A discussion of the importance -- and joys -- of historical inquiry

The Cornell Chronicle recently interviewed Michael Kammen, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture, who has taught at Cornell since 1965. Kammen is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in History for People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization in 1973 and the Francis Parkman and Henry Adams prizes for A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture in 1987. His recent books have included American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century and Robert Gwathmey, The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer, both published in 1999.

Why is history a useful and important field of study, and what is its value, in general, for the non-historian?

Michael Kammen is the N.C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture and a faculty fellow with the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

Historical study teaches us how and why change occurs over time. It can teach us where political systems and cultural values come from and how they evolve. More generally, it is invaluable for learning how to understand the significance of a primary source (text, image, or artifact). The past and the present provide an overwhelming number of facts and events that are not equally important. Many are inconsequential. Historical inquiry helps us discern which are most important and why. The late E. P. Thompson, a brilliant historian, once remarked: "Only we, who are now living, can give a 'meaning' to the past. But that past has always been the result of an argument about values. What we may do is identify with certain values which past actors upheld, and reject others. ... Our vote will change nothing. And yet, in another sense, it may change everything. For we are saying that these values, and not those other values, are the ones which make this history meaningful to us, and that these are the values which we intend to enlarge and sustain in our own present."

What attracted you to the field?

What attracted me? Initially it was stories, narratives of events and individual lives. The Greek word historia means stories. Later it would become a fascination with origins, and then with relationships between past and present: Why do some things happen, but not others? Why did the American Revolution occur when it did? What were the causes? Why did a social revolution not occur during the Great Depression?

The historian learns the importance of contingency. Few things are inevitable. Significant events require precipitants. How to determine them? Historians learn about "agency": Who or what makes things happen? Gradually the lure of research became compelling for me. The historian needs to be a detective searching for clues, bits of evidence, pieces of a puzzle whose picture he or she has never seen on the cover of a puzzle box.

What are your primary research interests these days, and how do those interests intersect with your teaching?

Over a period of almost 40 years, I have gradually moved forward from the 17th to the 20th century. My current research project concerns the "four seasons" motif in American art and culture, which involves literature, what naturalists have written and what scientists have discovered in recent decades about seasonality and human behavior (such as Seasonal Affect Syndrome). I am currently giving a seminar on that topic at the Society for the Humanities [at Cornell]. It's great fun, and it's a collaborative learning experience for the students and myself. We needed to begin in antiquity, move through medieval and Renaissance uses of the motif, then bring it across the Atlantic to the New World. We'll be exploring images and texts right up to the present. I also teach a lecture course concerning American culture from the 1870s to the recent past. New scholarship on many aspects of that transformational period just keeps a comin'. I try my best to keep up with it and integrate new information and lines of interpretation into my lectures.

What have been the one or two most influential changes in the field during your time in academia, and how have those changes affected your research, writing and teaching?

Since 1965, when I came to Cornell, there have been at least two major transformations in historical inquiry: the "new social history" and then the "new cultural history." The first emphasized social structure, mobility, ethnicity, race, gender, class, the history of ordinary people and everyday life. The second has built upon those concerns but with greater attention to secular and religious values, symbols, perceptions, the built environment, rituals, traditions, and collective memory, to mention just a few target topics.

I have been more deeply involved with the second of these, especially political culture, but also popular and mass culture: how values and ideas trickle down from creative people at the top, but also how they filter up from "the folk." During the 1980s I tried to marry the "new cultural history" with a venerable but unreformed sub-field, constitutional history. The result was A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture.

How would you assess Cornell as a place for the pursuit of historical study?

Cornell is a wonderful place for history because we have a diverse and gifted faculty that includes historians from many departments, besides my own; and second because we have an incredible library. Just when Cornell was founded, an eminent historian, Jared Sparks, died. Andrew Dickson White [Cornell's first president and co-founder] bought Sparks' entire library and that provided a superb core collection at the very outset.

During the decades that followed, White sent faculty and librarians to Europe to buy and then build on great treasures like the witchcraft collection, the French Revolution collection, and others. Later the anti-slavery collection was added, and still later a distinctive collection tracing the history of human sexuality. Meanwhile splendid materials were acquired from East Asia and later Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. So we have all the basic monographs and journals needed for undergraduate projects, along with unique holdings that attract scholars from all over the world and also facilitate the work of our more advanced students.