What's your major?

By: William Sullivan

Somewhere during the usual course of daily small talk or light conversation, the question of one’s major arises. This is an important question indeed, not only that it facilitates further development of the conversation and sets into motion, the gears for mutual exchange and interest between two people, but more importantly it gives one, or at least myself, the chance to sort of boast about their major, especially if it is somewhat obscure.

Once this question is answered the usual hopes are that the other person asks more or becomes interested in what the other is doing with their major, just as you may ask of theirs. Unfortunately this reciprocal exchange is not always met with great interest. In my case, taking claim to being a History major does not always illicit an inquisitive response from the other. Of course, this is not always the case, but more often than not I feel that many students have an indifferent opinion of history. I always want to guess that it is just “different strokes for different folks”, but I feel the sentiments lie deeper than that.

It seems that certain trends among people in their regard to certain subjects are characteristic: math and language courses garner the most frustration with history following close behind. The reasons for this may stem from the requirement of date memorization, key terms and developing coherent essays from them. This may be a basic understanding of the dislike, but upon discussion and inquiry with a communications major, he said that history always seems to contradict itself and that many of the sources seem biased and or flawed in telling the whole story; that what you learn and read about the past could be untrue. Funny enough, this statement was actually agreed upon mutually; I could see a definite reason for preference over history in favor of a more exact and calculated area of study. It was sort of a moment of reckoning; how come I choose to study history, a subject of biases and potential disorder?

On the most basic level my interest in History has always sparked from being inquisitive about the past, especially with regards to World War II when I was younger. My interest was not only with specific periods in history, like World War II, but histories of schools, towns, or music for that matter. Investigating the history of something always allowed me to become more acquainted with whatever I was studying. History, like art, allows you to illustrate and color in details; Music is plenty good by itself but knowing the history completes the auditory discourse. Imagine if we never knew of the time period in which Wagner lived, we would never understand what influenced his music, or what compelled the obscure compositions of Francis Poulenc. Knowing the history behind an old poem may give it new meaning; the same goes for an antiquated verse that can be seen in a new light or perhaps how it was meant to be seen in the first place. It is inescapable, that is, the daily use of history. Every time you refer to a certain decade, era, dynasty, or battle you are likely to refer to it as history. Every period in time that has a name has been decided upon by historians in one way or another.

History is always unfolding and gaining new perspective. Take for instance anyone who has ever been forward thinking and then passes away into relative obscurity, only to be venerated three generations later. I always enjoy reading stories of the people we now think of as great men and women, geniuses, and forward thinkers only to read about how their ideas or actions were received during the time they were alive. The same goes for people who were esteemed in their own time only to be footnotes of history in the future.

History is not just an exercise of recounting the past, but recalling the past in order to progressively study events in relation to their time and also to apply them to ours. Just as an engineer takes established knowledge and principles to solve a problem, a historian will use the same principles to undertake historical questions and discrepancies. After all this embellishment of history, I think the aforementioned sentence is the real reason why I study it. I do not mean to establish the subject of history over engineering or anything else for that matter, but instead to make it a point of interest for students and perhaps bring it a little more justice to the skeptics! If nothing else, history will remain an outlet for my inquisitive nature and perhaps win me some respect on Jeopardy.