, because I know the way most schools teach history really is incredibly boring. Most people think it’s only about memorizing times and places. There is some element of memorization involved, but no more so than any other discipline. I fell in love with history because it’s about discussion. In high school history was all laid out so clearly, with obvious good guys and bad guys and a neat list of causes and effects that led from one era to the next. Grade school classes teach a static version of the past that adds up to the stunningly boring conclusion that everything was always going to happen the way it did. The truth is much more interesting. The fact is, historians don’t always agree about why things happened or what effect they had. Good guys and bad guys are rarely so clear cut. Everything in the past was once the present, and there has never been a present free of controversy. Once you start talking about it, it becomes way more interesting.
“Hey, when did x happen?” Every now and then someone who knows you’re a history major will turn and ask you some variation of this question. It doesn’t matter what time period or geographic location you’ve studied. You’re expected to be a walking encyclopedia of random dates. Just because I’m a history major doesn’t mean I know when every single event in the universe occurred.
“But how are you gonna find a job?” Okay, I will cede some ground here. When I told my parents I’d decided to major in history as well as creative writing I could almost see them thinking, “Oh great, another useless degree.” The thought of graduation terrifies me, although I’ve been reliably informed that it terrifies everyone. But I’m confident I’ll find something to do, and there’s more to life than a job. I was always going to major in something that interested me, something I could have fun doing and could stand to have a career in for the rest of my life. Maybe I’ll end up working in a museum, or doing research. As long as I get to keep debating and learning, I’ll be fine.
