I’ve been thinking a lot about the decline of the history major and the broader indifference to history in general at a time when it feels so important to have an historical perspective during these strange and dangerous times.

On January 12, 2019, The New York Times ran an article, entitled “Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’.” Some young people want to study history, but rural universities are making that nearly impossible. The article cited as an example the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point,  where the administration wants to drop history from its curriculum, not just as a cost-saving move, but to reshape the university “…for the future.” Instead, they want “career-focused programs.”

And then there’s Peter Herman’s excellent opinion piece in the Times of San Diego denouncing a recent “executive order” by the Chancellor’s Office at the California State University system that arbitrarily (and without proper faculty input) decreased the general education requirement system-wide in a way that specifically curtails the “world history program” and the history of “American Institutions.” From now on, a student will be able to graduate from the California State University system without ever taking a history course. And it’s not like this is a small matter. The California State University system prides itself on being the largest comprehensive higher education system in America, with 23 unique campuses, over 437,000 students, and a diverse student population.

But the problem is larger. A recent Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation poll found that approximately two-thirds of Ameicans probably would not pass the exam for American citizenship!  A test that requires only a score of 60 to pass. I wonder how many of our "nativists" would fail? And some of these same people want to bar immigrants who they believe will contaminate America and its culture?

In the push for more career-oriented programs of study, liberal arts colleges like my own Barnard College have been creating and expanding STEM programs. Those programs are valuable, and necessary in our world. Students want them. But the displacement and disparagement of history, even among the humanities, alarms me. The Chronicle of Higher Education asked (Nov. 26, 2018), ”Why are Students Ditching the History Major,” and cited a study that shows history has declined more than any other humanities major. Fewer students are interested in majoring in history. Some university administrations find history departments expendable as colleges have turned corporate. History departments themselves sometimes devalue the study of earlier periods.  The history department at the University of Illinois, where I taught for years before coming to Barnard, decided not to replace their well-known historian of seventeenth-century England when she retired. Many English departments have “modernized,” feeling the need to no longer require majors to take courses in earlier periods. It is not just a matter of declining majors, changing demographics and the reshaping of departments. A recent article in the New Yorker (February 4, 2019) quite correctly called it “The Decline of Historical Thinking,” noting that the decline in history majors is evident in all ethnic and racial groups. Only the Ivy League institutions have remained immune to this decline. 

I must confess something. When I was young, history seemed just a matter of memorizing events and dates. How boring. Of course there was more to history than that, though I didn’t think so at the time. But I also avoided history for other reasons.  Having grown up with a father who was obsessed with the topic and thought the end times were upon us, I really didn’t want to think about it.  Instead, I chose Literature, especially of the past, which seemed a safe distance. I never took a history course as an undergraduate or in graduate school. It wasn’t required, and I didn’t seek it out.

It took some years for me to realize that historical thinking wasn’t a matter of memorizing dates.  I came to realize that historical thinking meant understanding the past, seeing a relationship between our present times and what has come before. And so I have become a literary critic who is also an historian. Gradually I’ve been stretching myself, wanting to glimpse the bigger picture and my students seem to like that.  So in the larger world, as in our personal lives, the past is never fully behind us. It’s not just that tragedies can repeat themselves, especially if we are not vigilant, but that the past leaves its imprint on later generations, much as our genetic ancestors remain in our DNA, our childhood traumas leave their mark.

In my opinion, we need historical thinking more than ever. Just to cite one example: Did President Trump know the history of the slogan “America First” when he started using it in his election campaign?  If not, he was ignorant of the fascist roots of the phrase in the U.S. during the 1930s among Hitler sympathizers, such as Charles Lindberg.  Would Trump have used it if he had known its history? If he knew it and would have repeatedly used it anyway, that would be a terrifying thing. But if a person is willfully ignorant of the phrase’s history, or if he refuses to accept that knowledge (or sees it as “alternative facts”), then isn’t that just as troubling? As if knowing your own country’s recent history doesn’t matter, let alone world history.  

I’m left wondering if there isn’t a close relationship between dismissing the importance of history and historical thinking, along with a cavalier attitude towards “truth,” as if we can make it up as we go, believeing there are no consequences to such ignorance.

 But we know there are.

Recently, while doing research about America in the 1930s and 40s, I came across something startling. For some time I’ve been interested in nationalism, particularly national exceptionalism, and found a periodical published during this time period called “The Torch of Israel,” which was dedicated to the idea that America is “…the modern land of Israel.” 

This concept of national exceptionalism that considered America as the new Israel was an idea brought over initially by the Puritans who settled in New England.  But this piece was from the 1930s with isolationism as its core message. The cover of the June 1932 issue featured a picture of George Washington accompanied by the slogan, “KEEP OUT of Foreign Entanglements.”

There is much here to talk about, much that has resonance in our own times.  But what struck me that day was a large announcement featured on the bottom of the page of a later issue from October 1935:  “Are you an American, or are you an Internationalist? Internationalism is a mongrel creed which means mischief, it is the chief contention of Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia is against God and Good Government. Well, if you are an American, Read an American Magazine published in America by Americans and For Americans. The enemy is within our gates, the despoiler is at our door. The American Home, the American School, the dear old American Flag are in danger as never before. Will you defend the distinctly American possessions? If you are willing to do this, help the cause which stands for PURE AMERICANISM, THE TORCH OF ISRAEL by subscribing…We stand for the Bible—for Israel—for Israel’s God.”

Of course the questions are: who or what is Israel, and who or what is America? (As it turns out, “The Torch of Israel” was fiercely Protestant, anti-Catholic and anti-Immigration at a time when there was pressure to admit Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, but quotas kept them out.)

I cannot help but hear an anticipation of the toxic kind of nationalism we are now witnessing.  There’s nothing wrong with love of your country, but toxic nationalism is something else.  Note in the publication’s announcement the opposition between “an American” and “an Internationalist”—the then-current term for the Jews, taken from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1905), an anti-Semitic fraudulent text purporting to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders planning world domination.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford published an English version of the Protocols as “The International Jew,” which spread the idea that the Jews were an international conspiracy ambitious to take over the world.  The Protocols has never gone out of print, its virulent seemingly unstoppable. The coded term we hear now is not “internationalist” but “globalist,” and it has been levelled against George Soros and others by white Protestant supremacists, like Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr, who is charged with sending pipe bombs in October 2018 to Soros, the Clintons, the Obamas, and others he blamed for supporting liberal causes that were destroying “pure America.”  (It is no accident that Jews, Blacks, liberals and the media were all grouped together as a threat to America by Sayoc).  In “The Torch of Israel,” too, we see the fear of the immigrant, the dislike of those who come to America who are not “American” (that is, people of color, which included Jews, Asians, Middle Easterners, but also Eastern and Southern Europeans from Italy, Spain and other Catholic countries).  In Congress’ 1924 discriminatory immigration act, racism and religion were intertwined, inseparable—as if those who constituted “America” were necessarily white and Protestant. 

These are the identical assumptions of our 21st century white supremacists and nativists, who fear that their country is being made impure by demographic changes and immigration. I believe it’s not just a matter of race, but religion. While President Trump’s efforts to close the borders to refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries may well have started as an attempt to fight terrorism, it is hard to escape concluding that both racial and religious prejudices have played a role. Same goes for the obsession with having a firm border along Mexico to keep out “bad guys,” presumed to be embedded with children and families. Who comes to America from the south through Mexico? Latin Americans, who are Roman Catholic.

Many of those who are so eager to keep out refugees from the Middle East and from South America want to keep America “pure” as well as “safe,” and they see the swelling numbers of blacks, Arabic Muslims, and Hispanics here as destroying America’s identity, making it impure—that is, not white and Protestant. And for the anti-Semitic extremists, the threat comes from Jews too, who despite (or because) of their successes in America, are not really considered white. Remember the lie that George Soros was financing the caravan coming through Mexico? For some conservatives, it’s not just disturbing but frightening that America and the nation are changing. The sense of danger, the hysteria, the fear that we hear now (we are told that we are in a “crisis,” that we have a “national emergency”); the demonization of liberals and “globalists” as well as immigrants-- sounds all too much like the 1930s to me.

The world may have changed, but the current state of affairs sounds all too frighteningly familiar.