The Cynic Researcher/Student

why you should study history

For the last thirty years, I have taught history at the collegiate level for a huge state university, at community colleges, and at for-profit schools. Of course I’ve come across a variety of cynical students but this week, I’ve encountered one that’s made me the saddest I’ve ever been about the future of historical research. I’ll let the student talk for himself/herself. This from an email:

A picture of enslaved women at work.

“I have been putting up with this history degree nonsense for a few years but just once I want someone to give it to me straight before I graduate. Isn't this all BS? I'm not a genius, I can't just pull novel research out of my butt, the only topic I can reasonably have access to digitized primary and secondary resources for is something others have already researched, which means I'm really just rehashing the same work somebody else already did and pretending like it's unique. I can't just say "I'm going to research whether Moses existed today" and dig up a bunch of non-existent primary sources about Moses.

A few classes ago I tried to write a paper about Franz Boas, and when I tried to access his personal letters I found they were all handwritten in German and not organized at all. It's 2024 and they haven't been translated. How am I supposed to know whether I am going to run into obstacles like that before I start my research, especially considering the class is structured to force us into a set topic at the beginning of class before we had chance to feel out what would be a good area to research.”

Granted a lot of students don’t understand how to do original research, aiming for huge topics that are multi-book length topics OR wanting to research “what if” scenarios—what if the South had won the Civil War? What if the Normandy Invasion in WWII had failed? (by the way, historians don’t engage in what if scenarios, except over beers and cocktails). But a conversation (email, phone call, instant message, Zoom) with your instructor and you should know whether your project is viable for you or not. (Do you read German? Know someone who does? Can you go to an archive that holds all the papers?)

But this student? I don’t even know where to start with his/her comments. First, there’s this sense that all the WORK involved in researching should be done for the researcher. Librarians? Archivists? should have gone through every document that exists everywhere and digitized and organized them all in service to—whom? I’m sure there are people out there who would love to do that but who would pay them?

I’m grateful daily to the Church of Latter Day Saints who has made so many records digital and searchable. Though this is done for geneology (think Ancestry.com), I can purchase a subscription and use the site in reverse for actual census record research. It’s not easy, and I’d love to see a site geared toward historical researchers (different interface!) but it’s still better than ordering census records on microfilm and sitting in a darkened reading room for hours at a time, which is what I did in 2000.

But most alarming and what has made me so sad is that this student thinks you need to be a genius to come up with an original research project.

I currently have two projects on-going. Here’s how I stumbled into them.

I’m interested in my fifth-great grandmother, Margaret McMichael, who bought a farm in Tennessee as a widow with five children in 1817. Few women did that, and so I wondered how it happened. In tracking her, I found that she had emigrated from Ireland, probably around 1790. That led to me wondering about women who emigrated in this period and from that, I made a proposal and applied for a researh grant to go to Ireland and London to look at documents in archives, libraries, and the public record office that relate to women who emigrated from 1760 to 1815. I’ve been reading secondary sources and from those, I’ve narrowed my focus further to women who emigrated from Ireland to South Carolin from 1785 to 1815.

As my student has said, I’m no genius. But I am insanely curious and that curiosity led to questions. The more answers I find, the more questions I have. Thus, an original research project that has expanded from my interest in one person.

For project two: That same Margaret McMichael would go on and acquire two slaves. (I know this from census records—thank you Ancestry.com.) I wondered what happened to those slaves after the war. In the census records, they are listed with the last name of McMichael, having taken on the name of their slave owner. Again, few people in Tennessee owned any slaves. Of those who did, most owned one. How did my widowed great-grandmother have this much money? And how were they treated? What happened to these people owned by my ancestors? (Cue in guilt, sadness, but again curiosity.)

One of the women named Philis (Filis) McMichael was listed as divorced in the 1880 census. WHAT? Why would a formerly enslaved woman, who didn’t have the legal right to marry in slavery, file for a divorce? That led me into looking at divorce among formerly enslaved women from 1865 to 1930 in rural Coffee County, TN. And there is original research project #2.

I don’t think that a history degree is nonsense. It basically teaches you a little bit about everything because everything has a history—music, literature, medicine, art, engineering, psychology, religion—all of it is covered in and by history. Additionally, it teaches you to think critically and to approach the world with empathy and curiosity.

If you are a curious person, love to read, are content by yourself going through old records, diaries, newspapers, and photographs, you might be a future history major—and one who can pursue their own original research projects.