Experience and Interest

In 1985, Gary Larson's off-beat newspaper cartoon Far Side featured a single panel, one which many found utterly inscrutable. It shows an old wizened traveler in a wagon pulled by two oxen moving from left to right across a desert landscape. The man looks straight ahead with an expression of bored detachment, but the two oxen's heads are both craned hard to their right, more or less looking toward the viewer. In the foreground, resting in the sand, is the large skull of a steer. There is no caption. In his post-retirement retrospective The Prehistory of Far Side, Larson testified to receiving many letters from confused fans puzzled, unable to find the joke. (I would reproduce the cartoon, but since his retirement Larson has explicitly requested that people not post any of his work online. Darn artists trying to make a living.)

The "joke" is simple though, and I've always found it quite profound: we notice those things which directly concern us and our type, and have no interest in those things which don't. For historians and educators, this is a truth that in our bad moods leads us to self-righteous gloomy pronouncements about people's selfishness, but 1) this makes us far less winsome, hurting the fields, and 2) we are hypocrites: I've never met a historian who does not have some historical topics that he respects but in which he cannot muster much interest.

The key is to unpackage each criterion: direct concern and our type. The fact of the matter is those two can change, and quite dramatically. The better we understand how we form in our minds what concerns us and what doesn't, and who are like us and who are not, the better our history will be. Closely related, we need to recognize that bridging gaps of interest and identity often comes down to artistry: the Wars of the Roses are of interest to many because of Shakespeare, and the Crimean War because of Tennyson. And of course who apart from American historians and numismatists would have been able to recognize this Founding Father before 2015?

Alexander Hamilton says do not throw away your shot to reach the maximum number of people with your historical work.