A group of students in my museum class are preparing an exhibit for our library on World War I. They have done careful selection of objects and are arranging for a Tumblr component with readings of poetry and letters from the front (the latter from our university archives). They will be ordering poppies from the VFW and using them as a recurring theme of memory and honoring the troops who fought in the Great War. The number of them will be such that they may have a basket of them for people to take one as they visit the exhibit.
As I was talking to them I said something about my grandfather having been too old to have fought in WWI. And I looked at their rather confused looks I said that their grandparents would have probably fought in the Vietnam War.
This past week we have been hearing a lot about anniversaries, one within some of our memories and one far beyond even our grandparents' generation. The Gettysburg Address and the assassination of President Kennedy. I was just over one when he was killed, so I don't remember any emotional impact of it (my first truly political memory was the 1968 election), but to my students it is as long before their birth as the dust bowl of the 1930s is for me.
It is a very strange thing to be teaching history to students when to me what I am teaching is my life, not history. In general the history I teach is much longer ago than this, as my assignments tend to be in the first half of the western survey, but when I teach non-western material or interdisciplinary material I have much more recent coverage. I spent last week talking about the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge in one class, and the images of the evacuation of the embassy and the coverage of the Killing Fields are things I remember seeing on the news.
For them the Soviet Union is purely history, and I have to catch myself from correcting their pronunciation of Mao Zedong in the middle of a student presentation (the most shocking was MAyo see TUN (the mayo as in mayonnaise) (I will write comments on the page, but would rather not interrupt a presentation midway as it runs the risk of undermining the presenter's confidence, so for pronunciation I wouldn't do it. For a major error of fact, I would gently provide guidance, but that kind of mistake is fortunately rare). When I started teaching here my first friends outside my department included a history teacher who specialized in Russia, and they spent the winter of my first year in Moscow as the USSR was shuttered forever (my students are so young!). I remember watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and listening to the Watergate hearings on the radio. I would bet the majority of my students don't know why Richard Nixon is important, even if they are prelaw or environmental studies minors.
It creates a challenge for me to teach historical material, because I don't want to have them believe that everything that happened before their lives is dusty and old, but I also want them to understand the value of distance in out ability to analyze events. I want history to live for them through stories and personal narratives (not just my own, of course), but I also want them to realize that there are ambiguities we might not see until time has passed.
This past week in my museums class, we were talking about ownership of objects by museums, and what circumstances make such "ownership" questionable or downright untenable. Is ownership of art extracted by the Nazis from vulnerable populations or simply looted substantially different than that claimed by the Allies (particularly the Soviet Union) as "justifiable" war reparations? What about if we go back into the 19th century and look at the distribution of Benin bronzes as a result of the British Punitive Expedition of 1897? Who has the right to these objects? And if your grandfather (or in their cases, great grandfather) has a samurai sword picked up in the South Pacific, is that okay? Does it make a difference that the living remember the war? Or is anything clean? And is that a problem? Does your uncle have a collection of Roman coins? Does he think about how they have been obtained? Is that okay? How about ivory? My goal in this assignment was to have them examine grey lines in the treatment of cultural property. Law comes into it, of course, but history does as well.
Just some general musings on history and the present, the past and the future. I feel sometimes that I am in one of those odd film shots where the background suddenly is much further away and the individual is isolated in the foreground. In my case the background is my life and the history I have seen, and my present is the foreground. I feel displaced and now and then rather old. There are advantages to continually teaching 18- to 22-year-olds, but more and more I feel as if I seem like a fossil to them.
We are off next week (the full week) for Thanksgiving, and then have one more week for class and then a week of finals. I encouraged my students to take their books with them (and to actually open them) so they didn't forget everything before coming back for that last week or two. Who knows if they will listen. But I tried.
When I was an undergrad we just had Thursday and Friday off. Do you have classes at all next week?