Category: Personal Experience

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Can Historians Be Funny?

“The Political Drama,” from the British Library (1834-35). “I govern the people. I pray for the people. I legislate for the people. I fought for the people. I preserve the peace for all four. And above the devil on the extreme right is; And I’ll have all five.”

Recently, I was asked whether historians avoid humor. My recent experience shouted “yes,” but I recalled that when I was a child my parents owned a small, amusing book about history. The author’s name was Richard Armour. I googled him and bought two of his books. I find him funny.

Armour was the author of at least 35 books and all kinds of poems, jokes, and essays. He was also a professor at such schools as Northwestern University and Claremont Graduate School and even dean of the faculty at Scripps College. 

His best-known book, It All Started with Columbus, is a riff on the education that most Americans received in the 1950s.[1] (Every year in elementary school, like clockwork, we learned about the explorers: we never seemed to get further.) It All Started. . . is often just silly, as Armour makes puns or tangles up the facts, most of which Americans probably knew at the time.

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About Time

I was 33 years old when I realized I was living in a different era from my past. My 1950s world of big skirts with felt poodles, petticoats, and even hoops; of sweltering at school in May and June because there was no air conditioning; of 45 rpm records; of going to the drugstore soda fountain and choosing vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream—all had been part of a different epoch.

Yes, I had been a young adult during the turbulent ‘60s (and was part of the turbulence), but I hadn’t experienced them as anything other than one year following the previous one, like day follows day, even if those days were tumultuous. It took twenty years for me to see my past as part of a distinct period, one that was gone.

Historians, however, routinely chop up time—they have to.

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I’m Going Back to College

For the past few years I have been taking courses at North Carolina State University—first, a few undergraduate courses in French and history, then graduate-level classes in history alone. In April, I was accepted as a genuine, formal graduate student seeking a master’s degree. My primary concentration will be European history.

I’m retired. I’ve been retired since 2015. My husband, Rick, is an economist who says that education is an investment and, given my age, I won’t have much time to earn a return on it. So why do I want to do this? My reply is that this education is a consumption good, not an investment. Some people have “bucket lists” of things they want to do before they die—usually places they want to see. My bucket has two things in it: studying history and speaking French.

I’m writing this blog because I wish to deepen my educational experience and see if my observations resonate with others.’ I want to comment about it all—mostly history and historiography, but also other academic disciplines and maybe even pedagogy and college administration (not personalities, though, except possibly my own). I hope my questions and comments will elicit further observations, including corrections, from colleagues and friends, practiced historians, and fellow  students.

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