Interview by George Bennett
Inside his office, instructor Scott McAleer displayed the results of his slow exposure camera. When his class talks about photographs as historical documents, he says, he has the class pose. The period style recreation takes seven minutes or more and produces pictures that are “creepy and old-timey looking.”
McAleer details some of the trade-offs of technology and we discuss the differing perspectives between journalists, who look constantly at what is happening now and next, and the historian’s world, immersed hundreds of years into the past.
“I just don’t think of modern events in the same way that I think about the discipline of history. To me, they’re separate.”
Scott McAleer was pleased and eager to share the success story of his former student Sean Kinsey, a history graduate and member of his history co-curricular. Kinsey, he explained, completed a cooperative work experience/history internship through the Albany Regional Museum, which led to a job there.
Kinsey, at his new job, spoke highly of his professor. “He would bring in hands-on material for people to handle from the time period,” presenting information without “saying where it’s from or who the author is and then reveal that at the end. There’s a little twist, you might not have thought” the source would be “that person … from that region, for that reason.” These surprises made class compelling.
McAleer is quick to laugh, even when discussing serious matters. So, imagine a warm laugh helping ease through sometimes weighty topics.
What is it like for you to live through historical times?
McAleer laughs.
Wait, are we doing that?
I try to kind of keep a healthy detachment from some of it and recognize that people will look at this era much differently in 10 years and 20 years and 100 years. I don’t remember a time in my life when people were generally saying, “Oh, everything’s just fine.”
You know, every generation is always sort of like, “The world’s ending, the world’s ending.” And so not to downplay the significance of the times that we live, but I think we’ll know a lot more in 100 years.
History encourages caution in judgment-making because in the past we’re always dealing with imperfect records, contradictory information, contradictory evidence and we’re always aware of the fact that there’s stuff that we just don’t know. I never have 100% of the information.
Is that helpful? Personally having that long perspective.
It’s healthy to detach a little bit and to recognize a lot of stuff is just out of our control. In any generation and in any era. You do your best to improve the world as you’re going, but with the recognition that you’re not in control. Not being in control is a very healthy thing I think.
Is it 100 years? What kind of time frame do you think before events get clearer?
It’s different, of course, today because we have more information than we can handle, whereas if you go back thousands of years, you have barely any information. And so I don’t know. Does that process speed up today because we have more information more quickly?
For people who are really worried, is there a specific time that you think is similar, that people can look to in the past and think – we made it through this?
Certainly the earliest days of the Republic. Say, like the 1790s, when we were taking the ideas that came out of the revolution and politicizing them. The first political parties were formed and both political parties fully believed that if the other side won, that the country was just gonna disintegrate, right? So passions were really, really high. In fact, you won’t find an era in American history with more passionate politics than the 1790s.
Then, of course, the American Civil War stands out for sure. The Great Depression would be another one. The events in the interwar years and then the 1960s were very turbulent, lots of bombings and civil unrest. So yeah, the country’s made it through equally turbulent periods.
Can you give us a little mini life history?
Well, I was lucky, when I was 16 in 1989, I was selected as a part of a student exchange with the Soviet Union. So right before they collapsed, I spent three weeks there meeting people behind the Iron Curtain. Interacting with people who did not have rights at all, interacting with people who were afraid of getting on the wrong side of their government. Recognizing that a totalitarian regime is a very real thing … that was foundational. … Did a bunch of archaeology along the way. And been here for about 19 years now.
I’ve been lucky to travel a lot too with students through the study abroad program. So, I’ve traveled pretty widely throughout Western Europe and Northern Europe. Travel’s a great thing and it opens up the mind. It’s great intellectually, but also personally. Taking students to London for two weeks here this summer and really, really looking forward to that. One of my favorite things is just facilitating that experience for people who’ve never done it before and seeing their world expand is really where it’s at for me.
There’s just so much history there. London is almost exactly the same amount of square miles as Benton County. This will be my fourth trip and you know I still only see a little fraction of it.
It’s very approachable simply because of the language and especially traveling on the public transit system – because students have to learn these cities themselves. … At first, I just wanted to go everywhere. I was like a typical American. I just want to get all the stamps.
What’s an early historical memory?
My mom said when I was a little tiny baby the Watergate hearings were on TV and she said she would just plop me in front of the TV and I was just fascinated by what seemed like these important men talking about important things. Of course I was a drooling baby, but I don’t know, maybe that was it (the start of his interest in history).
Do you have strong opinions about AI?
Yeah, I just want to kill it. I hate it. I’m terrified. I don’t like anything about it. I think it’s the existential challenge to me that is terrifying. Like, what is it gonna mean to be human, when pretty soon we’re not the smartest critter on the planet anymore? And I worry about people’s ability to find meaning in life if so much of the stuff that people used to do for work is now gonna be at least augmented by these machine.
I think at this point I’m a pessimist until proven otherwise. That’s my intuition anyway. … It does seem to me to be something completely different than a better typewriter.
I think it will be used as a research tool to great effect. AI can help you hone in on aspects of your research. Of course that assumes everything’s been digitized and it hasn’t.
There’s also this thing where so many great ideas have come up, researchers have done such incredible work sometimes by accident. I’m looking for these documents, oh and I find this over here. I don’t know that AI is going to be really great at that. It certainly is gonna be able to do interesting stuff by compiling information on big trends that are sort of invisible to us at the moment. It’s going to notice things that we can’t because it can think sort of infinitely.
Its impact on humans, of course it’s a disaster. I have trouble sitting through a 30-minute TV show without also scrolling around on my phone. There’s no doubt that it’s already changed us in fundamental ways.
I dream about it. I dream that I can’t get some app on my phone to work. It’s usually like a map and I’m trying to navigate a city and I keep typing stuff in and it takes me to the wrong place.
But you know, I’ve never allowed any kind of technology in my classes, in the classroom itself. No phones, no tablets. I look at it as a refuge from that stuff, and it’s generally gone amazingly well. I mean, students have told me that they really like the fact that they’re sort of forced for a time not to be distracted by their devices. You carve out little spaces where you can.
People seem kind of shocked when I tell them, but we just kind of lay out the ground rules at the beginning of class and it’s really been no big deal honestly.
How has technology and regular people’s documentation going to affect future historical study?
Well, history, up until the middle part of the 20th century, it used to ignore what we call social history, and it used to be very much about economic history, military history, political history, history of kings and queens and people like that. Part of it is that’s what historians cared about the most, but part of it is also, just, a lack of documentation.
In medieval Europe, very few people were literate and people who were writing just weren’t really writing about common people’s lives. And that changed in the middle part of the 20th century and people got much more interested in social history. That’s a huge part of what we do now. And so, yeah, I think as people are documenting their lives in real time, I think in the future, that’s going to be a pretty rich resource for historians, sure.
What do you think of some people wanting to view history with a kind of predetermined end result they want to impose?
I would say there’s absolutely people on both sides of the political divide, who want my discipline to sort of be a referee in the culture war, right? And some students do come in with an expectation that that’s what this is about. It’s just really not true.
There are people who do come into teaching history sometimes with various political agendas, and that’s really unfortunate because we’re not really here to talk about our lives today. We’re here to find beauty in the past and people who lived 100 years ago, 1000 years ago. And I think it’s a little conceited for us to try to make what was going on then about our modern kind of political bickering today. And so I’m much happier focusing us on what can we learn from people who lived in the past.
Now, clearly, it does sometimes relate, some of the same political debates that took place during the Constitutional Convention are taking place today. We live in an era of all kinds of inequities that have historical roots, right? But I think if you make the discipline the starting place, I think if you make … gosh I hate to sound corny, but the incredible lives that people lived the starting place, it kind of minimizes some of the anger and frustrations that people have today. And we can look back in the past and appreciate it for what it was.
Why study history? Why should people attend or support community colleges?
It’s such a great training that can be applied broadly to a whole bunch of jobs, but it’s not the kind of thing that there’s always a clear path, right? I’m gonna get a job as an historian, right? It just doesn’t really happen.
And so our students get jobs as teachers. We have a lot of students going to law school. It really is just a good kind of training ground broadly to learn how to synthesize a lot of information, to scrutinize sources, instill a sort of healthy skepticism in students. All those are really useful skills.
Community College is a great place to land. Here you can come to a place like this and get an individual experience. There’s just so many opportunities – student government, there’s a place for you; the history co-curricular, where students can explore history outside the classroom and also explore careers.
I just encourage LBCC students to get involved in stuff, whatever that thing would be. Get an instructor you like and say, “Is there more I can be doing outside of class?” We’ve got this great co-curricular program, we’ve got a study abroad program, we have internships. Because ultimately taking ownership of your own education but also your own path is a really great thing and you don’t even have to have a fully formed idea. Just go up and say, “Hey instructor, I just love this subject. I’m not gonna maybe major in it, but are there other things I could be doing” and just see, because we tend to have more opportunities than a lot of students realize.
Right now, I think I’ve got two history majors in one of my classes. So the vast majority of our students are not history majors, and it really makes it fun ’cause we get people from a broad background and so we try to strike a balance with that so that it’s successful to everybody.
Have you found that that’s changed, a general understanding and background that people agree on?
I do think people come out of high school with very different kinds of training in history, some almost zero and some with a lot. And that does make it a challenge because you don’t have the same sort of bedrock stuff. Culturally it’s kind of the same too, like our media is so fractured now. When I was a kid, we had three channels, plus PBS (we didn’t really count that). And as a result, I grew up watching a lot of reruns of sitcoms from like the ‘60s, ‘50s, “Leave It to Beaver” and stuff like that. We all did. So we had these cultural references to understand one or two generations before us, and that’s just gone now.
And when I first started teaching you could reference a movie and almost everybody had seen it or knew about it. Where now it’s just completely different. And some people are just totally enmeshed in video games and that’s their culture or enmeshed in comic books and that’s their culture. … So it’s a lot more difficult now if you’re trying to illustrate a point by making a reference to a modern thing. It’s hard to find a modern thing that we all hold in common.
If you could relive a moment in time, what would be important to you?
We were just joking about this in class ’cause I was the one that didn’t want to get in the time machine. Sorry, we have antibiotics and novocaine and all these great things now. Gosh, I would love to have seen the American West before the arrival of Europeans. I would love to have seen not only the cultures but also the plants and animals. I would love to have seen buffalo in abundance, salmon in abundance. I would love to have seen the original old growth forest of the Northwest. Really, that kind of thing probably would be of greater interest to me than, say, signing the declaration or something like that – but I would love to see that too.
There’s a lot of advantages to being alive today. I feel like I hit the lottery by being born when I was born, where I was born. We got it pretty good.
