Announcing the
History is Interesting Project

  At some point, it was bound to happen.

  After a year or so of teaching it, you begin to be a little frustrated hearing the whimper of students who just plain hate history. Their rationales are numerous: it’s boring, it’s a bunch of dead people so who cares, they’re bad at it so why bother, etc. While the human race is a diverse thing, and an individual can be good or bad at any numerous concepts, subjects, and skills, I refuse to accept those arguments.

  College history courses have a lot to offer, yet get passed up a lot more frequently than they should. Why is that? I think the blame can be placed on the way history has to be taught in a high school, thanks to crap legislation like No Child Left Behind and school boards demanding results on tests that they themselves couldn’t pass. The conversational give and take is left out of a subject whose very livelihood is predicated on debate. Blame can’t fall on history teachers who earnestly try their hardest – we need to accept that somewhere along the line that society as a whole, for whatever reason, has screwed up.

  And that’s why I’m formally announcing the History is Interesting Project on my website that no one reads. Along with my friend Matt, ladyfriend Ashlie, and other scholars who want to help, our goal is to create something interesting and funny which will appeal people, but especially teenagers. We aim to show that history isn’t just a collection of names and dates to be rote memorized and vomited on a page, that there are mysteries to solve, conclusions to make, and arguments to have.

  We’ll have chapters dedicated to gender, the civil rights movement, reconstruction, and socialism. We’ll try to muddle our way through the worlds of sexuality in the United States and chart the social trends of the 70's and beyond through analysis of the movies of the era. We’ll do the same with literature and pop culture of earlier in the century. And we’re going to do all of this in an accessible, funny, and ultimately engaging way.

  My main point is that there are plenty of people who have given up on their succeeding generations. They smugly watch over the younger crowd, shaking their heads and muttering to themselves at how low our societal expectations have become.

  I, for one, refuse to do so.

  Care to join us?

     

  

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