This evening I had the great pleasure of joining a panel of fantastic and thoughtful folks discussing the power of history. We were brought together by the great folks at the OER Project who create resources to support K-12 teachers and think about what you can do with history/social studies education. 6 years ago Trevor Getz (who has led the creation of these materials as a content editor and producer) invited me to participate in the creation of one of the videos for OER World History, which highlighted some of my work on the history of motor transportation in colonial Ghana and featured my wonderful collaborators at the La Drivers’ Union (I’m apparently sometimes known as “the pirate lady” – it’s one of my favorite things; watch to understand why…). It’s been a real joy to help support this project from the sidelines, particularly as I’ve gotten to work more with K-12 teachers through some of our K-16 initiatives at the American Historical Association and hear firsthand the struggles they face and how much these resources and the community provided by the OER Project helps them. Today, however, I had the honor of engaging directly. Particularly in this moment, supporting history educators is more important than ever. So we logged on to Zoom at the end of the work day to speak about why history might just be a superpower with history educators across the country and around the world. I was joined by my friend Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning at the AHA, as well as teacher Adriane Musacchio, undergraduate history student Kylani Baldridge-Alvarez, and our moderator Angelina Meadows Comb. A video will be forthcoming and I’ll be sure to link it here. But, in the meantime, I wanted to take a minute to write down and remember some of my own thoughts in relation to the questions as we begin yet another year in the midst of big debates about history and history education.

Why do you think history matters?

I can’t help but think about this question in light of my own experiences as a student. I was not an undergraduate history major. I did take a few history courses that I loved, but “history” had been introduced to me in school through stories, and I did not find that particularly compelling in part because the stories I was being told didn’t feel particularly relevant or interesting. Instead, what I found interesting about those courses I took in college was the analytical power of history. I often say that history helps us understand the “why and how” behind the “way” of things. It forces us to confront and interrogate our assumptions and, in the process, can be truly transformational. Students who get to do their first research projects, community members who learn how to research in archives for the first time, communities who see themselves represented in historical narratives in new ways – they all repeatedly tell us that their engagement with history is transformational; it changes their lives. That matters.

Kylani, our student discussant, mentioned that history makes us have to grapple with the hard reality of sometimes being wrong. I love that, and it resonates strongly with some of what I was trying to say. Having to grapple with evidence of multiple perspectives on the past, even when they seem disagreeable or challenging to us and even when they make us uncomfortable because it challenges something that we think we know to be true, is hard but important work that enriches us all as individuals and as a community.

How does the study of history really reflect our study of humanity and our role in that story?

I think we have to think about this question in two different senses. The first, in terms of content. The history of everything, everywhere, at all times is fair game for historians. By definition, we study the diversity and variation of human stories – increasingly diverse all the time as we seek out new stories to tell and new ways to think about our old stories. I frequently (half jokingly and half serious) tell my colleagues in other parts of the university that if they’re interested in their students learning history, they better reach out to us first because we can probably gladly cover it and have the unique set of knowledge and expertise to do so in ways that they do not. The second, in terms of method. How we approach the work of history reflects who we are as a society and how that has changed over time. Just this week I was talking to a friend who told me about how she clearly remembered her high school history teacher telling their class that history was written by the victors and that one of the things that she was so excited to see was that so many other stories – stories of those who were not necessarily powerful; histories from below – are being written and shared now. Historians have been doing that work for approximately 50 years, but it is gradually filtering into the classroom and textbooks in important ways. That some people find these stories challenging says as much about who we are as a society as it does about the past itself.

Why do people who study the humanities benefit in the new world of AI?

I think about these questions through my work as both a digital humanities scholar and a historian of technology. First, one of the really core issues that I am most concerned is left out of conversations about AI and its impact is that AI is only capable of correlation, not causation. As Brendan reminded me, my colleague David Hicks often says that AI is basically just a really good guesser (he uses more colorful language). It cannot make causal arguments. At best it mimics what causal arguments look like. That’s why it makes so many mistakes and why it often doesn’t feel quite right. But causality is a core requirement of history – understanding cause and effect is a precondition of historical analysis, and our standard of evidence and interpretation is high. We can’t imagine the past or guess what happened. We have to prove it based on evidence. While there was an article posted just today arguing that “historian” is one of the jobs most under threat with the expansion of AI, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what we do and a misunderstanding of how AI works. It’s more important than ever that we make this clear. It’s always been important, but we’ve been coasting on people’s interest in good stories for a while, perhaps, and have not been clear enough – even to ourselves – about what we do and how we do it. However, it cannot wait anymore. We must be united in this work and understand its urgency. The AHA has been working on clarifying this for quite some time, and I’m looking forward to helping facilitate additional conversations at the conference in Chicago in January. I’m not an expert, but if you’re interested more in the role of correlation and causation in machine learning, check out this article in Forbes. The AHA also recently released some guiding principles for AI in the classroom.

Second, true problem solving – particularly for complex problems that involve human beings and are shaped by human motivations – require a kind of creativity that requires a nuanced attention to culture and values that technology can never capture but which scholars of the humanities are uniquely qualified to address. As the history of technology teaches us, when we do not pay attention to those nuances of culture and values, we tend to create technologies that, at best, are ineffective or inefficient and, as a result, waste resources. At worst, these technologies can create or reproduce real violence that has lasting consequences for individuals and societies. History shows us that we cede control over our decision making at our own peril.

Is History progressing? What does that progress look like? How can history help us make informed decisions today?

I misunderstood this question at first, interpreting it as an extension of a general social obsession with progress or progressive history. But what was really meant here was, is history changing? Is our ability to produce history improving? Historiography shows us that the production of history has, indeed, changed as we have refined our methods, embraced new kinds of evidence, learned to tell different kinds of stories and grappled with what that meant for our assumptions about the past. In grappling with the tension between continuity and change, agency and structure we explore the implications of mistakes and lessons learned by both people in the past and ourselves as interpreters of the past. Some people find that threatening or believe that means we are “politicizing” history through some sort of “revisionism” but, as I tell students all the time, good history is always undergoing revision. Rigorous method and high standards of evidence should mean that we are constantly reinterrogating our understanding of the past when confronted with new evidence or a new question, in some ways not unlike the work of scientists.

How do students, teachers, and academics support each other?

In an ideal world this would be a common sense answer, but in reality we often haven’t supported each other well. Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream provides us with a history of the American historical profession and, among other insights, describes the gulf created in the 1960s between professional historians, teachers, and students as politicians and parents sought to control what they saw as dangerous knowledge about the past which had empowered young people to protest and question established orders. Conversations about K-16 history are trying to bridge that gap once again in new ways, thinking about how we can help support each other through a student’s entire educational journey. University history faculty are often educating those who teach in K-12 history/social studies classrooms, but, while we might be content area experts, we have a lot to learn from teachers about how you scaffold learning and teach skills in ways that allow students to move from being consumers of history to being active and engaged producers of history.

Why would someone want to go into the study of history in today’s climate?

There’s a lot to be concerned about right now, and it’s understandable that people feel fearful or frustrated or angry or demoralized. But I think the challenges that we’re facing mean that it’s more important and exciting than ever to do the work of history. We might feel under attack in our classrooms as we grapple with politically-motivated directives, but when I go out and talk to alumni and community members, they tell me over and over again how important they think history and history education is – particularly right now – and how passionate they are about the past. We need to think about how to mobilize those people to make effective arguments about our impact. Because all of this attention means that people are watching and that provides unique opportunities to be real leaders who can help shape the future through the study of the past. That doesn’t take away from the anxiety at all. I have had more than my fair share of panic attacks and frustrations over the last six months (and, if we’re honest, much longer…) and we need to honor those challenges and the ways that it drains the energy and distracts the attention of our community. But that means that community is more important than ever – working together to share in the work and move our field forward. I will also say that computer science graduates are starting to come to me asking for job opportunities because jobs are disappearing as AI eliminates the need for entry-level programming jobs that would normally absorb the large number of graduates and students need to be able to distinguish themselves and build additional skills and perspectives in a crowded job market – skills and perspectives that only history and the humanities can provide!

What can we do to increase the value of history and history education?

I speak to a lot of alumni and community members looking back at the end of their careers who are telling me how much they care about history, how much their history education helped them in their careers, how much they wish they had pursued more history education. Retirees tell me about passion projects they have always wanted to pursue and are flocking to talks about historical subjects. We need those people to be advocates. We need to help them make the connection between their interests and the importance of robust history education. And we need them to see and be able to articulate the skills and literacies that history help us develop and the diverse ways those skills and literacies can be applied in the world to the benefit of us all. In order to do that, we have to move beyond storytelling and conversations among ourselves to develop better tools to help people understand the benefit of applying historical knowledge and skills across a wide range of sectors – or at least we need some members of our community doing that and we need to respect that work. We have to be able to explain to people what we do and how we do it, so that more people understand history as a form of expertise that requires education and training and experience. That a message that we need to be able to make in our community but also among our colleagues.

What is the distinctive value of history?

I often say that history is the hardest discipline. We cannot say anything that we can’t prove based on evidence – we can’t observe it or infer it or imagine it; we have to prove it. And we have to do so from multiple perspectives. That means that there are some questions we cannot answer, which can be frustrating or even sad. It also means, however, that the stories we are able to tell – the analysis we are able to do is complex. History is, in many ways, a series of events, placed in chronological order in ways that allow us to understand cause and effect. However, a positivist vision of history – in which we are just assembling facts and dates in the correct order to get a complete picture of the past – vastly underplays the complexity of producing historical knowledge. Faithfully interpreting historical sources with integrity requires an understanding of context, an attention to human psychology and motivation, and a consideration of contingency (that it could always have gone a different way if only certain decisions were made differently or certain actions were taken). And we do that while also balancing the tensions of continuity and change, agency and structure. History, in other words, is highly complex. It is uniquely positioned to shed light on and help us understand the highly complex challenges that we face. That complexity also means it’s hard for people to understand and can be mystifying, particularly if we continue to talk about it primarily through narrative and storytelling.

What is exciting you about the next year?

I am always excited to see students come back to campus, but I am particularly excited about the community engagement work that our faculty and students are doing, which includes some of the exciting K-16 collaborations that I am privileged to work on.

What is one word that captures history education for you in the next year?

Evidence!

Here’s to another year doing the hard work together!