Across Generations
When I went to the student coffee shop on Friday, the student at the cash register guessed my order before I could tell him what I wanted. I remarked that I had had similar experiences with regulars when I worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts over twenty years ago. His response: “They had Dunkin’ Donuts back then?”
For me there has always been a Dunkin’ Donuts. Indeed, according to Wikipedia and the corporate website of Dunkin’ Donuts, the first store opened in 1950, which is close enough to “always” for someone born in the early 1960s. So why did the student think Dunkin’ Donuts was new? His own answer was eminently practical: “I haven’t even been alive for twenty years.” Still, his underlying assumption that so much of the world around him was new took me aback.
Maybe I should not have been surprised by his presentism. After all, the current generation of students has grown up hearing that they live in a completely different world than the one into which I was born. They have heard from their parents and teachers about a bygone world in the midst of a Cold War without personal computing, the internet, cell phones, iPods, and global warming. And then there are the many students who have grown up in new subdivisions, schools and strip malls.
What do these thoughts have to do with me and Clio? One of my main goals in my undergraduate survey courses is to teach historical thinking, which in part entails helping students appreciate not only that the world has a past, but that the people in that past saw that world through different eyes. But it is not enough for me to ask them to see how the world looks when it is filtered through the experiences of earlier generations. In order to do my job, I find it helps if I meet them halfway and try to understand how the world looks when filtered through their experiences. Of course, I usually end up looking uncool in the process, but as the father of a teenager I am used to that.
Stoneman’s Corner
- Book Review: GDR and Consumption January 13, 2013
- Teaching Notes: Synthesis and Process September 29, 2012
- Hist 499-005: Gender and Class in Modern Europe August 18, 2012
- Reflections after Class July 3, 2012
- Requiring Students to Use Chicago Style (or Turabian or Whatever) June 14, 2012
- Military History Conference May 13, 2012
- Syllabus for Hist 606: Themes in European History II May 3, 2012
- Command Culture by Jörg Muth April 28, 2012
- Who Should Groener’s Schlieffen Plan Matter To? March 18, 2012
- Hist 499-003: Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Required Books) March 7, 2012
Interesting post and so true! I often joke with my bosses about such ‘historical’ findings when they talk about punch-card computers and how innovative they were when they started working.
But it is true that there seems to be an interuption between the self and the past before recognition of life. It’s an interesting area to explore.
I tried to talk a friend into understanding that classical music is not just music dead people created. I said that just like a certain type of music in the 1980s was considered old fashioned in the 90s, and music today is different than music from the late 90s, people growing up in the 1780s probably considered their parents’ music to be old-fashioned, and then their own children considered 18th Century music to be old-people’s music. Music defines an era but it also expresses the same human emotions differently. Once you’re able to imagine that young person who listened to a new classical piece in the 18th Century having the same reaction a young person nowadays will have when listening to new music, you’ll be able to see history as something that has been lived and experienced rather than a group of events with only one thing in common: they happened in the past.
Thank you both for your thoughtful comments.
I agree. Understanding is gained through experiences and not from reading texts.
I’m not sure I understand you. Surely you believe there is value in reading texts. Why would you have a blog otherwise? I’m also not convinced that personal experiences and reading texts are always completely different things. In history classes I can at least get students to fathom something of other people’s experiences through texts, films, and discussions. Still, yes, we are very much bound in time by the things we experience personally in our own lives. But we’re human and can transcend those boundaries, at least a little. But now you’ve got me going places I had not planned on visiting. Thanks for your comment.
It seems to me that these last three comments tie together; a text can give us facts and even a bit of insight into the subjective experience of the people involved at the time, but those things don’t translate well without some kind of comparable experience to lay it up against–a parallel like People in the Sun described with music. Of course, our parallels are imperfect and often rife with unconscious assumptions, but without them textual information may be just information without understanding.
This kind of thinking comes up a lot in conversation when my – admittedly geeky policy and history freaks – discuss the world.Most people seem to have adopted a kind of mental shorthand in thinking about history. It’s almost like gravity increasing the speed of a falling object, but mentally when looking backwards through time.For many, the NOW and the recent history, of their lifetime in particular for a young adult, seems to be fairly reasonably defined in their minds. They can remember the months of buildup to the war in Iraq or the long dragged out fight after the 2000 presidential election.But when people look further back, they see a bunch of nothing with giant spikes of activity. Many people see World War II as a series of battles and diplomatic ploys and do not take into account the long periods of waiting by the military or the slowness of travel by transport ship. When you condense an event or a half a decade into a few high points you totally lose track of its effect on regular citizens. I see this as becoming even more pronounced now (since Vietnam really) because TV coverage of things that happened halfway around the world can be seen in real time. The two world wars did not offer people that luxury so there was massive anxiety involved in waiting to see what was going on with their loved ones far away.
Interesting post, however I have to disagree on one point. I don’t think the world has changed much. I do not think that today’s generation sees the world differently than the previous one. There might have been a technological boom in the last 30 years; however, wars continue to be fought, politicians continue to be indecisive, and we are in the same state of fear as we were during the Soviet Union. It may not be bomb shelters anymore, but we do take off our shoes in the airports.
@Almas: While there are certainly similarities, it is important not to stop there, but instead to look for what differences might have also existed. In this case, the political and cultural contexts for the two situations in which you observe fear were very different. The many wars the past century has seen have also not been the same despite sometimes clear similarities.
To give you an idea of where I am coming from, have a look at G. W. Schlabach, A Sense of History, especially the last point in his list (which will make the most sense after reading all the rest).