The common involvement of college and secondary school teachers in introductory courses, exemplified by the Advanced Placement Program (AP), has become a source of strength in history curricula. AP courses in the schools of fer students superior preparation for university-level learning and open to them higher levels of achievement in historical work.
Yet the success of such cooperative ventures depends upon effective communication between university and secondary school faculties: upon professors’ familiarity with the capacities of students entering the university and upon secondary school teachers’ familiarity with the research trends that continuously reshape college-level courses. What follows is an attempt to promote the latter, offered by a Europeanist who has taught the introductory survey for more than a decade at Stanford University and has recently been involved in test development for the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board and the Educational Testing Service. It reviews certain shifts in historical thinking that over the past two decades or so have changed the direction of historical research, reflects upon the reasons why these have not yet revolutionized the teaching of introductory European survey courses, and suggests some realistic aspirations for beginning to reshape those courses.
In the past twenty years, the ground has shifted massively under the European survey. As always, changing interpretations have revised our understanding of various portions of the past: for example, the recent ecumenical view of Luther as a Catholic saint in advance of his time, or the emphasis on the irrational in the so-called “Age of Reason.” On a deeper level, however, certain inversions in historical philosophy have changed the very terms in which history itself and “historical thinking” are understood. The legacy of what are called the “new social historians” in England and America and of the Annales school in France has turned upside down the conception of history that Tocqueville and Ranke honed and that for a century underlay the paradigm of European history on which European survey courses have been based.
Traditionally, the introductory European survey has been deeply rooted in a triangle of state, event, and analysis of causation. The traditional European survey has assumed with Sir John Robert Seeley that “history is past politics,” with Thomas Hardy that “war makes rattling good history, but peace is poor reading,” and with Thomas Carlyle that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Its framework has traced the succession of great public events (national elections, wars, civil strife, revolution), large-scale public transformations (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution); its actors have been the great figures in public politics, in public economic life, and in culture understood as the public world of art and ideas. Powerful social groups have been considered important; subordinate groups have been included only insofar as they interacted with elites.
Traditionally, the introductory European survey has been deeply rooted in a triangle of state, event, and analysis of causation.
Succinctly stated, the inversions of the past two decades have overturned the trio of state, event, and causation: elevating society over state, duration over event, and cohesion over causation. Looking first at state and society, the political and diplomatic history which has been the core of the traditional survey is in a sense an artifact of the nineteenth century, a time-specific feature of the nineteenth century, for this political history was defined and codified during the heyday of European nation-states and modern inter-state diplomatic systems. History as then defined fed upon the documents made available by the state and, more than this, served to legitimize the state by celebrating as historically significant the individuals and events within the public reality that the state itself recognized.
Since the Second World War, however, partly because of the experience of world war and partly because the flowering of social sciences greatly enhanced understanding of how human societies operate independent of state policy and in ways to which politics are irrelevant, European intellectuals (including historians) turned from a focus on state to a focus on society. Once subtracting the Leviathan from center stage of the past, these historians did not find a Hobbesean state of nature; they found, rather, community: a local or regional, private, spontaneous, self-regulating force that was even more important than the state in determining the direction of human affairs. And so turning from state to society, they came to focus on the common many rather than on the elite few, on the private reality rather than on the public, on the group rather than on the individual. As Lucien Febvre, founder of the Annales, said: history seeks “the collective historical person.” Jamais l’homme: les hommes [Never man, but men].” And we might update Febvre by saying “les hommes et les femmes [men and women].”
The second inversion raised the duration above the event. From the Annales in particular came the notion that change in human life across time takes place at different paces in different areas of life. In politics change can occur rapidly in an event; in economics change usually occurs at a moderate pace, often in generation-long trends; in mentality (the bases of thinking) change occurs much more slowly, “at a glacial pace,” taking many generations or even many centuries for mental change to ripen. So the historian has to look at paces of change, at durations; above all, the historian has to avert his or her vision from the succession of events that traditionally had defined the framework of history just as he or she looks away from the state: the event, like the state, is simply not of capital importance. In the words of the late Fernand Braudel: “the event is explosive, it is something new. It blinds the eyes of contemporaries with clouds of smoke; but it does not endure, and its flame is hardly visible.” “One is too accustomed in history to latch especially onto splendid, resounding, and ephemeral aspects of human activity, great events or great men . . . most facts labelled historical are to the true human history as waves that rise on the surface of the sea, colored for an instant by all fires of the light are to the deep and constant movement of the tides.” The historian needs to plunge into the depths of the tides of human history, beneath the seductive but misleading event. [Braudel’s seminal article on the durations of change, “History and the Social Sciences,” has been reprinted in Peter Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe; Essays from Annales (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 11-42.]
The third inversion might be called cohesion over causation. Whereas historical study had traditionally sought to identify chains of causation in human history (what were the causes of the First World War or of some other event of state), this new definition of history largely eschews the search for causation as inevitably oversimplifying the complex past. Conceiving human society as more analogous to a biological phenomenon than to a mechanical one, its goal is to find the rapports, the reciprocal relations within a society; not, for example, to ask why a particular population thought in a particular way, but rather to ask what social structure or economic organization coexisted with and thus corresponded to that way of thinking. Asking why a people think a certain way is an impossible task; but if one can identify the Zusmnmenhang [interconnection] of the various aspects of life, it is possible thereby to identify the char acter of a society.
Society, duration, and cohesion, then, are the assumptions that underlie the work that has excited historical circles during the past two decades and which has profoundly reshaped investigations into the European past. These are the assumptions underlying Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, Theodore Zeldin’s France, Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood and The Hour of Our Death, and Natalie Zemon Davis’ essays and The Return of Martin Guerre. These are the assumptions that underlie advocacy of social history and the importance attached to recovering the history of women and minorities. Social history, then, is more than a supplement to our knowledge of past politics, and the aspiration for “gender balancing” is not merely an artifact of present politics. Both are, rather, integral components in a novel vision of the way human societies work, an understanding that transcends and replaces state, event, and causation.
But if these inversions have reinvigorated historical research, they have also to some extent confounded and con fused the introductory course. They have created a disjuncture between research directions, which have largely been running in these channels, and pedagogical practice, which has been slow to adopt social history, especially in the introductory course. In my experience, the abilities and familiarities of students to some extent militate against the reshaping of the introductory European course according t0 these inversions. By the time they reach college, students typically have firmly entrenched in their minds the notion that history is past politics; analysis of social development through time may strike them as interesting, but they do not think that it is history. (Here, by the way, is another inversion: the young more wedded to the traditional than their elders.)
Furthermore, abandoning the strict chronology provided by successive events often makes students uncomfortable. History by durations may seem “spongy,” vague, and sprawling to their unpracticed eyes. For example, Centuries of Childhood, which ranges broadly in tracing mental change that occurred at a glacial pace, can bewilder students who cannot be sure from page to page precisely which century Aries is talking about. Whether because their previous training has been more narrow or be cause their cognitive abilities have not yet reached full development, beginning college students frequently have difficulty grasping rapports and multiple causations, which are far more complex than the succession of milestone events.
Finally, students are often put off by the numbers in quantitative approaches to analyzing entire societies. Students do not expect numbers in a history class room and often are loathe to accept them. This reaction may be less pronounced at the secondary school level than in college, where greater self-selections have already taken place and the numerically inclined are less apt to take history courses at all than are those who prefer words to numbers. If so, secondary school history courses have a special role to play in accustoming students to social history.
Beyond the abilities and familiarities of students, lies another kind of constraint on the adoption of this inversion of history, a very recent renewal of emphasis on the political that directly counters European historians’ motivations for turning away from the state in the first place. In this country in recent months one certainly senses a renewing interest in the civic (interest in Ameri can patriotism) and also a renewing em phasis on history as civic education, as teaching with a civic purpose.
This same trend is discernible in Europe as well, at least in France. The Mitterand government has announced plans to return public school history to the traditional paradigm because the new history was not fulfilling its civic purpose. The new history was telling students much about food supplies and the experience of gender or ethnic groups but not much about what it means to be French. This governmental decision has challenged French intellectuals, who had turned to society and away from state precisely because two world wars on their own soil had led them to see the state as a divisive force that fragments mankind into artificial units of political loyalty. Their shift from state to society set out to use history less to consolidate nation-state identities than to unite peoples by emphasizing the universals of human experience (birth, love, subsistence, community culture) that men and women con front in all times and places.
In view of the changes in understanding wrought by social historians in the past twenty years and the persisting obstacles to teaching history in that way, what can or should up-to-date introductory European history courses consist of? This new history is much more comprehensive than the old; it has greatly expanded the past, but the school year has not expanded commensurately. So the teacher asks in bewilderment: “Who has time to include those new materials? I have too much else to cover.” Or the teacher cries: “How can I include all that is now recognized as part of the European past and still have a manageable, coherent story?” The temptation to stick with the easily manageable will always be strong. Darwin’s publisher, thinking his unprecedented ambitions had made his manuscript unwieldy, advised Darwin to confine the book to his pigeon data alone, since “everybody is interested in pigeons.” As Darwin’s example demonstrates, comprehensiveness makes for significance, the easily manageable is the easily dismissed.
The key to making a more comprehensive history manageable has to lie in judicious, even sometimes ruthless, selection. In order to construct a coherent story from the vastly expanded materials of European history, it will be necessary to lay aside much of the information that supplied the backbone of the old paradigm. [Two textbooks that endeavor to incorporate new understandings of social history are John P. McKay, et al, A History of Western Society (Boston, Houghton Mifflin) and Mortimer Chambers, et al., The Western Experience (New York, Knopf). Six models for introductory history courses appears in Kevin Reilly, ed., Proceedings of the AHA Annapolis Conference (Washington, 1984), which can be purchased for $6 from the AHA (400 A St., SE, Washington, D.C., 20003). Curriculum materials entitled Restoring Women to History: Materials for Western Civilization, prepared by Elizabeth Fox-Genevese and Susan Mosher Stuard, can be purchased for $16 from the Organization of American Historians (112 N. Bryan St., Bloomington, IN 47401).]
The analysis of society cannot simply be grafted onto the story of past politics; it cannot be inserted in the empty spaces in political history surveys, even if such empty spaces could be found. In order to do justice to the new historical totality, one will have to apply a revised conception, revised principles of selection. And though the new social historians have not offered a fully articulated pedagogical blueprint, they have suggested three principles of selection: society, duration, and cohesion.
In principle at least, and practice has often borne this out, once past the initial blocks in the students’ understanding, the more comprehensive history of the social historians has an appeal that is stronger and more universal than the appeal of the traditional paradigm, for it relates to every person’s experience as the old did not. Few of our students will ever wield political power, formulate or articulate state policy, or create great ideas. But everyone is born, everyone thus becomes part of a community, everyone lives in a household or institution, marries or remains single, has children or not, migrates or stays put, and eventually dies; that is, everyone participates in and makes the patterns of private experience that the new history looks to. So the new history at one and the same time makes historical actors of us all and allows us to extend our personal acquaintances beyond the pitifully narrow chronological range of our own lives. Surely, few would be able to resist the appeal of a brand of history that does that.
Carolyn Lougee, Associate Professor of History and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Stanford University, is a specialist in early modern French history, with special emphasis on women and education. She studied new approaches to the survey course as a committee member for the Teaching Division of the AHA and served on the college board committee that writes the European History AP exam. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual convention of the AHA in San Francisco in 1984.
