About the Author: Part Six -- A Death and a Life

A man should be upright, not kept upright.

Aurelius, Meditations

Part Six: A Death and a Life

March 13, 2000
In the four years since The History Guide has been online I have received a lot of feedback from many people. The majority of those folks who have written have been high school and college students. One person wrote to me with a question about Peter Abelard, the Nominalists and 12th century logic. One junior high school student asked about the price of a horse in the United States in the 1850s! Of course, I also receive many requests from students who need help with an essay assignment. I have to shake my head when someone writes and asks for "more information on Rousseau." What am I to make of that request? Or then there's the obvious "help me write my essay." Here's a rather specific example:

1. Did Hobbes believe that human beings were too selfish to be naturally political?
2. If human beings are naturally competitive, how is political order possible?
3. Why should we obey an absolute government?
4. Can only an absolute government protect individual liberty?
5. Does the right to revolution subvert good government?
6. Is the founding of political authority on rational selfishness too idealistic?

I don't really mind answering these questions, but I always write back and tell the student that a much better approach would be to tell me what they think first, and then we could discuss that response. The wise student will write back as soon as possible. It has been a pure joy on my part to have been able to help as many people as possible. My own intellectual curiosity demands that I share my knowledge with others. That's my vision of education as well as my take on what the Internet is all about. And that's why the subtitle of the site is simply "revolutionizing education in the spirit of Socratic wisdom."

One of the sites that has drawn many people to write me has been the intellectual autobiography itself. I'm told it offers a personal touch ("how it really is") and that, I suppose, is what I have been trying to accomplish here and in my own college-level teaching. Too often we enter a classroom as students who expect knowledge -- facts and figures, information, data, evidence, proof, details, narrative, chronology, truth. What we often neglect is that knowledge is one thing, but wisdom another. Unfortunately, many students seek the "quick fix" -- knowledge handed to them all neat and clean. What they sometimes forget -- better yet, what they've never experienced or themselves -- is that human history is a jumble of events ("one damn thing after another"?) and not at all as rational as we would like to believe. Knowledge is easy -- anyone can "know." But the wise person has the toughest task. Thinking requires effort. This is what the educational process is all about.

As students, we also sometimes forget that the person standing in the front of the room is an individual whose life itself is also history. That is, their choices for lecture or discussion are based on their own particular likes and dislikes. In fact, their choices will tell you something about them. And the good student should be made aware of this simple thing. With this in mind, it has always seemed essential that I "deliver" myself to my students as an individual, a real, living, breathing human. That's one of the points of this intellectual autobiography -- professors are human too! And I think if students realize that professors are human, then the barriers between teacher and student may be relaxed. Want more? -- read the article Professors Are Human Too: Breaking Down the Barriers Between Instructor and Student.

More than a year has passed since my last entry into this intellectual autobiography so it seems fitting to update these pages. I ended the last entry with my excitement over the prospects of teaching history at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC as well as creating yet another set of lectures for The History Guide. I mentioned that it would take me about four months (which would have meant December 1998) to complete the task. Well, the new set of thirty lectures on Ancient and Medieval Europe is still not completed. Just the same, the majority of the lectures are now online. The remaining lectures are written and coded into HTML -- the hard part is the editing, hyperlinking and "imaging." That's what takes so much time. I really wanted to get these lectures online but simply ran out of time. And for those of you who are interested, each of the lectures takes me about four or five hours to write. I sit at my desk and write as much as possible, sometimes as much as twenty or twenty-five pages in a day. Putting the document into HTML is easy -- it's making sure the lecture is just right that takes time. So, each lecture represents ten to twelve hours of work.

I am still teaching at Meredith College -- to date I have taught eight sections of Western Civilization I and II. The history program at Meredith is very small and there are only a handful of professors. Luckily, the faculty have made me feel right at home and I have also managed to develop an excellent relationship with my students. With any luck, I'll get the opportunity to get back to some upper-level teaching in the Spring 2001 term, perhaps European intellectual history. I've also been given the task of designing the history department's website, which ought to be going online fairly soon.

Outside teaching and the further development of The History Guide, there have been two events that took place since September 1998. Both events had a profound effect on my life. In late October 1998, my father passed away suddenly. I spoke to him on a Wednesday night, on Thursday night he was in ICU and the next evening he passed away. He had burst an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which was repaired by surgery, but then died the next evening of a heart attack. His kidney functions were minimal so even had he survived the surgery and not had the heart attack, he probably didn't have much longer to live. My poor mother! Not only had she lost a son, now her husband was gone as well. I was at my Dad's side when he died and although I had told him many times before, I told him I loved him and he nodded. I had to deliver my Dad's EULOGY at the service -- I barely remember doing it.

My dad was a good man and a good friend. He loved cars, cameras, the Yankees and the Rangers, mowing the lawn, and doing odd jobs around the house. He was also something of an artist and I still have a half dozen or so of his better landscapes. He taught me how approach a task -- he taught me the right attitude, so essential to living a good life. He taught me to work hard and to enjoy myself as much as possible. He was my best friend and now, when I mow the lawn, or paint the house, or talk to my son, I do so with the total image of my father in my mind's eye.

And with the passing of my Dad came a new light into this world. On May 13, 1999, my daughter Heidi Nicole made her appearance -- a month early! As I write these words Heidi is ten months old. So now Scott is the "big brother" and Amy finally has her "little sister." And now my wife and I are really busy!

The year at Meredith College has been enjoyable and I feel as if I have found a niche at this school. My skills at teaching western civilization have improved and I am thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere of a small, private college. Of course, I am still working part time but as always, I give 100% to all my classes.

I also spent the past several months (October-March) giving myself a tutorial in modern German history. I began with Hajo Holborn's three volume History of Modern Germany, a wonderful study that gave me the necessary background to German history. I then went on to devour: Craig's Germany, 1866-1945, Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, Norbert Elias's The Germans, Joachim Fest's outstanding Hitler, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin, by Alexandra Richie, Fritz Stern's Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire, Dreams and Delusions and The Politics of Cultural Despair, Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret, Mosse's The Crisis of the German Ideology, Davidson's account of Nuremberg in The Trial of the Germans, Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth and Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany. I threw in Stanley Payne's History of Fascism, 1914-1945 and Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War: Explaining World War I for the heck of it. Right now I'm reading Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. Sometime soon I'll get to Timothy Garton Ash's In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, Halperin's book on Weimar, Germany Tried Democracy, and Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness 1933-1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years.

I thought Fest's biography of Hitler to be one of the best biographies of Hitler I've ever read and I highly recommend it. Norbert Elias's The Germans was an eye-opening experience. I've got his Civilizing Process, but haven't had the time or the energy to crack the spine.

Well, I suppose this entry has filled in some of the gaps since the fall of 1998. The next few weeks will see me lecturing on Nietzsche, Freud, modernism, fascism, Hitler, Stalin, world war, existentialism, Orwell, and Europe at the end of the 20th century.

Part Seven: The Sure Thing

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