Mr. Peabody and Sherman prepare to use the Wayback Machine.
College students have lost interest in history, writes David Kaiser, who taught the subject from 1976 through 2013 at Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. “Most history courses are now too specialized and often politically slanted.”
Elite colleges employ more history professors to teach fewer students, he writes. For example, in 1965, Harvard and Radcliffe had 270 history majors with about 30 full-time history faculty. In 2017 the department had 45 history majors and 47 full-time faculty.
At departmental lunches, I heard faculty report that their class had half a dozen students in them without a shred of embarrassment—much less any analysis of whether their contribution to teaching was earning their salary.
At one such meeting, a prominent faculty member plugged a talk by a visiting British historian about the significance of the powder puff in 1920s Britain. The talk was built around an arrest of a suspected gay man who was carrying a powder puff, and the presenter riffed on industrialization, consumerism, commodification, and transgressive sexuality.
Studying the political leadership of Western countries became “suspect because it supposedly reinforced white male hegemony in society,” Kaiser writes.
In the 1960s, “the Vietnam War convinced a critical mass of college students that they could safely ignore whatever the older generation said,” he writes.
Many . . . decided that imperialism, not the defense of freedom, was the basis of American foreign policy; that universities were cogs in that imperialist machine, not sites to pursue knowledge for its own sake; and that racism was fundamental to American life, instead of an aberration our parents’ generation had been working to eliminate.
In the 1970s and 1980s, political history fell out of fashion in favor of social history, he writes. “Practitioners sold it as an attempt to learn more about workers, peasants, and other less-visible social sectors that traditional political history had tended to slight. Feminists and nonwhite scholars picked up that ball and ran with it, arguing that they represented identities that white male historians had ignored, and whose voices now needed to be heard.”
At the last annual meeting of the American Historical Association only 2.5 percent of panels discussed political history, Kaiser writes. However there were sessions on the of Sesame Street in the 1970s and the authorship of Wikipedia articles about women’s suffrage.