When you have a free afternoon sometime, go visit the archives of the Holland Museum, and ask for an old account book of the Boone Lumber Company (collection T00-1600.5). Set the account book in front of you on a table, open it somewhere in the middle, lean forward and breathe. Suddenly, the smells of a 19th-century lumber yard will fill your nostrils. Trapped in those pages, for well over a hundred years, is the dust of oak, cedar, pine, and hemlock, a testimony to a past age.
Typically, when historians want to learn something about the past, they seek words, not smells. They also tend to put texts before photographs, and letters before old buildings. All too often, historical research is limited to the papers of politicians at the national archives. And, at many universities, history is taught as mostly a set of fixed content, separate from one’s one interests and personal history. Sometimes, history can feel distant and impersonal.
But as a student at Hope College, I was inspired to look at history from different angles and find connections to my own concerns. I read my fair share of classic texts by Alexis DeTocqueville, Frederick Douglass, and the like, but I also participated in oral history projects, surveyed local historic architecture, wrote for campus publications, worked in and traveled to archives and museums. Classroom lessons in historical thinking inspired me to think about the myriad ways one might approach historical questions. History department events and invited speakers initiated me into the cult of the footnote. By the time I went off to graduate school in history, I had a set of diverse and profound experiences that taught me to approach the past from different angles.
Now, having written a book titled Creative Historical Thinking, I can reflect on what makes a creative environment. Creativity, it seems clear, can only develop when people feel comfortable in asking questions and “playing” with ideas. In his famous 1938 study Homo Ludens (playing man), Dutch historian Johan Huizinga explained that play was the cessation of formal rules, which could be set aside for a short period of time, so that we can experiment with new ideas. Play is not disorder and lack of seriousness; it is precisely what we must do if we are to discover new kinds of order, as well as new and serious bits of information. Play, Huizinga wrote, was at the core of culture.
Hope College certainly offers a comfortable environment for those who wish to ask questions. Indeed, there is a campus culture of inquisitiveness and respect. In a small, friendly history department, students enjoy the advantage of being able to forge relationships and get personal feedback from their professors. Small group exercises in class give students the opportunities to think creatively about how history is written, and who controls the narrative. Connections to local historical agencies give students the opportunity to practice in the field.
The old proverb rings true, that people might forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Hope makes you feel like a person, not a number. Studying history within a liberal arts tradition highlights the importance of individuals and individual rights, of culture and tradition, religion and being. In the process of studying history, we not only satisfy our own curiosity, but we build connective social tissues. History must always begin with the individual, develop through curiosity and play, and come together for social ends as we relate what we have discovered. Whether it is studying their Reformed heritage, their own ethnic background, or the great moments in world history, Hope history students have real opportunities to think creatively about history, and to approach it from their own perspective.
To be creative, you must put your fears aside and be open to new experiences. So, I implore you to start looking for new ways to think about and write history. Get my book. Or, for other inspiration, go to the museum; get a whiff of that lumber yard account book. It just might bring you back in time, and change how you think about the past.
So I’m in a social setting, mingling with a new acquaintance. I’m asked what I do.
Chad Carlson is Associate Professor of Kinesiology and Assistant Men’s Basketball Coach at Hope College. He will be leading a History Colloquium titled “Why March Madness Matters: Reflections on a Popular Sporting Event’s Forgotten History. The talk will take place on 
The ancient Greeks created many elements of our cultural heritage—philosophy, drama, democracy, to name a few. But contradictions, such as a democracy based on slave labor and ruled by a “first citizen,” lie behind the beautiful buildings and the dramatic victories over larger forces. This course explores the rise of Greek culture to its height in the fifth century B.C. and its evolution into the Hellenistic world that prepared the way for the Roman Empire. Flagged for global learning international.
This course explores the colonial experiences of Africans as well as the legacies of European colonial rule in Africa. We will examine the different ways Africans responded to European military conquest and political domination from the mid -1850s to the 1960s and the ways Africans struggled for independence. We will take an especially close look at Kenya and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The course is flagged for cultural diversity and Global Learning (International).
This course will focus on the ways the United States changed in the years between World War II and the attacks of September 11. Key question of this class revolve around the changing power dynamics of the last half of the 20th Century: How did the government and military respond to the fact that the United States had become the major world power? How did American economic dominance and economic struggles shape the ways Americans saw themselves and their role in the world? How did American men and women of different races, classes, regions, ethnicities and religions understand and shape the meaning of social power? Major topics include: the Cold War; the economic and cultural changes of the 1950s; Vietnam and the rise of protest in the 1960s; the economic and foreign policy challenges of the 1970s; the rise of conservatism in the 1980s, and the challenges of diversity and globalization in the 1990s. This course is flagged for global learning domestic.
The world that we live in today continues to be shaped by the legacies of past empires. From commerce to cultural activities and diplomacy, societies between the East and West were interconnected in more ways than can be imagined since European and non-European explorers took to the seas on a global scale. This exciting period of exchanges and conflicts, known as the age of exploration, roughly spanned the late 14th through the early 18th centuries. This course will probe the context of exploration with focused discussions of topics like the rise of the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms, the Atlantic slave trade, the international networks of Jesuit missionaries, the spread of Christianity and Islam, the discoveries of India and the Spice Islands, and the silver trade in East Asia, among others. This course fulfills the global/international component of the History major and meets the Global Learning International requirement.
The United States’ military shaped and defined its character, culture, and politics and, ultimately, catapulted the nation into superpower status. This course examines America’s rise into becoming the world’s most potent warrior democracy, tracing the history of the U.S. military from its establishment to present day. Along with investigating the purpose and performance of the military during time of conflict, its role as a political and socioeconomic institution will also be examined, especially with regard to its power and limitations within America’s constitutional system.
Are you interested in how people lived their lives in the past? Consider early modern Europe—the period between about 1450 and about 1800. This period saw significant changes—the expansion of Europeans beyond their continent to the New World and Asia, the fragmentation of the Christian church in Western Europe, the evolution of warfare and the beginnings of the change from feudal or mercenary armies to standing armies. People’s beliefs were challenged by all this change, and some people reacted to change by accusing people they distrusted of witchcraft. How did women and men navigate the changes of this dynamic period? Come and find out. Students will read both primary and secondary sources, and will write a significant research paper on a topic of their choice.
