Is there something "wrong" with history?

After reading Alan Brinkley's "Historians and Their Publics" and Part I of Ian Tyrrell's "Historians in Public" I thought about the question, is there something "wrong" with history. I do not believe there is something "wrong" with history. Both author's discuss how specializations are threatening historians and their work and how they are able to communicate history to the public. I agree that specializations can be threatening when trying to explore the entirety of history but I only agree when the specializations are sufficiently narrow. On the whole, I think specialization is important. Brinkley discusses the benefits of these new specializations by discussing how they draw in new audiences who feel they have been excluded and feel some tie to this newly explored aspect of history. I agree with Brinkley on this and I feel this is a great outcome of specialization. Yes it may be more focused and yes it may narrow the audience more but it also has the possibility of bringing new meaning to history and new interest in history for the audiences it does reach. Everyone has a favorite time period, event, culture or general topic in history that they find fascinating. Having these interests is what encourages one to keep reading and keep exploring and push for further understanding of that part of history.

One of my goals is to become a high school History teacher. Ian Tyrrell discussed how "historians have faced at least three broad categories of audence..." and one of them is high school history curricula. I would undoubtably fit into this category of audience and I found this aspect of Tyrrell's work particularly interesting. There were various points in his book that focus directly on the history curriculum in high schools and how there was a push for national history standards in the past. While I agree that most people are very ignorant when it comes to American History, I am strongly against national standards in any curriculum. This goes back to the idea of specialization that was discussed earlier. Every teacher needs to specialize their class to fit the needs of their students. Every student is different and has different interests. Therefore, in order to engage students teachers must be able to alter what they teach. If they are stuck teaching specific topics, with controlled texts and resources and exams and their students are disengaged, then the students will not learn and it is back to square one. After completing projects on student learning, being a student myself, and spending much time in high school classrooms, I have found that students learn best when they are interested in the topic at hand. Therefore, I feel it is more important for people to be enthusiastic and interested in learning about some aspect of history than trying to know everything about history.

While academic scholars are fantastic resources for reading about and trying to understand the past, they are not my first resort when I read about history and I would not expect that my future students will read the works of academic scholars first when they learn about history for pleasure. Nonacademic resources can be great tools for understanding the past and I feel it is important to incorporate them into a classroom as well. . Tyrrell states that, "It is also true that for knowledge of the past, the public and the media often turn to nonacademic resources." He discusses the History Channel and while I do not watch the History Channel on a regular basis, it has become a popular channel for many Americans.