“Everything Connects to the Future”: Jean O’Brien on Studying History

Regents Professor Jean O’Brien of the Department of History discusses how studying history can change one’s perspective of the world and prepare them for future success.

How did you become interested in studying history?

I've always been interested. I think some people just are. My parents were both history minors, and we were always learning about history from them and our travels. It also ties in with my Ojibwe identity in lots of ways, as I was really interested in knowing the history of [my] people. My grandmother lived on the White Earth Indian Reservation, and my mother grew up there, so we spent a lot of time there and heard stories. 

What is unique about the history department at the U?

History can sometimes be a conservative discipline, though I have never found that to be the case here. I have found the U’s program to embrace new approaches, perspectives, and ways of thinking about a complex world. It opens up the horizon for understanding issues that we grapple with on a daily basis. 

Since the 1970s, the department has really concentrated on hiring people who want to understand US history as very diverse and complicated. This department hired women's historians very early on, when women's history was first coming to be accepted in the profession. It also extended to African American history and American Indian history, which is what I do. The Department of American Indian Studies has been here since 1969 and was the first fully established department in the country. The first American Indian historian was hired in 1975, very early on in the move to build the field of American Indian history in a new way.

What is it like to research history?

The faculty in this department have lots of different approaches to historical research, and lots of different methodologies and theories that drive their research. A lot of our research is archivally driven. Oftentimes, it’s literally going to the archival buildings, like the National Archives or the Newberry Library in Chicago, although the recent digitization of materials has really made things much easier for many of us. But we also have faculty who do oral history research or ethnography. They work on intellectual history, so they're more involved in looking at literary sources or the writings of people left behind. There's a lot of work done in social history, which can be anything that allows you to understand the everyday life of people.

What do you want students to know going into the program?

Activating the imaginations of students is something that we really try to do in this department. I have amazing colleagues teaching fantastic courses, and it's really fun to be able to grab a student's attention and get them to think, "Well, what else am I going to take?" 

One of the things that I tell my students from day one in my undergraduate classes is that history is not about names, dates, and events. It's not about memorizing things and being able to regurgitate them in a rote way. History is about being able to narrate your understanding of what happened in the past. What were the significant things that happened? What's the narrative arc that takes that past and helps us understand how it helped form the present? What can we learn about what happened in the past, and what we might not want to do in the future? It's really about captivating people's imagination and making history come alive for them. That sounds like a cliché, but it's not about dead, dusty things. Everything connects to the future.

How does studying history prepare you for the future?

History has been a major of choice for people exploring all kinds of careers, such as lawyers or politicians. People in the business community are saying that they want history majors and people who are doing the liberal arts. Why? Because we train people to think, to analyze, to write, and to make persuasive arguments. These are tools that you can use across the board, and they're useful skills that history teaches in a particular way. 

Learning history helps people understand society in a complex way. How you navigate choices you make on a daily basis is informed by what you know about history and how you think about the trajectory of histories. Knowing these kinds of things reveals what’s possible in the future, and we can look at history as a potentially hopeful lesson about how to tackle major problems in society. That's using history to activate and participate in public life to make transformative change for a productive future.

This story was edited by Lily Zenner, an undergraduate student in CLA.