Show Us Your Majors

by Cliopatria

When the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, stepped down because of his indictment on a felony indictment for criminal conspiracy, House Republicans quickly settled on the Majority Whip, Roy Blunt of Missouri, as his interim successor. I looked him up on the net and found that Blunt was a history major at Southwest Missouri Baptist University, earned an M.A. in history from Southwest Missouri State University, and returned to SMBU as its president from 1993-96. I wondered what, if any, difference that background in history and higher education might make. BeyondDeLay lists Blunt as one of the 13 most corrupt members of the Congress and lays out the evidence of his corruption. [ ... ]

With an assist with several history department websites and Dr. History, I looked up the names of people commonly cited by us as having been history majors.

U.S. Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University), Woodrow Wilson (Princeton University), Franklin D. Roosevelt (Harvard University), Richard Nixon (Whittier College), George W. Bush (Yale University)
N.B. Theodore Roosevelt (in 1912) and Woodrow Wilson (in 1924) also served as president of the American Historical Association.
Other Politicians: Senator Bill Bradley (Princeton University), Senator Max Cleland (M.A., Emory University), Representative Newt Gingrich (Emory University), Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (Harvard University), Senator George McGovern (Dakota Wesleyan University) Senator George Mitchell (Bowdoin College), Justice Antonin Scalia (Georgetown University), Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson (Princeton University)
N.B. (1) Before serving in the United States Senate, George McGovern also earned a Ph. D. in history from Northwestern University and taught history and political science at Dakota Wesleyan University. (2) Before becoming Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich also earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Tulane University and taught history at Western Georgia College.
Athletes: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (UCLA), Ken Dryden (Cornell University), Jackie Joyner-Kersee (UCLA), Grant Hill (Duke University)
Educators: W.E.B. DuBois (Fisk University), Vartan Gregorian (Stanford University), Henry Kissinger (Harvard University), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Harvard University)
N.B. DuBois was also the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard (in History).
The Media: Chris Berman (Brown University), Wolf Blitzer (SUNY-Buffalo), Seymour Hersh (University of Chicago), Charles Kuralt (University of North Carolina)
The Business World: Carly Fiorina (Stanford University), Lee Iacocca* (Lehigh University), Martha Stewart (Barnard College)
N.B.Andrew D. Todd points out in comments that Lee Iacocca was not a history major at Lehigh.
Entertainers: Ellen Barkin (Hunter College), Jimmy Buffett (Auburn University), Janeane Garofalo (Providence College), Katharine Hepburn (Bryn Mawr College), Lauryn Hill (Columbia University), Conan O'Brien (Harvard University), Edward Norton (Yale University), Michael Palin (Oxford University)
N.B. Michael Palin is not the only member of Monty Python with an interest in history. Terry Jones has written on the history of chivalry and has hosted a History Channel series on the Middle Ages.

I'm not sure what to make of this list. Are these supposed to be role models of success for history majors? Is there reason to believe that the common thread of their having been history majors made a significant difference in their lives? Could we make a list of history majors who have been monumental failures or monumentally corrupt? Or, weren't some of those already listed known to have been such? Show me your majors. What difference does it make?

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Jonathan Dresner - 9/30/2005

I haven't ceded anything, but in terms of the ambitions of students, those with specific career goals or even intellectual goals which are matches to some of the social sciences more often than they used to ignore the fact that history also covers the same ground, sometimes in superior fashion.

And, to take up KC's argument, I would suggest that one of the causes of the apparent lack of interest in political/diplomatic specialities in history departments is the that entering graduate students with an interest in those subjects are more likely to think that political science is the better field.

In my own case, if I knew then what I know now about the social sciences, I probably would have gone into anthropology as the really appropriate venue to study the questions I started out with. I'm glad I didn't, and I now have new and different questions which anthropologists really wouldn't be useful to answer. But -- my point, and I do have one -- not every decision about majors, career paths, etc. is done with complete information and understanding of the subtle differences and overlaps of disciplines.

Ralph E. Luker - 9/29/2005

But I wonder if we're not really talking about KC's issue. In other words, Kissenger was an undergraduate history major at Harvard. He wrote his dissertation on Metternich and central European diplomacy. It appears to me that you want to suggest that the historians' abandonment of diplomatic and political history is a function of the differentiation of the social sciences out from history. The last time I checked, we historians ceded, at most, the last five years to the political scientists and _no more_.

Ralph E. Luker - 9/29/2005

Thanks for the correction, Andrew. I checked some, but not all, of the names of people cited by history departments as having been history majors. I'll make a note of that error.

Andrew D. Todd - 9/29/2005

You have your facts wrong about Lee Iacocca. He was an engineering student at Lehigh. According to his "as told to autobiography," (Lee Iacocca with William Novak, Iacocca: An Autobiography, 1984) he started in mechanical engineering, realized he wasn't enough of a math whiz, and switched to industrial engineering. He did a minor in psychology which involved putting in a fair amount of time working at the state hospital, and did a bit of technical journalism for the school paper. He got a job at Ford, but when an offer of a graduate fellowship at Princeton opened up, Ford gave him a leave of absence to take it up. At Princeton, he earned a research-oriented M.S., with a thesis project which involved building a dynamometer. Compared to other contemporary engineers, the striking thing about Iaccoca was that he had a research degree, rather than an MBA. The major distinction in the auto industry was between engineers and business administration types. Iacocca was on the extreme outer edge of the engineers, an extreme "toolie" type. Robert McNamara, on the other hand, was the archetypal "bean counter." History majors simply weren't in the running unless their name was Ford.

Again, about Carly Fiorina, you have to understand the extent to which she was really despised at Hewlett Packard, and of course she got forced out in the end. She was a kind of "Lord of Misrule" figure.

Jonathan Dresner - 9/29/2005

Well, I never did, and I've had several students successfully go on to Law School, but there are an awful lot of non-History pre-Law students out there these days.

There's an awful lot of history in political science (at least there should be); I don't know enough about Kissinger to say whether his early interest was in diplomacy (in which case he'd probably have picked polisci) or in history.

But in terms of reasoning backwards, most of the people you cite didn't spend an awful lot of time as historians outside of their undergraduate careers, and their uses of history were more consistent with the social science disciplines which are now separate.

Ralph E. Luker - 9/29/2005

But you're reasoning from subsequent careers back to what would have been, if ... Kissinger's dissertation was a solid European diplomatic history topic and when did we give up the claim that history is the obvious pre-law major?

Jonathan Dresner - 9/29/2005

I think we need to distinguish, at least somewhat, between more recent and older examples. Some of the earlier folks on your list would probably have majored in PoliSci (Kissinger) or pre-Law (Scalia) if such a major had existed earlier in the last century.