Why People Should Study History

In 1998, I received a scholarship to study for an undergraduate degree at Yale University. During my four years at Yale, cheap Inflatable Tent I explored a broad array of subjects: economics, German language and literature, mathematics, English literature, etc., but the subject I was most committed to intellectually was history. The ten history courses I took at Yale included ancient Greek history, Roman history, medieval European history, the Reformation, the European intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the history of modern Russia and modern Germany. When I told other Chinese that I was studying history at Yale, many talked as if I were a slacker evading science and engineering programs, or a loser who couldn't make it in computer science or electrical engineering; others wondered why I had chosen such an impractical subject.
Both responses reflect the deeply ingrained prejudice of many Chinese against the humanities - and are grossly erroneous. Studying history at a great American university is neither easy nor impractical. In some sense, I learned my most important lessons through struggling with the difficulties of studying history. My history courses posed a much bigger academic challenge than my previous experience in Tsinghua as a freshman in biochemistry, or in Tsinghua Fuzhong's experimental accelerated science program. I came away from those four arduous years at Yale tremendously enriched.
　Most history classes at Yale require attending two or three lectures a week, a weekly discussion section, relentless reading assignments of 200 or more pages a week, a midterm and final exam, and two papers. At the beginning, just taking notes on lectures and finishing the reading on time were daunting challenges; writing papers was nightmarish. My trouble with papers generally started the moment they were assigned. The topics were indeterminate, e.g. "write about any topic of your choice in ancient Greek history", "write a book review for a book of your choice" from a reading list of fifty books on medieval history or "compare and contrast selected passages from Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America." The expected end result is a paper making a coherent argument that draws its supporting evidence or ideas from several books or journal articles. The subtext to such assignments is: whatever you say in the paper has to reflect your own thinking; hence simply repeating the professor's opinions or whatever is in the readings will not get you very far. In the first week of my Yale career it was hammered home to us that plagiarism was the capital crime in the academic world. Each year there are students who are punished for plagiarizing.
　Looking at a paper assignment, my mind often went blank: ANY topics in ancient Greek history? But which one, andswheresto start? Even after I was able to narrow the topic down to, say, the career of Pericles, there were still thousands of books and articles written on it. What was my main argument to be? What points should I make? What information should I include in the paper to support my argument? I would spend hours going through hundreds and hundreds of pages of reading with no clue what to write on. I spent so many nights pacing back and forth in the library, trying to define a topic and choose my arguments. And I was hardly the only person with this problem: Yale students complain about papers as much as Londoners complain about the weather. Pulling all-nighters to finish a paper is part of the shared memory of those "bright college years".
I gradually realized the value of such seemingly unguided education. Allowing students great scope in choosing their own paper topics reflects the Western belief in individual initiative. Students are encouraged to make their own choices and go wherever their interests lead them. On a different level, in the process of groping for a topic, then screening the available material, and finally using it to make an intelligent argument, students learn the important lesson of rapidly processing and critically utilizing a large amount of information. This is an important skill not only in historical research, but in many careers outside the academic world,swheresinformation comes in the form of a tangled mess, not neat textbook passages to be spoon-fed to passive "learners".