Teaching

Philosophy of History

As a historian of the United States, I believe that history helps all of us to know ourselves and our place in the world—to understand how we and the many identities that we embody are the swirling outcomes of personal choices, but also of larger structural political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our present and future. As a professor, I want my students to see themselves in the past while understanding the ways that their lives are also vastly different from those who lived before us. In doing so, I want to help my students learn to cultivate a sense of historical empathy—to understand the worldview and the choices made by people long ago—in part to practice the important civil task of putting oneself in another’s shoes and understanding their perspective even if we are obliged to disagree or find their position reprehensible. This is the value of history: to bring historical context to bear in ways that help us to navigate the present and the future, to do so with empathy and connection, with humility for what we don’t know or can never know, and with the hope of making our society and our relationships better, fulfilling the broad principles outlined in our founding documents.