It may seem odd for a math major to be blogging about history, but I’ll try here to explain myself.
In middle and high school, my favorite extracurricular activities – probably better described by Penn State’s term of “co-curricular activities” – were math competitions and quiz bowl. The math part is obvious, but to most people, quiz bowl is synonymous with trivia, which is one step away from “random trivia” or “useless trivia”. That’s true to some extent, but quiz bowl and its facts have had a surprisingly large influence on me.
It was only by chance that I started playing quiz bowl at all. I joined the team in 7th grade because a friend encouraged me to go, and to my surprise, he decided not to play. Fortunately, lots of people in my grade did play, and we were good. In 8th grade, the A team won the league tournament for the first time in the middle school’s history. By 9th grade, there were enough of us for the high school coach to form an entire quiz bowl homeroom.
Since we were in the same homeroom, we could talk about stories in the news each morning and touch on things we learned in class (which were often prime quiz bowl topics). As we progressed through high school and learned both standard course material and extra facts for quiz bowl, the pool of things to reference in our discussions expanded ever further.
The connections between current events and historical facts or stories were the most interesting – history is the story of how everything came to be the way it is today, so links between historical events and current events highlight how things have changed (or not) in the meantime.
For example, in 1953’s The Crucible, Arthur Miller drew an apt comparison between McCarthy’s prosecution of Communists and the Salem Witch Trials. How many times nowadays do we hear about partisan “witch hunts”? The concept has become a standard political expression, but like many clichés, it began as an insightful and important way of characterizing something.
That’s the type of original connection I’ll try to make with this blog, so bring on the current events!
With some luck, something I write could become a cliché someday.