College and Research Libraries


By STANLEY PARGELLIS 

Why Not Teach the History 
of the Universe?~ 

TET me begin, asking your forbearan~e, 
L with an extract from the Iowa Clarzon 
of Apr. 18, 2147, reporting a conference or 
symposium held by a number of historians 

at Iowa City. 

Speaking before a selected group of world 
officials in the Auditorium last night, Profes-
sor Howie Notall Binns of Mackenzie Uni-
versity declared that schools and universities 
should stop teaching the history of the world, 
and concentrate instead upon the history of 
the universe. "Unless we understand the ab-
normal-I might even say the utter-irra-
tionality of the inhabitants of Venus," he 
maintained, "we shall never be able to deal 
satisfactorily with similar irrational elements 
in our own people." Professor Binns went on 
to say that world federalism could not con-
tinue to succeed without careful scrutiny and 
application of the principles worked out in the 
long-established federation of the moons of 
Jupiter, and that our knowledge of overlap-
ping and interlocking historical cycles, a study 
admittedly in its infancy, would be forwarded 
to a measurable extent, to our own consequent 
advantage, by detailed analysis of the success-

. ful predictions practised and rriade use of in 
connection with the rings of Saturn. "In 
comparison with the fine results which these 
older communities have obtained in the con-
trol of both human and physical nature," 
Professor Binns concluded, "we are groping 
in the dark almost as helplessly as we were 
two centuries ago." 

Professor U. N. Tchuno of the University 
of Argentine feared that universal war and 
the end of our civilization might well follow 
our failure to extend our history courses out-
side our own puny world limits. "We are 
now dealing with people," he cried, "who 

1 Paper presented Apr. 19, 1947, at. the .Iowa State 
Histoncal Conference held by the Umverstty of Iowa 
at Iowa City. 

have never had either a Marx or a Ford, and 
it is absurd and dangerous for us to continue 
to w·aste the precious time of our children 
by telling them of either. I count 3II8-
perhaps 3 ug-civilizations in the history of 
the universe that have flourished and failed; 
unless we can discover the reasons for those 
failures, we shall assuredly end by failing our-
selves." 

Other members of the audience supported 
these sentiments, with the exception of a 
single speaker, afterwards discovered to be 
one Henry J effers.on of Liberty, Iowa, who 
was understood to remark that he thought 
something might be said for teaching Iowa 
children the history of Iowa.- "History be-
gins in our own back yard," those nearest him 
told reporters they fancied they heard him 
say before he was placed under arrest and 
removed from the hall. 

An editorial the following day in the 
great Yukon Aurora~ considered to have 
become, since the artificial melting of the 
polar ice fields through atomic energy, the 
leading paper of the Western Hemisphere, 

read as follows : 

Some two hundred years ago, after the close 
of the second of the world wars which con-
vulsed the twentieth century, a courageous 
group of historians and publicists challenged 
the primitive practice then in vogue of teach-
ing what was known as American history in 
the schools. The long and bitter discussion 
which ensued, in the course of which the de-
fenders of "American history" naturally 
aligned themselves with the proponents of a 
narrow nationalism, was not concluded until 
the police powers of the new world state were 
invoked. Since that time, now more than a 
century ago, history as taught to the children 
of th~ world has been a powerful inducement 
to world order and tranquility. The Board 

408 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



of Historical Control, a department of the 
well-known O.W.K. (Office of World 
Knowledge), has supervised the training of 
teachers and the publication of textbooks. Its 
rigid system of school and college inspection 
has become a model which other departments 
are striving to emulate. The unfortunate 
incident which occurred in Iowa City last 
night should not be regarded as a reflection 
upon the B.H.C. A few unassimilated ele-
ments, as harmless as they are unbalanced, 
are doubtless to be found in many areas 
throughout the world. 

The primary task before the world state, 
as the Aurora has consistently advocated, is 
the preservation of universal harmony. We 
have no hesitation in recommending to 
O.W.K. serious consideration of those meas-
ures presented so ably last night at Iowa City. 

With that influential recommendation the 
editorial ends, and with it this first venture 
of mine into the tempting field of Utopia-
making. 

Wrongness of Philosophy 

It is probably unnecessary to explain to 
any group of historians just what is wrong 
about the very logical philosophy of history 
advanced by Messrs. Binns and Tchuno and 
even more by their journalistic contem-
porary, the Aurora. For the three of them, 
history has at last become one of the social 
sciences, through the directed use of which 
human beings can be shaped foT the achieve-
ment of political ends. The professors, I 
am pleased to report, still believe in true 
history-finding out what did happen in 
Venus-though I fear they also lend their 
approval to the repugnant processes of state-
directed selectivity and dissemination of 
historical interpretations to which the 
Aurora is so irrevocably committed. I am 
also moved by the fact that two centuries 
hence some measure of free speech still 
exists. Members of the audience could still 
express opinions, and Henry Jefferson could 
scarcely have been the only man in Iowa to 

OCTOBER .. 1947 

show some sentiment, and some understand-
ing of the validity and importance of his 
sentiment, for the land which he and his 
fathers had tilled. 

In my opinion, history is not one of the 
social sciences, any more than is music 6r 
poetry, and calling it so, and thinking of 
it so, and teaching it in connection with 
economics and sociology and psychiatry, as 
they are conceived today, is one more con-
tribution to the advance of the jungle. You 
people in Iowa have not seen once produc-
tive fields giving way, as in parts of New 
England, to the wilderness. Subtly, almost 
imperceptibly, the junipers, the soft woods, 
the vines creep in, beginning at the edges 
of the fields and seeding themselves further 
each season. The man who wants to save 
one small grass plot, one garden, or one 
small orchard, must keep wielding the mat-
tock and the ax. Those once productive 
cultural fields of our Western civilization-
the concept of a possible society made up of 
free, rational, self-disciplined human beings, 
each one an end in himself, and fulfilling his 
own peculiar potentialities through service 
in gz:eater or smaller degree to the com-
munity-in upon these fields the jungle is 
being let. Any observant man, setting him-
self to look for such evidence, can find it 
on ev~ry side. 

Knowledge of Past 

We are here concerned with only one o,f 
those sides, which has to do with men's 
knowledge of their past. Recorded history 
is an extension of one's own experience to 
the experience of other human beings like 
ourselves who did the same things we do, 
though with varying ideas and under vary-
ing institutions. This is at once the simplest 
and the most human and most productive 
way of regarding history. So regarded, 
history becomes one means of keeping alive 
an individual's belief in himself and in 

409 



individualism, of helping him select his own 
historical facts, come to his own conclusions, 
and ·so develop his own philosophy of living, , 
of which his interpretation of history forms 
an essential, integral part. History re-
garded as social science must inevitably tend 
towards the standardization--or better, the 
impersonalization--of interpretations and 
of the philosophies which arise from them. 
It destroys that very thing which is the 
strength and the essence of history: indi-
vidual differences of opinion based upon the 
obvious fact that individuals are different. 
Not the weakness of history, as some social 
scientists are fond of pointing out, but its 
glory, lies in such disagreements as Howard 
Beale revealed in his article on the causes 
of the Civil War as interpreted by his-
torians, in the recent report of the com-
mittee on historiography, written under the 
auspices-! hate to admit it-of the Social 
Science Research Council. 

The function of the teacher of history, 
therefore, is to help his stu~ents extend their 
own experiences, nothing else. The mo-
ment he starts giving a dogmatic interpre-
tation of his own, especially on those great 
questions like the Civil War and the fall 
of the Roman Empire, he sells out to the 
jungle. When he teaches no interpre.tation 
but his own, insists on it, will let no student 
hazard any other, he is already fit for the 
staff of the Yukon Aurora. 

The place to start the teaching of history 
in this broad and human sense is exactly 
where Henry Jefferson put it, "in our own 
back yard," in the prairies and corn fields, 
which are the Iowa version of New England 
rocks and rills. Midwesterners are woe-
fully ignorant of Midwestern history. 

Midwestern History 

A few months ago, a speaker in St. 
Joseph, Mo., on the occasion of the 
hundredth anniversary of the chartering of 

the Hannibal & St. J o railroad, told some-
thing about the courage and hopes of the 
men who began it, about its importance to 
northern Iowa, and of its dramatic sig-
nificance in the days when all freight and 
mail, going West, was funneled along that 
narrow strip of track. At the end of the 
speech, an intelligent young woman came 
up and said, "I didn't know that was his-
tory. I didn't know the Midwest had a 
history. I thought history was Plymouth 
Rock and Bunker Hill." That tragic story 
illustrates the meaningless results of teach-
ing historical abstractions in a vacuum un-
related to experience. What sense does a 
Bostonian's view of the United States make 
to someone from St. J o? Boston children 
can be taught about Bunker Hill; all of 
them have seen the monument and, if they 
are willing to take their lives in their hands, 
they can see in the middle of a busy street 
the cobble-stoned circle which marks the site 
of the Boston Massacre. An imaginative 
teacher finds it easy to put a bewigged royal 
governor on the balcony of the Old State 
House above that circle, and from there to 
develop the conflict between Massachusetts 
and the Crown. The equivalent for St. J o 
is Roubidoux's cabin, the pageant of canoes 
-missionary, Indian, fur trader-on that 
swift broad river, the steamboats, the Gold 
Rush, the railroad, the settlers, the Civil 
War-every one of which ties St. J o to the 
rest of the country and the rest of the 
world. 

A couple of months ago the Chicago Sun 
asked the Newberry Library to edit a 
special Midwestern edition of its literary 
section, "Book Week," to appear May 4-
an issue to be devoted to a series of biblio-
graphical articles which would suggest the 
best books for the intelligent layman who 
wanted to learn something about the Mid-
west. The guest editor invited a number 
of experts in various fields to contribute 

410 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



articles. They are good articles, for the 
most part, but they leave anyone who be-
lieves in the value of history a little sad. 
There are simply not enough books that 
meet the triple standards of accuracy, read-
ability, and sympathy for the subject. 

Cities of the Midwest 

Take, for instance, the great city. The 
Midwest has eight or nine large cities, and 
the paucity of material Ofl them is pathetic. 
Compare what has been written about Chi-
cago with what has been written on London 
or Paris, even after making due allowance 
for Chicago's youth. There are books on 
every square in London, on streets, on build-
ings, and they are being published all the 
time. One of the most recent is on the 
natural history of London, beautifully illus-
trated, written by a naturalist who can 
tell you what plants grew where two cen-
turies ago and what ones have disappeared, 
what birds have come and have left the city 
and .which ones remain. An English his-
torian walking along the South Downs 
with an American companion and seeing a 
row of beehives in the valley below, re-
marked, "There were beehives there in 
Domesday Book." The unity of past and 
present, the dropping away of the centuries, 
the identifying of one's own experience with 
the experience of countless individuals who 
have gone before-everything that the his-
torian wants who sees history as philosophy, 
is in that remark. We don't know enough 
about the Midwest to know it that well. 

Again, there are no surveys such as a 
competent sociologist can make-and even 
the historian who denies that history should 
be a social science can find useful material 
in such surveys-of any Midwestern city 
except Chicago. Louis Wirth has directed 
a number of studies of parts of Chicago, but 
he is the first to say that not only has Chi-
cago nothing like Charles Booth's enormous 

OCTOBER, 1947 

study of Life and Labour in London; it has. 
not even anything approaching Henry May-
hew's four volumes on London in the 
186o's. 

Fewer Books on the Midwest 

We are turning out fewer books on the 
Midwest today than we did sixty years ago. 
If you walk up and down looking at the 
Midwest shelves of a good library, you are 
impressed with the number of county his-
tories compiled in the nineteenth century, 
put out for a commercial purpose, I admit, 
but better than all but one or two of the 
few twentieth-century county histories; you 
are impressed with the histories of towns, 
the number of magazines that dealt with 
local history, the pioneer accounts, the auto-
biographies. The new books stand out like 
a single black-eyed Susan in a field of mus-
tard-they are so few. And as for the first-
rate new books ... it's an event when one 
appears. Graham Hutton's Midwest at 
Noon is as unique as it is unusual; even 
though an Englishman can see some things 
in the Midwest which es~ape those who have 
always lived among them, we ought not 
have left the e~tire field to him. The 
Lynds' two books on Middletown have now 
been followed by one on Plainville, U.S.A., 
a little out of the real Midwest belt, but 
to the best of my knowledge no one has 
tried to repeat for his own section that 
wholly charming and delightful book on 
the Rock River by Colonel Phalen called 
Sinnissippi. For the small town and the 
farm, as well as the city, we have to depend 
upon novels, some of them first-rate, like 
Ruth Suckow's Iowa Interiors or Herbert 
Quick's trilogy. But novels, though they 
give us the flavor and the social setting 
perhaps more faithfully than a history can, 
do not take the place of factual, interpreta-
tive histories. For information on many 
towns absolutely the only place to go is the 

411 



W.P.A. Federal Writers Project series of 
state guides. If any of you have looked 
through the raw materials out of which the 
guides were written, as I have done for 
Illinois, you know how inadequate and 
unscholarly much of that material is. Once 
in a while there is a good article in the 
two hundred odd cubic feet of typewritten 
copy turned out by the W.P.A. workers, but 
most of it is both badly written and 
undocumented. 

One reason why such books are not being 
written is that people are not interested, 
have never been taught to be interested. 
But another is the increasing scarcity of 
documentary materials. Take, for example, 
and it is another Chicago example, because 
I know more about Chicago's needs than 
Iowa's, that most interesting period in Chi-
cago's history, the r8go's, when a tough 
merchants' town suddenly acquired within 
the space of a few years a great new univer-
sity, an art gallery, a symphony orchestra, 
a couple of libraries, and began a new liter-
ary movement. Those were the days when, 
in the local idiom; Chicago made culture 
hum. What was the reason for it? A 

· young Yale student, a Chicagoan, investi-
gating the question, came to the conclusion 
that one man, Charles Hutchinson, probably 
had as much to do with all these develop-
ments as anyone. We inquired about the 
Hutchinson papers, learned that a few years 
ago they had been destroyed by his surviving 
heirs; all, that is, but a handful. When 
telling a dinner companion one night about 
this tragedy, I was delighted to hear him 
say, "Why, I've got Charlie Hutchinson's 
papers. I saved all there are left." These 
few papers are all that remains of a man, 
except the institutions he encouraged, whom 
many people called the leading Chicago 
citizen of his time. No one can ever write 
a life, a good one, of Marshall Field or of 
Potter Palmer or of almost any one of a 

dozen great nineteenth-century Chicagoans. 
A friend of mine writing a life of Cleve-
land's chief justice, Melville Fuller, a Chi-
cago lawyer, finds it almost impossible to 
get what he wants on Fuller's Chicago 
career. There may be collections of papers 
for half a dozen men in those years of the 
city's spectacular growth; we have more 
information on men in almost any medieval 
city than on men in Chicago, the metropolis 
of the American · heartland, which today 
produces nearly half the manufactures and 
more than half the food in the United 
States. 

Lack of Documents 

Leave the men for a moment. Turn to 
the growth of Midwest business. Once a 
month or more some public relations officer 
of a Chicago or Midwestern firm has asked 
my help in get'ting a substantial history of 
the business written. It is a centenary; they 
are willing to let a good historian wrhe his 
own ticket, give him all the aid they can, 
a free hand to go where he wants for facts 
and to say what he wants-all the essentials 
as a historian sees them, in short, but one. 
They have no documents. When it is 
pointed out to them that no one can write 
a history without documents, the basic skele-
ton record of the business as found in the 
minute books, in the journals and ledgers, 
and in the correspondence of the chief execu-
tives, they reluctantly, sometimes half 
suspiciously yield, wondering why enough 
cannot be got out of the newspapers. This 
is only another example of the absence 
among Midwesterners of historical-minded-
ness. One expects it perhaps among ordi-
nary people, like the woman who, cleaning 
her attic the other day, found and brought 
in three small books which she hoped might 
be of value. One of them was a nineteenth-
century pocket edition of Shakespeare, 
worth perhaps ten cents if it had been in 

412 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



good condition. She was descended from 
the Chase family of Michigan, who had 
settled there in the 183o's, and that morning 
she had burned a bushel-basketful of letters 
from one of the great pioneer bishops of the 
Midwest, Philander Chase, founder of 
Kenyon College. Such destruction goes on 
daily. Publicity, I think, would help to 
stop it, and there is no better publicity than 
that given by school teachers teaching the 
history of Iowa and the Midwest and 
working in conjunction with historical so..: 
cieties and college and university libraries. 

I have spoken of the paucity of books on 
the city, small town, farm, individuals, 
businesses. Look at the history of literature 
in the Midwest. We have long talked 
about a Chicago school of writers; there is 
no book on the subject where there could 
well be half a dozen. Have you any good 
book on the Iowa school of writers? Have 
you any books on Iowa novels and Iowa 
poetry of the nineteenth century, or on Iowa 
publications? The _ Palimpset contains a 
number of articles on such subjects, but 
what about books. Is there any study of 
Iowa architecture? or Iowa presses? of the 
Iowa theatre? of newspapers? What about 
a history of political ideas in Iowa, utilizing 
among other sources those amazing records, 
the constitutional conventions of the nine-
teenth century, which sound dull beyond 
words but are fascinating and lively reading 
when you bear in mind that in few other 
countries could as much sound political 
wisdom have been found as among these 
Iowa farmers? 

Such books need writing, and in a style 
that will attract readers. It is becoming 
increasingly obvious that we have .two sorts 
of people doing histories today: the scholar 
who digs for the facts, can be trusted to 
turn them up, and whose books are read 
only by other scholars or would-be scholars; 
and the professional writer whose sentences 

OCTOBER~ 1947 

have pace, who catches and transfers to the 
printed page the drama and color of past 
events, but whose facts and interpretations 
cannot be believed because he will not dig. 
These two ought to be the extremes, with 
plenty of people in the center. The number 
of writers both sound and readable rattle 
around in the center like seeds in a gourd. 

Lack of History Books 

Here is another reason, then, for the 
failure of Midwesterners to know them-
selves. Children in the Chicago public 
schools are expected to study the history of 
Chicago · at one point in their wobbling 
career, but there is no history of Chicago 
they can read. Every so often I get a sad 
little note from some child asking me to send 
her some books on Chicago. You have a 
history or two on Iowa, I know. Are they 
the kind of histories that, catching the 
imagination, also initiate a child into the 
mystery, yet not too involved a mystery, 
which study of the past teaches: that, 
though they are individuals, they are also 
part of the stream? 

Tragedy of Twentieth Century 

Everything that I have been saying is one 
man's guess at a solution for what must 
seem to any historian one of the tragedies 
of the twentieth century. Here is a great 
people, powerful beyond belief and com-
mitted to the political theory that the im-
portant decisions of government, in domestic 
and foreign affairs, must be also the de-
cisions of the majority. Those decisions, 
during the last twenty-five years, have been, 
to use the kindliest word, erratic. If they 
continue to be as erratic for the rest of the 
century, we shall be known as the people 
who achieved both the greatest success and 
the greatest failure in history. Almost any 
real historian, even a prejudiced one, knows 

(Continued on page 426) 

413 



according to subject and speaker. By · far 
the greater percentage of the audience con-
sists of staff, faculty, and graduate students, 
with never more than a handful of under-
graduates except when music or films are 
featured, and even then university person-
nel and graduates predominate. This may 
be partially due to the fact that all dormi-
tories and organized houses serve dinner 
at half-past five, but experimentation with 
four-thirty to five-thirty meetings for the 
Library Hour did not show any difference. 

The committee has also discovered that 
the size of the audience is no criterion of 
the success of the individual program. One 
of the best examples of this fact was a talk 
ori the cooperative movement which drew 
only about twenty people. These twenty, 
however, engaged the speaker in a lively 
discussion which lasted about half an hour 
after he had finished his lecture. 

The Library Hour program correlates 
with another of the public relations pro-
grams of the university-"The Library 

Presents-," a weekly half-hour radio pro-
gram over the local university station. The 
radio and lecture programs are frequently 
able to make use of each other's ·speakers. 

As a whole, the librarians' association 
feels that the Library Hour has more than 
justified the rather considerable work in-
volved. In addition to the value of the 
program as a source of information to about 
2000 different people over a period of two 
years (a total of approximately 3500 have 
attended), it has also taught the various 
committee members a great deal about the 
workings of the university-its departments 
and its personalities. 

While a large university with its wealth 
of talent is a reasonably easy field for a 
series of this sort, it is probable that an 
even greater need might exist in a smaller 
school where there are .fewer outside events. 
In any case, such a series, if well planned 
and publicized, can do much to foster the 
goodwill of faculty and students toward 
the library and its staff. 

Why Not Teach the History of the Universe? 
{Continued from page 413) 

what we lack-a sense of continuity and of 
balance and understanding of human beings 
organized into societies that move through 
time. He knows also the remedy, which is 
historical-mindedness. 

In suggesti1,1g that historical-mindedness 
begin at home, in the back yard, I do not 
mean that it should stay forever in the back 
yard. There is a front yard too, and the 

Correction 

street which passes by leads to the ends of 
the earth. Every Iowan ough_t to follow 
that street as far as his time, his interest, and 
his sense of duty propel him. If, at last, it 
leads him to the rings of Saturn, I am all in 
favor of it. Why not teach the history of 
the universe? But not at the outset, not as 
an abstraction, not until, knowing the his-
tory of Iowa, he has history in his blood. 

In the July issue, Part I, p. 259, it was stated in the article on "College and University 
Library Statistics" that the previous statistics had been published in the March 1943 
Issue. It should have read "March 1944." 

426 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES