|
 I
think that a lot of people imagine historians sitting at their desks,
memorizing lists of names and dates,” says history Professor
Ellen Eisenberg. “What I try to do is get students to experience
what historians do.”
Recently named the Dwight & Margaret Lear Chair of American
History, Eisenberg has spent the last 14 years not only teaching
students history but teaching them how history is made. “It’s
making history come alive and making the act of being a historian
come alive. How do historians put research together to construct
a picture of what happened? How does their interpretation fit with
what their colleagues are arguing?”
 Eisenberg
takes this approach because she says many students come to college
with their heads full of historical facts but little critical understanding
for how those facts are created. “For a lot of students, their
experience in high school is that they have a textbook and the textbook
says what happened and that’s it. They don’t think of
that textbook as a document that represents one of a number of different
interpretations. I want them to see a text as an argument, and then
take it apart and discuss it among themselves.”
Students learn firsthand what it takes to be a historian by conducting
research that involves unearthing and analyzing original documents.
Emphasizing original research, says Eisenberg, invests a student’s
analysis with a greater sense of ownership and originality. “Sometimes
students think a topic has been so thoroughly analyzed that they
assume, ‘What else can I say?’ Then our students go
over to places like the State Archives and find original documents
that, as far as we know, nobody else has written about. Suddenly
they realize, ‘Wow, it is possible to make an original discovery
and uncover some new insight.’”
Willamette’s liberal arts environment also gives Eisenberg
the intellectual freedom to develop some insights of her own. “If
I decide that I’m interested in some new issue, there’s
absolutely nothing to stop me from either developing that as a research
project or developing it as a course. At a lot of larger schools,
I might be one of 20 American historians and they all have their
territory, which they research very deeply, but there’s a
lot less breadth. Here, I am one of two Americanists, so I really
can focus on whatever I want.”
For example, Eisenberg’s recent interests have ranged from
African-American studies to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
Both of these topics were originally part of broader general history
courses, but Eisenberg has developed each into its own distinct
class. “You can never really get bored, or if you do you only
have yourself to blame,” she says. “There are very few
jobs in which you have the freedom to say, “Oh, I’m
interested in this now, so I’ll pursue it.”
Whatever she chooses to pursue next, Eisenberg clearly believes
that the study of history is far from a desk job.
|
