The Case for History 10a

Unlike the sciences and much of the humanities, there is only one lecture course which all history concentrators must take to graduate.

It is History 10a, “Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures: From Antiquity to 1650,” the sole remnant of an imposing body of historical knowledge department leaders once thought all of their students ought to know.

And Hist10a’s time may be nearly up, to be replaced by a requirement that concentrators take a course “long ago” and “far away” from their specialty.

At a time when the curricular review’s boldest initiative has been to call for the creation of year-long, integrative survey courses to incentivize commonalities between what students learn, it should be a moment for History 10a to wax, not wane.

But that message has not reached whoever is pushing this change in the History Department. (The brainchild of the effort remains unknown; The Crimson could only find critics of the proposed change to comment on-record—who all grimly predicted the policy change would pass—while the change’s boosters stayed mum.)

No matter. Knowing that History 10a is the bête noire of a pedagogical regime that becomes less fact-based and more esoteric with each passing year, where specialization is the name of the game, is more than enough to understand why the class’s fate is sealed.

Several weeks ago, New York Times columnist John Tierney took Harvard’s History Department to task for failing to offer a comprehensive survey course on, among other things, the American Revolution. (Instead, its faculty offer a freshman seminar on the Declaration of Independence; a class that compares the American and Haitian revolutions; and “Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in Revolutionary America”).

That last class is taught by 300th Anniversary University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. And she was sufficiently angered by Tierney’s column that she wrote a lengthy response, which landed errantly in The Crimson’s editorial page.

Amidst complaining how “Tierney seems to long for the day when American history courses line up in the catalog in neatly marked packages,” Ulrich also related an anecdote about students visiting from Beijing University. They had a solid command of hard facts, but did not have a sturdy understanding of how those historical events came to pass. “The Chinese students,” Prof. Ulrich avers, “wanted to know how ordinary people got their ideas about liberty.”

Prof. Ulrich, let me tell you something about my peers: we are in no danger of becoming fact-spewing automatons able only to dish out the who, when, and where of historical occurrences. We are rarely incapable of forming an opinion, even absent those aforementioned facts. Attend a random undergraduate section, and you’ll see what I mean.

Yet, we’ve reached a point where a University Professor can complain of that awful dystopia where the “names and dates [of historical events] were chiseled in stone.” This attitude is chief among the reasons why undergraduates are so devoid of a broad historical narrative in which to situate the little nuggets of ephemera they receive from the hodgepodge of Harvard history classes. It’s this condition that makes History 10a’s mission is more vital today than ever before.

In a push to have a greater understanding of the ordinary people in the background of historical occurrences, or the ideas inspiring them, the more basic facts have simply been excised.

I remember, for instance, the first time I was assigned Edmund Burke; I had no idea what a Whig or the Glorious Revolution was.

As it stands, I wonder how many Harvard students could answer some simple questions about European history like who participated in the Thirty Years War and when was it fought?

Or, who was Charles Martel?

Or, who was Alexander the Great’s mentor?

Its critics complain History 10a is poorly taught.

I took it during my freshman fall, and I didn’t think so. And neither did my peers, who gave Profs. Eric Robinson and Mark Kishlansky above-average reviews in the CUE guide. In making my decision to concentrate in History, no factor was as instrumental as my positive experience in the class. In recent years, undergraduates report less enthusiasm for the course—with the exception of Prof. Angeliki Laiou, who has received rave ratings.

And then there’s the ironic charge that Hist10a’s vast subject matter is spread too thin—ironic, because it’s certainly not advocates of the study of the West who have forced two millennia of Western Civilization into one semester.

Yet professors manage to get out key dates, persons, places, and reasons why in lectures that often garner applause. While lectures are devoted to outlining a skeleton of Western history, sections are devoted to primary sources that, sadly, often go unread.

But the remedy for History 10a’s current woes is not to abolish it, but to turn it into a more serious endeavor. If it is in fact poorly taught, then ensure it is taught better. If it is spread too thin, then schedule additional lectures and hold two sections a week. Or—and pardon this passing fantasy given the reality on the ground—restore History 10a to its proper place as a two-semester course.

That students are uninterested in taking a class like Hist10a is a fallacy. At a time when non-concentrators might fulfill their requirement with greater ease by taking any of the less burdensome, more peripheral Core courses, 40 percent of History 10a’s enrollees take the course to fulfill a Historical Study requirement, despite its tougher grading and occasional dullness.

These students realize that education is occasionally not fun, that before greater truths can be discerned, one ought to have the most basic facts straight. Let’s hope department leaders realize the same.



Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07 is a history concentrator affiliated with Mather House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.