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Chris Cantwell: "Young Historian" |
Rebecca Onion
Mairin Odle
Jessica Luther
Chris Cantwell
Alexander Avina
All of these historians talk about their vocation journeys, their research, and the history of the discipline. Here is a taste of Chris Cantwell's interview:
Why study history? What do you think is the future of history?
There’s
a growing sentiment that the future of the past is online. Scholars,
educators, curators, and librarians have all turned to social media and
digital technology to find new ways of analyzing sources, sharing
information, and cataloging the past. But I think this turn to the web
is part of—or should be part of—an even more important shift toward the
public. The ongoing fiscal crises and dominant economic ideologies that
are rapidly remaking the myriad institutions in which the work of
history is done have had far more drastic impacts upon the communities
those institutions are intended to serve. I therefore simply cannot
imagine a future history, academic and otherwise, that does not consider
intentional and creative public engagement as important as innovation
and accuracy.
As
a centerpiece of the humanities, history is not “that which cannot be
justified” as Stanley Fish has argued, or the “flower” to the more
practical (and supposedly more employable) STEM disciplines, as the
American Academy of Arts and Science’s Humanities Commission recently
proposed. History is humanity’s lodestone, forever bending our projected
upward progressions into arcs of time. The past anchors a person’s
identity, shapes the communities in which they live, and serves as a
rhetorical weapon in nearly every political discourse. To research,
share, and promote history is not about enriching the human experience
or ornamenting a student’s employability. It is about transmitting a set
of skills that directly contribute to an individual’s social, civic,
and economic success. If the profession is unable or unwilling to
advance this claim in the future, then my hopes for the study of the
past grow a little dimmer.