Not sure if this fits, but what are the benefits of teaching history to young children? It's not like the information is applicable for them in the future (at least in the way that math/science/writing skills are). So why is history such an early part of our learning?

I hope this doesn't come off negatively; I love learning about history and think it's important to know and keep learning, I just want to know why we start in elementary school.

I'm currently reading through an excellent book called With Zeal and With Bayonets Only, which offered a rather thorough reimagining of how the British army operated during the American Revolution. For years, historians of the British Army having been arguing against the stereotype of old-fashioned redcoats being outmaneuvered and outshot by Americans hiding behind rocks and trees. This book goes so far as to argue (convincingly) the reverse: that the British army enjoyed tactical and organizational flexibility far ahead of its time, with junior officers sometimes leading platoons or companies independently of the main line of battle. It does a better job bringing the reader down into the ranks than other book that I've read.

I've been thinking a lot about ways of writing history, both in my own work and in the recent works that I've read. While I'd love to have a broader conversation about the (re-)turn to the "material", I'm thinking specifically of some moves that have been made in recent work. One is the inclusion of infrastructure as a narrative centering device that links some of the recent trends in historiography such as environment, material production, cultural milieux, etc. Another, related, is the use of "scaling" or "zooming" as a way of moving the narrative "lens" through richly populated historical worlds (in which, unlike micro history, the "lens" can pan out to encompass wider historical phenomena). A third is the criticism of "agency" as a device which posits humans-vs-humans, instead of against the structuration of larger world-historical processes such as capitalism (I'll bracket a mention of the enduring subfield of the history of capitalism, which has shifted toward financial instruments in the last decade, concurrent with recent global financial crises).

Does this make sense? Let me give an example. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013) is a series of evocative portraits of the the global cotton market and its material origins on the Mississippi River in the Antebellum period. Johnson argues that it is crucial to look not at the “agency” of slaves but at their experience and consciousness as a whole, and how the world is structured around them; he thus focuses on material processes (production, exchange, consumption) on micro and macro scales and cognitive experience (how the world was structured for masters, slaves, and everyone in between), and insists the material and cognitive are interlinked. In this way, race can be seen in Johnson’s work as a material and cognitive reality that is understood by blacks and whites alike; Johnson brings out historical racial consciousness by exploring, for instance, the ways that certain sounds (dogs barking, horses hooves clopping) or the bounded spaces of the plantation had different meanings for blacks and whites, while also tracing out the bales of slave-picked cotton that entered global markets and fostered increase demand for such commodities. There's more to the book, and I'd love to hear from people who've read it, but I'll stop the example there. I put it forward as an example of a work that uses "scaling," that depicts "infrastructure", and which resists the "agency" thesis. Johnson only acknowledges the last point directly, the rest is embedded in the narrative. Anyone read any works that operate along similar lines?

(To make a connection to more widely-read work -- "Scaling" has been aptly shown by work by Sven Beckert ("World Wide Web of Cotton Production"), who shows the effects of the Civil War on world cotton consumption and production markets. Another recent work by Richard White, Railroaded, deploys the element of scaling quite well, though his former work on the Columbia River does too. And its worth mentioning the classic Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon.)

TL;DR:

Does the "scaling" metaphor work for people? Do they see it in different subfields than 19th century US history?

Is infrastructure an important component that allows these to operate? How are historians addressing issues of "infrastructure" and "environment", in your experience?

Is "agency" still an analytical category used in your fields? When is it most useful? Less useful?

I'll put up another post about this tomorrow in the Friday thread, but interested parties should know that Cambridge's History faculty is looking to hire a new lecturer in Modern British History. It explicitly notes that early-career scholars are encouraged to apply, provided they've got a good record of scholarship on the build, so I can envision this being an attractive possibility for a number of people here.

The submission period closes April 15th.