When you learn history in high school, you are given a textbook and asked to learn dates, names, and events, who did what, when, and why did they do that. When you enter into college, it is not that different. You get to specialize in a specific area of history and your focus can become quite microscopic, but a lot of the time you are still learning a specific tale of history. I hadn't started to realize this until recently, but my studies at my liberal arts college is actually pretty unique. As a history major, I have been living in the history department since my freshman year. It wasn't until this past summer, where I was taking a couple of summer history courses from two different community colleges that I realized how different the liberal arts experience can be.

How many of you have learned through your history courses that Hitler was the villain of World War II, and that the Holocaust is completely his fault? How would you feel if I told you that I took a course on the Holocaust last spring, and one of our primary conversations was on the level of culpability of the Holocaust that we can attribute to Hitler? It was amazing, to see this class of 25 students from all different majors and years come into the class with this firm belief, and leave at the end of the semester with a much more flexible interpretation of history. That is the primary experience that I have found that differs between my classes at liberal arts education and research universities: interpretation. When I take a history class at my liberal arts college, I find myself having to shell out $250 on textbooks for a single class, but they are not textbooks and isn't that just so interesting. What I mean by that, is that instead of assigning a book that delivers a broad history that is generally accepted by the public, we read books written by historians that present their own interpretation of history. My professors assign a text from a historian that provides a relatively good outline of the events we will be studying, but then they will also assign three to six other books that are other historians' interpretations of the same history, or interviews with people from the events we are studying. The primary objective of my courses at my liberal arts college is to learn what was occurring in a specific place at a specific time, but it is also to learn several different narratives from different people, and how these narratives can change our interpretations of history, and therefore us students can create our own interpretation. Let me give you an example.

Last semester I took a course titled Mao's China, basically discussing the social and political events the occurred in China from 1945 to 1980. Our primary text that we were reading was by the historian Maurice Meisner, and we used that throughout the semester. In addition to this, we read "Chen Village" by Anita Chan, who provided a microscopic look at the events occurring in China at this time through the lens of a single village. We also read multiples of Mao's translated speeches, and compared them to the histories that we were reading. Furthermore, our professor gave us a list of several books, and told us to chose whichever one appealed to us the most, and then asked us to read another complimentary historiography, and then compare them to the histories we had been reading in class, identifying biases, holes in theories, missing information or new information, etc. Our job in this class, was to look at a wide variety of information and interpretations, and create our own interpretation in the light of all of this information in several essays throughout the semester. At the end of the course we looked at Mao and his actions, and each of us chose how we would label Mao's role in China's history, providing broad and vastly different interpretations between each student.

Last summer, I took two classes on US history, one from a community college in Oregon and the other from a community college in California.They were on different periods of United States history, and each were different levels of difficulty, however they both used the same textbook. The textbook assigned was very straightforward and provided one clear path of history for the United States. One class had no written assignments, and the other class had a couple of two to four page essays that were supposed to be a test of our readings of the text, and were a reiteration of what we had read. There were no opportunities to offer interpretation, and there was only one straight narrative that we were to learn.

Now, my personal experiences are limited, in that I have not taken a history class from a four-year research university, and have only taken classes from community colleges and liberal arts colleges. Therefore, history classes at a college such as UCSB or OSU etc. might be vastly different from what I am describing. This is not meant to be a critique of history courses or of other colleges. What this article is, is a exploration of how interpretation can play a huge role in history, and a statement on how my own personal experiences in my liberal arts college has made me all the more aware of how interpretation and analysis can play a large importance in everyday life. When I first started taking history classes at my college, I hated it; I was so confused and I didn't understand half of what my professor was saying. Now, I am able to see the differences in narratives, and better at recognizing the power of a single person in a large historical event. I am still confused, honestly, I have probably never been more confused in my life, and you are talking about a Spanish and history major who made it through multi-variable calculus. However, I have never felt more happy to be so confused than I do in my history courses.