Sunday, Oct. 13, 2002
sunday, october 13 - if you've never heard of Steven Ambrose, you really don't know shit about history. And you should be ashamed of yourself. okay, only if you give a shit about history.

I've never succeeded well in a classroom in large part because the classrooms i've sat in for most of my life were never intended to teach me what I wanted to learn. American classrooms don't teach a mind how to think. They're designed for indoctrination. They teach what to think. (But that's an entirely different discussion.)

When I was in high school, I wanted to study twentieth century history. But unless you were a super smarty-pants, twentieth century history was limited to the Vietnam War. (Not even the politics of the war, just the war itself. Hollywood style.) In my first year at Walla Walla Community College I learned more about twentieth century history from Dr. Webster than I had in twelve years of school. Still, he was a lecturer and his textbooks were of the standard sort: all science, no philosophy. But he kept hope alive that history was indeed as interesting as great literature. I just had to find it.

A year or two later I heard my dad raving about a new book on the Lewis & Clark expedition. My dad, a better writer and storyteller than most people I know, doesn't rave much. In one of my episodes of intellectual posturing I pulled the book off of my mom's shelf. Over that summer I couldn't put it down. Steven Ambrose was a little-known history professor when he hit the best-selling big-time with plain, yet wonderfully descriptive and emotional stories about the subjective experiences of history. I knew so little history before I read his book, I thought Lewis & Clark were a couple of wild western yahoos out roaming the Louisiana Purchase by themselves. Ambrose's writing brought an informed and comprehensive sense of history to common culture in common language. He introduced the human experience to the academic discussion of history. In "Undaunted Courage" I read about an incredible adventure, the likes of which no fictional writer, alive or dead, could even dream of; one that lit a bulb over so much of my community's own historical identity. Sans politics, sans ideology, he showed me how it is done.

Ambrose was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in April. He died this morning.

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