I am wary of traditionally structured autobiographies, having been frequently been advised that such accounts can devolve into a triumphalist narrative in which the writer serves as their own protagonist; defying obstacles and overcoming adversity, until finally reaching the artificial endpoint in the decision to write. If this essay does conform to such teleology, I hope it is for more interesting reasons than self-aggrandizement. The self-revelatory nature of the assignment has forced some curious choices. I should state openly and from the outset that the way I understand why I “do history” is integrally connected to the rest of my occasionally coherent if not rigorously systematic understanding of the world on the whole. Therefore, I draw on disparate themes: relationships to friends, family, the church, spirituality, and politics, and I make divulgences about meaningful experiences only faintly and tangentially related to my subfield within history. I hope this does not read as evasive, but rather as an attempt to articulate my development as holistically as possible in eight pages. Well, seven and a half after this tedious introduction.
My understanding of history in relation to “the past” is like that of maps to the places they depict. A history is a story of the past, often supported by varied sorts of empirical evidence and is hopefully a useful representation and exposition of the past- but should not be confused for the past itself. By that definition, history contains elements of both art and science, which I feel holds its greatest appeal, importance, and resonance. I have developed this understanding through my early education, my undergraduate experience at Florida State University, through disorganized study in my four year interregnum from the discipline, on its resumption at Depaul University, and through innumerable hours with friends and family on road trips, and train rides, coffee, beer, wine, and whiskey.
As I hope is the case for us all, the way in which I interpret the world and its history is no exclusive function of academic training, but is animated by the extraordinary and commonplace relationships I have had, and am fortunate enough to maintain. How the story of me and my best friend (whose life is so oddly and beautifully integrated with my own, following in lockstep from childhood through early adulthood in France, while following a similar course in personal development) has such an overwhelmingly emotional pull necessarily comes to mind when I construct a historical narrative. My aggressively subjective and personal experiences undergird my understanding of history as much as my social and academic ones.
Maybe it’s just social conditioning (my favorite childhood book was an atlas, and I did get rewarded in 2nd grade be being allowed to read the encyclopedia in the corner) but to my recollection, I have always thought in historical terms, to one degree or another. The majority of my childhood was wrapped up in trying to KNOW things: discrete facts about the past, the timeline of events, and where things happened. I benefitted from a rather simple idea of what it meant to know something about something and was quite satisfied to memorize facts, figures, names, dates, and all the other things that the average child hates about history, as if they meant something in and of themselves. For all the effort, I don’t think I really learned much of what is important about history, but it does make me a damn good pub trivia player.
My professional aspirations are hardly a reach considering my background and family history. I was raised in a family that put high esteem on higher education. And while my father’s family is almost exclusively white collar professionals and scientists, my mother’s is guided by my grandfather’s legacy as an historian and my great-grandfather’s role as a Methodist churchman. Since I was principally raised by my mother, it is her extended family and its ethics and values that shaped my early worldview. My immediate family emphasized the arts and humanities, even as they became increasingly under the sway of what I perceived to be an overly politicized version of evangelical Christianity. As I have come to understand the world under different terms and to follow different assumptions than the vast majority of my family, I am fiercely joyful that I remain close with my family and communicate quite openly with most of them. Our relationships walk the tightrope of seeking commonality, acknowledges difference, and tries (though I often fail) to avoid a dogmatic or possessive relationship to truth.
When I entered Florida State in 2003 I embarked on two distinct projects, history and philosophy, that I kept at arm’s length. After a brief foray into political science, which I found to be a far too limiting discipline for my interests, I began a course of study in history which focused on the politics of the Antebellum United States. As remains the case, this concentration is profoundly personal and also (one hopes) a fruitful intellectual project, with utility and validity within academia and the wider world. My family’s history and identity as Southern certainly underlie and motivate certain strains of my inquiry. My own mercurial and problematic self-identification as a Southerner on simple “materialist” grounds (I was born in a place traditionally considered the South, to a family that has historically resided there, ergo I am Southern) inspires a sensitivity to the role of identity and self-perception in history.
As I pursued a degree in history I also began a study of philosophy, instigated by the frequent pestering of my good friend and former pastor. I began to rebel from what I considered the intellectual weakness of the version of Christianity I was accustomed to, and graduated to a form of Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy which I found satisfyingly mentally stimulating. My exposure to academic philosophy was integrally useful and important in my understanding of history, both in terms of sharpening my mental acuity, and in providing a vantage on the long view of history. Even so, my worldview remained limited by youth and impertinence. (Even as I write that, I am aware that it is the nature of things that in a year’s time or less, I will be attributing the drivel of this essay to my defectively youthful twenty six year old mentality.)
It is my fallible recollection that my understanding of philosophy remained very much on the surface. I may have been able to discuss some of the ideas at some length, but instead of inspiring a deeper introspection into what it means to be, and how one should act, I was comfortable with using the pantheon of great ideas solely as conversational play-things. This relates as well to my sharpest criticism of my study of history: I was quite comfortable with memorizing and synthesizing, and used that ability to largely avoid wrestling with the important underlying issues which lay at the heart of the profession and the crux of historiographical debate.
Since I was unwilling to be deeply reflective about the heart of the profession to some important extent, my personal dedication to the craft was necessarily weak as well. Nothing in history is utterly mono-causal, and the initial inglorious collapse that I suffered at the end of my undergraduate career was certainly accentuated by a strong personal and emotional element (read: break-up with a long term girlfriend). Added to this during the spring semester of 2006 I received rejection letters from each graduate program to which I applied, including this institution. Still I am convinced that my lack of rigorous dedication to the craft of history, largely due to never allowing myself to be seriously and intimately challenged by the material played a pivotal role in my collapse. I abandoned my senior thesis, shut myself off from the world and my professors, and barely escaped with my bachelor’s degree. I felt at that time quite certain that the study of history, which had given me so much purpose, was closed off to me for good. This was not a good time.
I found myself rather directionless in the months after finishing at Florida State. This was not altogether a bad thing, and my ennui did eventually manifest itself in some productive ways. I began to disavow myself of my previous goals within academia, and otherwise assumed a lifestyle somewhat typical of service industry worker in their early twenties. Still, having lived my entire life in the South, I was restless for some different experience. Historically, I have not been a serious trail blazer, and my eventual move to France was neither arbitrary nor unaided by friends and family. A former French professor made me aware of a little-known French Government program which sponsors fifteen hundred-odd Americans a year to teach English as a second language in their primary and secondary schools. Roused by a chance encounter with a coworker (and now a dear friend) who was repatriating from Tallahassee to Sweden, encouraged and inspired by my step-father, who spent three years working odd jobs around the world after being wounded in Vietnam, my best friend and I applied. I was accepted to the program and moved to France the year after I graduated, he followed the next year.
My experience in Europe was unquestionably transformative. I was exposed to many ways of being which differed sharply from that which I was habituated. I learned a new language, grew acclimated to existing within a different culture. I lived in the context of new and different values and assumptions, while experiencing the tensions which existed within French society as an outsider. The entirety of such an experience necessarily informs how I view the world I come from, and provided a new vantage for considering the sweep of American history.
The schools I taught in drew a large percentage of their students from France’s ethnic minorities. While I attempted to teach the children of immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Portugal and elsewhere, I shared an apartment with a North African man who was living in France illegally. We remain good friends, and sharing some of his experience while interacting with my students gave me a window into a deeply unfamiliar world. Seeing ways that the French state and culture dealt with, or ignored, systemic social problems rooted in an impossible to disentangle mélange of interconnected issues of class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and religion profoundly impressed me of the immense difficulty that a society faces as it moves forward in time. As I resume a course of study, my time in France informs my understanding of how history is the terrain on which different social groups vie for self-justification, vindication, and pity, in the political realm.
After two years in France, I was still resolute in my unwillingness to make serious plans for the future. Nor did I have a mind to find a way to meaningfully contribute to society. I am inclined to think that courage plays a large role in doing anything worthwhile, and I certainly lacked the courage to either re-approach my past failings in academia, or what I perceived as the root causes. This is not to say that my time was wasteful; I gained a wealth of experiences that were deeply moving, and will continue to inform my worldview. I think that getting out of a comfortable or familiar situation is useful for that; it seems to open up the mind to possibility. Even if that feeling of expanded possibility never amounts to much beyond the feeling, it can lead to productive mental stimulation.
I began to read broadly, putting aside American history to take up biology, (non math-based) physics, some literature on cosmology, linguistics, politics, and a good amount of non-American history. Even though my reading was guided more by whim than by rigor, I feel that engagement with disciplines outside of the narrow scope of my subfield has served me well. I modified my thinking on a number of subjects and took up a pursuit of some of the essential (if almost certainly unsolvable) existential questions. For some time I embraced atheism, which I found to be problematic in some interesting ways, and have since developed a comfortably uncomfortable and uneven relationship to a concept that could be called God. Through the duration of time away from school, I don’t feel that I fundamentally retreated from a sense of the importance of history, nor my passion for it, even as new stimuli inspired a slow but profound shift in my understanding its role in both individuals and society.
After two years in France, I decided that I wanted to return to the United States, but had no intention to really consider the future in a concrete or pragmatic way. I was certainly addicted to traveling, so I decided to move to Chicago. I had two very close friends there already, and I knew several who had the city in their sights. I found a decent restaurant job, a decent apartment, and a series of less than decent roommates. Living in Chicago was mostly positive, even, or especially because of the growing pains I experienced there. In the process, much to my shock and horror, I encountered the genre of people that had not drifted around Europe, but were instead engaged in the pursuit of serious and tangible goals. Theirs was an example which I initially resisted, and was the source of intense discouragement; my hand was eventually forced.
With a great deal of practical and emotional aid from my friends and family, as well as the reestablished connection of a former professor at Florida State, I reinstated an inquiry into professional history. I took courses at Depaul University in the Fall of 2010 with the intention of defining the particulars of a research focus and my approach to history, while building the relationships necessary to negotiate the minefield that is the application process. While I initially considered myself open to stray from my erstwhile subfield, my interest was revitalized. As I prepared the seminar paper that would serve as my writing sample, I developed a new and more pointed interest in the literature I had abandoned at the end of my undergraduate career.
Nothing in history is utterly mono-causal, and the mindset with which I returned to academia was accentuated by a strong personal and emotional element (read: break-up with a short term girlfriend, and a long term left arm). Sometimes the universe is coarsely lacking in subtlety, even if our interpretation of the lessons to be gleaned are the subject of interminable debate. For me, these events were pregnant with meaning; personal experience has a way of driving home abstract ideals. The heartbreak and arm-break that I enjoyed mere weeks before I started classes gave an irreplaceable immediacy to my quest for meaning. The irony of breaking my writing arm at the outset of restarting school was the subject of many a wry joke (including this one), but I also found it strangely motivating. Experiencing emotional and physical pain in quick succession also gave me some insight into mind/body dualism, but that is the subject of a different and far more boring essay.
I do take some satisfaction mixed with chagrin that my story to this point follows the all too typical narrative of the twenty-something trying to find their way. There is certainly some value in taking a break, even if one’s sabbatical is neither intended nor organized under a principle. The law of unintended consequences is most often invoked to condemn the well-intentioned, but in my case it might be used to show that good results may arrive when none in particular were sought. The particulars of my research interests have remained similar over the years; 19th century American politics has deep roots in me. However, I hope that the past several years’ experiences will serve to open me up to deeper insights on an old and well-trod subject.
