Greetings, fellow
lovers of history! It’s the second half of the fall 2013 semester. Are you
ready for it? I am – well, I’m graduating in December, so of course, I am!
Anywho, sorry I didn’t publish a new post this past week. I haven’t crafted the
groovy material into a polished and acceptable form before the week was
over. So, sorry again.
But do not fret! This post is worth the delay! One of my
favorite professors here at Belmont, Dr. Daniel Schafer is a very groovy guy –
yeah, I’ve been around him too much, for he often says groovy. LOL! – and his
character profile is very groovy as well!
Born and raised in Chicago (still one of his favorite
cities), Dr. Daniel Schafer attended college in St. Louis, Missouri, and
Michigan and “lived for seven years in northern Missouri before”[1]
moving to Nashville. He added, “[P]lus, there was the year I spent doing my
doctoral research in Russia in 1991-92”[2]
(shortly before and after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed. He
earned his undergraduate degrees in history (major), German (minor), and
Russian (minor) at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his
“graduate training [exclusively] at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.”[3] Responding to my question of how long he has
been teaching, Dr. Schafer told me,
I’ve been a full-time teacher since
1995. But I had a good bit of teaching
experience before that. I first started
as a graduate teaching assistant at Michigan back in 1986. I had to lead a discussion section in a
Western Civilization class – students had two hours of lecture per week with a
mighty famous professor, then an hour of discussion every week with me. I was barely a year or two older than the
students and had just started graduate school the year before. The TAs led discussions and also graded all
the tests and papers. I did that for
three years in different classes, including some Russian history courses. After my wife and I moved to Missouri in
1989, I had the opportunity to teach part-time at Truman State University where
my wife had a job. I developed and
taught my own courses there, mostly about Russia. This developed into a one-year full-time
position at Truman State University in 1995-96 before I took the job at Belmont
in 1996.[4]
Dr.
Schafer joined the Belmont family in 1996 “when the history department had an
opening in Russian history. I guess my
first visit to campus was sometime in the spring of 1996 when I came down for
an interview. It was a regular,
full-time, tenure-track position, so I pretty much started right in.”[5] In
addition to his teaching duties, he does find time to be an active historian,
which Dr. Brenda Jackson-Abernathy said in her character profile is
required. Dr. Schafer stated, “I have
spent much of the last fifteen or twenty years as part of the ‘sandwich
generation,’ taking care of both children and aging parents. That has made it hard to take off and spend
extensive time in Russian archives and libraries. Fortunately, since the 1990s there has been a
flood of high quality publications of historical documents from the early years
of the Soviet Union, and this has been a big help for my research. I do most of my work during summer vacations
and the occasional sabbatical semester.”[6]
And
now, my interview with Dr. Schafer…
CRAFT: Were you always
interested in history?
SCHAFER: Yes. Next question?
CRAFT: Why
history? What first got you interested?
SCHAFER: My parents and
older siblings were all voracious readers, so I grew up in a house filled with
books. My father was a historian who
taught church history and historical theology at a Presbyterian seminary in
Chicago, so we probably had more history books lying around the house than anything
else. But there were lots of other
things to read. A lot of it was fiction
– classic literature, science fiction, adventure stories, recent
pot-boilers. But there were also all
sorts of non-fiction books on a variety of subjects – astronomy, evolutionary
biology and paleontology, archeology, psychology, philosophy, and
linguistics. So by the time I was in
high school I had developed fairly wide-ranging intellectual interests and was
beginning to see how different areas of human knowledge and endeavor were
linked together.
When
I started college I planned to major in either physics or mathematics. I had several career ideas at that
point. One was to become a deep-space
astronomer and investigate the mechanisms of the Big Bang – where did we come
from? Another idea was to go into
particle physics and help unravel the fundamental building blocks of matter and
energy – what are we made of? It seemed
to me that the most important discoveries in science involved either the very
big and distant, or the very small. I still
think that’s true, and I still follow developments in these fields. But while I was in college my latent interest
in history finally came forth and began shaping my future career. I can actually date the moment I decided to
become a history major. It was in the spring semester of my freshman year
(1981-82) during a lecture in a Western Civilization class. The topic was the legacies of the French
Revolution, and the professor was pointing out how the controversies and
conflicts of the 1790s revolved around basic political and philosophical
questions that we are still trying to work out some two centuries later, things
like the tension between liberty and equality and between tradition and
rationality, or the question of whether the ends justify the means. Of course, some of these questions have roots
reaching back long before the French Revolution. I remember this lecture as a one of those “ah
ha” moments where things suddenly become much clearer in my mind. I could see how our current political debates
were linked to a continuum reaching back centuries, and how one could never
understand today’s political world without a deep historical context. I glimpsed the interplay between eternal,
universal questions and the particular historical contexts in which they play
out – always different, yet always the same on some level. I later realized that this was the moment
when I decided to become a history major.
CRAFT: Is there a
specific avenue or focus of history you find most interesting, and why?
SCHAFER: I like “big
history” – the interaction of ecological and environmental factors with human
history over the long term, what some historians call the longue durée.[7] I’m also more interested in broad social
movements and trends than in the biographies of individual political
figures. The Spanish conquest of the
Inca empire is more about smallpox than Pizarro, though of course Pizarro had
to be there. I used to teach a course on
ecological and geographical factors in world history and really enjoyed it,
though I can’t fit it into my course rotation any more.
CRAFT: What got you interested in Russian and Islamic
history?
SCHAFER: With Russia, it really had to do with
growing up in America at the tail end of the Cold War. As a child I somehow became aware that I
lived in a city – Chicago – that had a Soviet bull’s-eye printed on it. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was
finishing high school and moving into college, there was a real fear in the
U.S. that civilization could be destroyed by a nuclear war between the US and
USSR, and that there was very little that ordinary citizens could do about
it. Popular movies and TV shows of the
era had plots revolving around US-Soviet war scares, accidental nuclear exchanges,
a Soviet invasion of the US, or depressing post-apocalyptic scenarios. I remember writing one of my college
application essays in 1981 about the nuclear arms race and the need for some
form of arms control. That’s part of the
reason I got interested in physics while in high school and considered it as a
major in college. But that’s also the
reason I developed an interest in Russia.
I began studying the Russian language my sophomore year, just after I
had decided to major in history. My
notion at that point was that knowledge of Russian history and language might
lead to a diplomatic career, perhaps as an arms control negotiator with the
State Department. At some point I
decided go ahead with advanced studies in Russian history and ultimately never
got back to a career in government service.
By the time I had completed my doctorate in 1995, the Soviet Union had
ceased to exist and the entire international situation was different.
I started paying
attention to the Islamic world during high school, when the biggest items of
international news were the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, and the Iranian hostage crisis.
I started following international news pretty constantly at that
time. My interest in the Islamic world
developed further during my years in college.
My very first college roommate was a Muslim, so I’m sure that had some
effect on me. History majors were
required to take courses on non-Western cultures, and I ended up taking two
classes in Islamic history. It was
fascinating to encounter a different civilization, to learn how it all fit
together, and to recognize both the similarities and differences with the
Western European Christian civilization.
So by the time I was planning to continue with studies of Russian
history in graduate school, I also had this parallel interest. It was a short step for me to specialize in
graduate school on the Muslim populations in the Russian empire and Soviet
Union.
CRAFT: What got you
interested science fiction and alternative history?
SCHAFER: My father and
older siblings were all readers of science fiction, so we had any number of
books around the house as I was growing up.
Some of my favorite authors in high school were the “big three” of
science fiction (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein), as well as
Robert Sheckley, whose works I found eccentric and humorous. I tended to favor science fiction writers who
take their science seriously and write precisely and realistically, so-called
“hard science fiction.” I’ve not much
gone in for medieval fantasy writing, or for the endless books and movies about
wizards (Harry Potter), vampires (Twilight), and supernatural hauntings
(M. Night Shyamalan and the others). So
far I have developed absolutely no interest in Game of Thrones. I thought I
might get interested, until I read that the author models his politics on the
War of the Roses between the Lancaster and York families, to the point of
naming his families the Lannisters and the Starks. Come ON!
Sounds like a bad high school history paper. I have a limited number of books left to read
in my life, and I’d rather read REAL medieval history than a medieval-styled
epic fantasy in a fictitious land with a bunch of magic thrown in. I make one major exception for the works of
J.R.R. Tolkien. Perhaps this is partly
because I first experienced them as childhood bedtime stories read to me by my
father (not just The Hobbit but the
entire Ring series)[8]
and which I read to my own son as well.
So these stories have a nostalgic feel for me. But I think, and some might not agree with me
here, that Tolkien was a better writer and story-teller than most of those who
have followed. He was engaged in a
sophisticated and many-sided intellectual project, sketching out entire mythologies,
languages, and alphabets that lay behind his stories – no short cuts for
him! Tolkien single-handedly created the
genre of high fantasy writing; every thing else is derivative. And he didn’t write book after book trying to
squeeze as much profits as possible out of his series.
I like hard science
fiction since it is actually a form of history writing, the writing of future
history. Since we don’t know exactly
what will happen, we can tweak a few things to make it interesting. What might the future look like if we settled
the other planets of the solar system?
Or if we solved the difficulties of interstellar travel? Or if we could extend the human lifespan
indefinitely? Or if we could learn to
travel through time? Or if we met an
intelligent alien species? Or if our
entire civilization were to collapse?
The best science fiction makes you think about who we humans really are,
how we behave, how we live together in societies, how technological change
affect us, how historical change unfolds, and so on. Alternative history is just another way to
explore the same questions. Look at past
history, change a thing or two, and imagine how the “future history of the
past” might have developed differently.
What if the U.S. South had successfully seceded in the 1860s – that’s a
popular scenario for some writers. What
if the D-Day invasion had failed? What
if Pontius Pilate had chosen not to execute Jesus? What if the British Empire had retained
control of America? There are endless
questions. Some historians dislike such
“counterfactuals” but sometimes it can be done very well and responsibly. What I’m not much interested in is questions
like – What if Roman Legionaries could ride dragons? That puts us back into medieval fantasy
fiction. Not a fan.
CRAFT: Do you bring history home with you?
SCHAFER: Every day!
CRAFT: Does
your family share your passion for history or teaching?
SCHAFER: There have
been a number of teachers in my family.
My maternal grandmother taught in a rural one-room schoolhouse in
Kentucky around the turn of the twentieth century – we have a copy of her
teaching certificate from 1905. As I
mentioned, my father was a seminary professor who taught church history. My wife is a professor of music at
Vanderbilt. My son is a college junior with wide interests in music, politics, economics, and philosophy,
but he’s told me he definitely does NOT want to become a historian – I guess
two generations of historians in the family is enough!
CRAFT: Is
there a person you admire or model yourself after?
SCHAFER: I admire my
father and other people I know personally.
I think I know too much about history to have any heroes, as such. People are all so complex, with their own
mixture of admirable and deplorable characteristics. So I don’t really idolize anyone. It’s not really that useful.
CRAFT: Who is your favorite intellectual or
historian? Why, how, and where do you see his or her historic relevance and
importance?
SCHAFER: I can’t name just one. There are a number of historians who have
strongly influenced me and helped me look at things differently. Fernand Braudel for one, and Alfred Crosby –
both of them looked at history in the big picture and pioneered work on the
environmental backdrop of human history.
I admire the clarity about history and historical method in the short
introductory works by Marc Bloch, E. H. Carr, and John Lewis Gaddis. There are many working historians in my own
field of Russian history whose work I admire, but I won’t single anyone out.
Thanks for readings, peeps. Stay tuned
for “Daniel Schafer: Learning from the Past to Better Manage the Future Part
II!” That’s all, folks[9] –
LOL!
MML, HI
[1]
Daniel Schafer, personal interview, March and April 2013.
[2]
Schafer.
[3]
Schafer
[4]
Schafer.
[5]
Schafer.
[6]
Schafer.
[7]
A French term which some historians use to describe the scope of their
projects.
[8]
That is, all of the Lord of the Rings books.
[9]
Looney Tunes character Porky Pig uttered
that classic phrase at the end of some episodes.
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