History Hacks for STEM Majors

(No STEM majors were harmed in the writing of this post.)

History is in a bad way. 

A poll conducted in 2018 revealed that only one in three Americans could pass a U.S. Citizenship Test.  A similar percentage believed Ben Franklin invented the lightbulb.  Twelve percent thought Dwight Eisenhower led troops in the Civil War.

Meanwhile, Americans were 50% less likely to visit a historic site in 2012 than in 1982, with further declines since.  Even at Gettysburg, with its magnificently preserved battlefield and the nation’s best battlefield museum, we must work full time to tell a compelling story and attract new visitors.

In the past, the White House has often been a historical beacon.  Grant wrote one of the most widely acclaimed memoirs in American history.  Wilson was a history professor.  TR’s story of the Navy in the War of 1812 was brilliant, and Eisenhower’s history of WWII was an achievement.  Not so much today.  When our current Chief Executive opined that Russia had invaded Afghanistan to weed out terrorists, even his friends at the Wall Street Journal wrote, “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President.”

Like our Executive Branch, history as a college major is in steep decline.  In 2008 there were more than 34,000 majors but in 2017, just over 24,000.  “Of all the fields I’ve looked at,” Benjamin Schmidt wrote for the American Historical Association in 2018, “history has fallen more than any other in the last six years.”

Much of this decline comes as a result of 2008 and the post-collapse fear of finding a job after graduation.  What arose from the rubble of the Great Recession was STEM, a kind of Borg of the educational world that laid claim to most any major that promised a job.  Since the Great Recession, the number of STEM majors in bachelor’s degree-and-above programs has grown by 43 percent to 550,000 in 2016.

The emphasis on science and math as humankind’s last best hope isn’t working exactly the way we planned. And then there’s that whole entrepreneurship thing going on in high education.  If there’s anything that’s gotten a boost since 2008, it’s the implicit promise that "becoming an entrepreneur" will feed a family of four.

So, as Silicon Valley thrives, our democracy implodes.  Our climate is ignored, our federal government disassembled, our states gerrymandered, and our cities content to serve leaded water. 

Thankfully, though, we’ve got robotic bartenders, Go-kart suitcases, and laundry-folding wardrobes.

In the interest of restoring balance to our fragile democracy, below are a few “history hacks” meant to find space in the nation’s hippocampus next to Moore’s Law and the latest Python update.

  

Psychologists say that our evoked group is three to five items; after that, nothing much registers.  So, each hack is limited to four ideas.  That means (just) a few concepts and people get left out--but they don't call them hacks for nothing.

Here, for example, is the history hack of American innovation:

Easy enough to remember, right?

Here is the history hack of the United States:

Getting the hang of it?

Now, let’s move to a broader canvas and hack all of Western History:

And finally, pulling the lens back even further, here is the hack of singularities—those moments after which history will never be the same:

It was David McCullough who said that we have to “remind ourselves of what we believe in . . . and in order to do that, you have to understand history.”

So now you do. 

Time to get back to coding that latest urban scooter app. 

You’re welcome.