history&community

some things we take for granted

historical inquiry and establishing a sense of community are both on my list of worthy goals (oh what a list!), and near the top at that. both goals have been the recent focus of my philosophical studies in various contexts. one of the trends in contemporary philosophy is in acknowledging the impossibility of seeing the world from a "god's eye view." that is to say that we can only understand the world through our own human eyes, and there are certain filters through which human eyes must inevitably gaze. the most evident of these filters are our history and language, our culture and tradition. these are what gadamer calls the "prejudices of mankind." human understanding is sometimes thought of as the ability to connect present interactions with past experiences... what then would human knowledge be without the careful open-minded examination of our own shared history?

community solidarity is another important concept, one that post-modernist richard rorty values more than any other. its easy to see the breakdown of community that has plagued the US more and more - there is no longer such a thing as a "street corner" dialogue. i think rorty's goal in using the idea of community and "siblinghood" (fraternity is no longer pc i suppose =/) is to bring back the notion of Truth to human terms, and morality to human beliefs. what meaning has scientific or moral truths if not the continuing progress of humankind, what does it mean to become better if not better people?

in short: new contributions in the study of history & the project of advancing a growing sense of community = worthy goals.

Historical Career Options

I got my assignment turned in today; summarize the book in four pages yeah!

In my historiography class we are studying about different ways to study and write about history. I have been thinking more and more about what area to specialize in. I am registered with American Military University to get a Masters in Middle Eastern History. The more I think about it however, this is going to be a degree in 20th century Middle Eastern History and there are few courses that deal with Middle Eastern history before these countries were taken over by the colonial powers. So I have been thinking about changing my specialization to something else, like Asian History for example. There are enough courses that AMU offers in Asian history that is pre-colonial that it would be a better survey of the region.

Now if all I want to do is to get a Masters degree and to continue to teach at a high school, a worthy goal that I am very satisfied with mind you, then either of these two degree options are great. I already have considerable knowledge of Western Civilization, all I need to enhance my career as a World History teacher is to gain more knowledge outside of Western Civ, this way I would be a more well rounded teacher. However, if I want to be able to contribute my own two-cents to the historical community I would be poorly suited to the task with either of these degree options, because I lack the language ability necessary to make sense of the primary source documents that are not already in English. If I was pursuing 20th century Middle Eastern History, this would not be too much of a problem as long as I stick to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but the further I stray from that topic (which is overdone anyway) the greater my need to read and translate Arabic becomes.

This brings me right back to my main stumbling block in life, foreign languages: I suck in learning foreign languages. Of course, when I think about it, this is not quite true. I suck at speaking or writing in a foreign language, but those are not the skills that I need as a historian. I need to be able to read and translate a foreign language. My experiences in formal (and informal) German language training courses has always been very frustrating for me and I have always felt stupid (I hate feeling stupid). However, I did manage to get my 2 sophomore semester classes in German in order to get m BA. (I passed them with a C and a D). So I am thinking about reading and translating a little bit of German every day (I have been able to practice the piano this way) and grind away at this until in a few years time I will be able to read and translate scholarly articles written in German.

This of course means changing my specialization to European History and writing the history of Germany for the English reading public. This is a new contribution to the scholarly world as most German history of the Middle Ages is only accessible to German readers. Of course, a knowledge of Latin would be helpful too, but most of the Latin documents in England and France have been translated into English already, but most of Germany’s Latin documents have only been translated into German. This would also mean that I would be keeping the door open for a doctorate degree in the future. A doctorate does not make sense if you cannot read the primary source documents, so I would have to specialize in U.S. or British history and there are way too many people running around with those degrees and I lack the interest in those areas anyway.

Well enough of my ramblings. Time to go work on my paper outline.

My First Post

My assignment was due today, but my professor had not posted it yet. He apologized and set the revised due date for Tuesday (before all the relatives get here for Thanksgiving). Here is the assignment:

"Provide a very succinct synopsis of the main points Green and Troup [the textbook] cite in their discussion of each school, then comment on how the example of historical writing connected to that school illustrates those main points."

In other words succinctly summarize the whole book. Well, I guess I got work to do ...