01c: The Importance of HistoryA couple of summers ago, my Dad came down from Wisconsin to spend the week with us. He and I were having breakfast at a local restaurant. The waitress brought me a stack of three pancakes and I got down to business. I should point out here that I have a system for eating pancakes. I started by lifting up the top two pancakes and buttering the bottom pancake. Then I let the middle pancake drop on to the bottom pancake and buttered the middle pancake. Then I let the top pancake drop on top of the middle pancake and buttered the top pancake. Having completed this task, I poured syrup over the stack of pancakes until it almost came over the side of the plate. By the time I had finished this highly complex procedure, Dad was literally laughing out loud. "That's exactly the same way your mother always had to eat her pancakes!" I have to confess that in the 42 years I got to spend on this planet with my mom, I had never once thought of Mom as a pancake eater. Over the years, I am sure I have eaten hundreds and hundred of pancakes that Mom fixed me, but I can't ever recall seeing Mom eat pancakes. Of course, that's the way it's supposed to be. Moms fix pancakes and their kids eat the pancakes. I am also sure that Mom never taught me how to eat pancakes, the way she taught me how to tie my shoes, and how to drive a car, and how to buy presents for my wife. Still, I have to perform this operation each and every time I eat a stack of pancakes. The only explanation I have is that I can't help behaving like my mother's son. In much the same way, we can say that a nation behaves the way it does because it can't help factors such as its own ancestry, geographical location, and history.
The colonists who founded the United States of America were mostly descended from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These ancestors had come to the different colonies for various reasons, but almost always of their own free will. Some, though, had come as indentured servants and some had been brought from Africa to serve as human slaves. Some of the first Americans' ancestors had lived in North America for centuries: the so-called Indians. From the early 1800s on, people from around the world poured into the United States to become Americans, throwing their stock into the great American melting pot. We live today in an America which rightly celebrates and nurtures its diversity. But we cannot help the fact that our nation was founded by a very un-diverse group of Anglo-Saxon males with very specific ideas. Some of these ideas were pretty awful: the tolerance for human slavery, the absence of women's rights, the belief that the Indians were not quite human. We are still fighting the consequences of these wrongs today. Still, by far the greater part of our Founders' ideas were almost miraculously constructive: the first great experiment in government that actually worked as designed. The United States did not always extend from sea to shining sea. As originally founded, America's western boundary was actually the Mississippi River; Canada was to the north and Spanish Florida was to the south. Unsurprisingly for a nation of immigrants, the American people was restless. Even before the American Revolution, colonists looking for new land defied British laws by settling the west side of the Allegheny Mountains. Sometimes the boundaries were expanded by purchase, sometimes viadiplomacy, and sometimes through the use of raw force. The United States was pretty much granted a free hand in this process because North America was too far away from Europe for the British, French, or Spanish to have any real clout. The Americans began to see their nation as having a "manifest destiny" to civilize North America, but the definition of "civilized" was open to question. More than anything else, the American Civil War arose from a dispute over whether the new territories to the west would become free or slaveholding states; once slavery was abolished and the Union restored, the Indians bore the brunt of the Americans' drive westward. And once the western frontier closed, America began to look outward. All of this is just some of the cultural baggage we carry as Americans.
Important as it is for us to understand who we were as Americans before we understand who we are as Americans, we tend to have afuzzy sense of our nation's history. Part of the problem is the time factor. Although I am old and bald and gray, I'm not old enough to recall the American Revolution. Even my Dad wasn't alive then. Actually, my ancestors were all still either in Great Britain or in Poland at the time, and neither side of my family made it to the United States until the 1850s. But once my ancestors arrived, they willingly became American - shouldering all of the cultural baggage I just described. Another problem is that a historical fact can be, and often is, presented believably with two completely opposed meanings. As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, I was taught that the Civil War was fought because the Northern states wanted to free the slaves and the Southern states wanted to keep them. My wife, growing up in Tennessee, was taught that the Civil War happened because the South was tired of Northern abolitionists telling it how to live. The truth lies somewhere in between: slaveowners were a minority in the South, as abolitionists were in the North. The real source of the war was the Founders' unwillingness to address the question head on when the Constitution was drafted. Our nation's history is full of cases like this. If we really want to understand ourselves as a nation, we have to set aside (if just for a moment) what we were told or taught to believe, and re-examine critically what actually happened and why. Some people, myself included, love the study of history for its own sake: reading it, discussing it, and even writing about it. More than two decades teaching college has taught me that most students aren't as crazy about history as I am. Some students may even feel about history the way I have always felt about the study of mathematics: a cruel and refined type of torment. But a historical appreciation of our nation's role in the world is not merely optional today. The United States is making history literally every day, which means that you and I are literally living history each and every day. Moreover, if we are to practice the involved citizenship described by Missouri State's statewide Public Affairs Mission, our own actions and decisions contribute to this history. We owe it to our nation and to ourselves to enter this process with the best preparation we can acquire. As you have no doubt discovered during your time at Missouri State, preparation for involved citizenship is a complex process. It involves the study of many different disciplines and the comparison of many different viewpoints. My bias is likely showing, but I see the study of history as the cornerstone of this preparation.
Now, when I order pancakes for breakfast, I order just one. I'm not as young as I used to be and heart disease runs on both sides of my family. I take my cholesterol meds, which is no problem. I work out regularly, which is, frankly, a pain in various parts of my anatomy. It's sad that I have to cut back on my portions, but family history indicates that I'm making a worthwhile change. But at least I can butter the living daylights out of that one pancake and drown it in syrup... the way that God and my Mom intended for it to be eaten.
Lecture 01 Homepage
01a: Introduction
01b: How The Course Works
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01d: Some Helpful Buzzwords
01e: Conclusions
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