Imagine yourself into a mid-semester Sunday afternoon. You’re easing into a quiet hour in the Quad. Or as quiet as a Quad hour gets, anyway, as water whines through shower pipes and music floats across the lawn. It’s the first warm day of March. Some classmates are out tossing a Frisbee. Or maybe it’s the kind of spring that dumps eight inches of snow onto Philadelphia 10 days before the equinox, and your hallmates are frolicking in it before it melts. This is your reverie. You’re in charge.
But you have work to do. The weekly prompt for History 011 has come out, and it’s time to respond. What is this artifact? And what’s the trick this week? Usually the task seems a little more difficult: without resorting to Google, but secure in the knowledge that no grade will penalize an errant reply, write three sentences describing the origin and historical significance of the item at hand. Yet this one is already stuffed with clues: a dated proclamation by one General Fremont, pertaining to an obvious conflict in a specific state. So your job is at once simpler and harder: Why does this document matter? Say so in three or four sentences.
Seriously: Write down three sentences. Read the prompt again if need be. The rest of this article will be waiting for you. Don’t fret if Fremont’s first name escapes you. What might a historian glean from this news clipping? What significance would it have had to a Missouri farmer who read it in the summer of 1861—or to an enslaved stevedore on a Mississippi River ferry, or to a Washington insider, or to the president himself? Three sentences: Go!
In May, I happened across Walter Licht, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, walking a few blocks west of campus after having delivered the final lecture of his 44-year teaching career at Penn. His retirement was news to me. I asked how it felt to address his last class. Different than he’d always imagined, he replied. “After I finished and took my last question,” he said, “I clicked a button and the window on my computer closed.”
In a year unclouded by COVID-19, there might have been an hour of well-wishing and bittersweet camaraderie outside the lecture hall.
I was curious about the subject of his final lecture. Licht specializes in the history of labor and industrial capitalism. But as fitting as it might have been to end with one final trip to his scholarly wheelhouse, he told me he’d lectured about the evolution of American conservatism from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump W’68. His swan song, in other words, had come in an entry-level introduction to US history course. But the last thing Licht needed from me was neighborly commiseration, for sparks of intellectual electricity seemed to shower the sidewalk as he buzzed on about this class. He and Kathleen Brown, the David Boies Professor of History, had completely reimagined this course from top to bottom, along with the educational goals they had for it. The result, he told me, had been the most rewarding teaching experience of his entire career.
When Licht joined Penn’s faculty in 1977, the history department vibrated with charismatic professors whose flair at the podium had ushered in a golden era of the introductory survey course. Few, if any, were more beloved than the late Alexander Riasanovsky[“Obituaries,” Jan|Feb 2017], a Russian émigré whose family had been driven from their home in Chinese Manchuria by the Japanese invasion when he was nine years old. With a rich baritone voice whose cadence quickened into a “thunderous roar” at climactic moments—as recalled by Lee Gordon C’68, who named his firstborn son Alex in tribute—Riasanovskymesmerized generations of history, pre-med, Wharton, and engineering students with his magisterial survey of Russia and the Soviet Union.
Riasanovsky was one of “a bunch of hams,” Licht recalled with fond admiration, “who did it extremely well.” Another was Richard Beeman, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History Emeritus, whose 43 years on the faculty included stints as department chair and dean of the College. His introductory survey of American history may have featured the most extensive wardrobe in the annals of undergraduate education. His death in 2016 [“Obituaries,” Nov|Dec2016] triggered an outpouring of memories about the costumes he donned to transform lectures into full-fledged theatrical performances. When Beeman covered Davy Crockett, his colleague Bruce KuklickC’63 G’65 Gr’68 recalled to the Daily Pennsylvanian, “he would dress in buckskin and suck on a corn cob pipe and have his trusty great big brown dog sit down beside him.”
This heyday carried into the early 1990s but was flagging by the turn of the millennium. Riasanovskyretired in 1999, Beeman stepped down in 2011, and nobody could fill their shoes with quite the same panache. Other dynamics were also eroding the classic survey course—particularly in the realm of US history. The proliferation of Advanced Placement US History classes in American high schools made a collegiate-level survey seem redundant to many incoming Penn students. Popularity shifted to more narrowly defined courses, like Drew Faust G’71 Gr’75’s class in Southern history [“Alumni Profiles,” May|Jun 2007] and Tom Sugrue’s class on the 1960s [“The Vital Thread of Tom Sugrue,” May|Jun 2009]. Interest leaked away from the classic introduction to US history, imperiling a traditional gateway for history majors—whose number was also sliding.
An intellectual challenge also confronted the traditional American history survey course. Contemporary historical scholarship had introduced “so many contested perspectives that challenged the overarching narrative” long presented by conventional textbooks, as Brown puts it, that “it became harder to sustain a course with a linear beginning, middle, and end.” Works like Wendy Warren’s 2017 New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, for instance, have complicated the traditional treatment of plantation slavery as an essentially Southern phenomenon, by revealing the influential economic role played by New England shipping firms and financial houses in directing its development. And that is just one example among legions. Several decades’ worth of scholarship excavating the experiences of overlooked groups, and interrogating familiar stories through unconventional lenses, have enriched the American story with a wealth of complexities.
The educational landscape was changing, as well. “In an age where any student who graduates from Penn will be able to Google a question of historical fact any time they want,” asks Brown, “wouldn’t the primary task be to teach them how to think historically … rather than absorbing information?
“Information itself is kind of passé at this point as a way to spend your time in a college classroom,” she says, “when the more difficult thing to teach—and the more valuable skill to take with you after you graduate—might be asking the right kind of questions about how the past is being reconstructed or used.”
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