Social Science or Humanities? It’s a Conundrum.

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Several weeks ago, this question appeared in my email:

The history department at MSU is part of the College of Social Science with Social Work. Yesterday a colleague said she thought it should be in Humanities. I'm curious what you think.

As it turns out, this is something I've spent some time thinking about over the last 30 years.* History is also part of the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, where I did my graduate work, along with anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology. As someone who worked primarily with sources from literature and the visual arts,** it never felt like a good fit. Today, as a historian-storyteller, I feel more strongly than ever that history belongs with the humanities. My historian friends who use lots of statistical data disagree.

I throw the question out to you, Gentle Readers: History: social science or humanities?

 

*Actually, now that I stop and count, it's been 36 years. Eeep!

**Though I did build a nifty spreadsheet and perform some statistical analysis regarding the number of Orientalist works in exhibits at the Royal Society in London and the Paris Salon over the course of the nineteenth century--a task that consumed far more time than the final results warranted.

Florence Nightingale Does the Math*

Florence NightingaleFlorence Nightingale is best known for her heroic efforts in the Crimean War,** where she threw open windows, scrubbed filthy floors and equally filthy men,*** bullied doctors and officers on the spot, fought with the British Army's military director, and saved lives.

She returned home a heroine. Victorian Britain loved to celebrate a celebrity. Nightingale was the recipient of hundreds of poems extolling the Lady with a Lamp. Opportunists printed her picture on souvenirs of every kind: including pottery figurines, lace mats, prints, and paper bags. If Bobblehead dolls had existed at the time, she'd have been Bobbled for sure.

At first Nightingale tried to keep a low-profile. She even traveled home under the unimaginative pseudonym of Miss Smith. She soon came to realize that she could use her celebrity to effect change. With the help of Queen Victoria, who was one of her biggest fans, she convinced the government to set up a Royal Commission to study the health of the army.

One of the lesser known facts about Nightingale is that she was a STEM girl. As a child she loved organizing data. She catalogued her shell collection with precisely drawn tables and lists. When her parents took her and her sisters on a tour of Europe, she collected population statistics . Later she studied mathematics with a personal tutor--not a normal choice for a young woman at the time. She once claimed that she found the sight of a long column of numbers "perfectly reviving."

Rather than leaving the question of the army's health to the Royal Commission, Nightingale analyzed the army data herself, working with leading statistician William Farr and sanitation expert John Sutherland of the Sanitary Commission. She reached the conclusion that 16,000 of the 18,000 deaths in the Crimean War were the result of preventable diseases.

Nightingale knew that her love for the clarity of numerical tables is not shared by all. She decided to present her data in a revolutionary way: statistical graphics. **** Her "rose diagram", a variation on the modern pie chart, presented her figures in a dramatic and easily understood form.

Nightingale-mortality

She went on to spearhead other reform campaigns, using a combination of statistical analysis and expert advice. She prepared by reading the best information available, collecting her own information if good studies didn't exist, interviewing experts, and testing her recommended changes before releasing her results. The "Lady with the Lamp" gained a new nickname, "the passionate statistician".

Florence Nightingale: founder of modern nursing, social reformer, grandmother of the info-graphic.

*With a hat tip to long-time blog reader Sam Guard, who reminded me of this part of the story.

**Publicized by the indefatigable William Howard Russell

***Or more accurately, caused others to scrub.

**** Farr thought it was a bad idea: "You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading."

From the Archives: Big History and Big Buts

Several years ago, when I was working on a Big Project, I stumbled across the concept of Big History.*

It’s basically the opposite of the academic mantra “not my field.” Proponents of Big History integrate many scholarly disciplines in order to look at human history as a tiny part of the history of the cosmos. One of their favorite ways of illustrating how new we are is to compress the timeline of the universe from 13 billion years to 13 years. In this scenario, homo sapiens would have been around for 53 minutes. The entire recorded history of civilization would have existed for three minutes. “Modern” industrial society has been mucking up the environment for roughly six seconds. In short, we are a blink in the eye of the universe.**

This TED talk by Big History promoter David Christian sums up the basic principles:

[Reminder: if you receive this post by email you may need to go to the History in the Margins website to see the video. Just click the headline or the link.]

It’s fascinating stuff. My introduction to Big History has inspired me to ask slightly different questions than I used to ask. Not just how the salt trade functioned, but why our bodies need salt. Not just when did farming start, but how grain was domesticated. Not just the role of fire in making tools, but the role of fire in making man. But, and for me this is a Big But,*** stories about people are what pulled me into history. Here on the Margins I often focus on the smallest stories. When I think about writing books, I gravitate toward big sweeping themes. But whether the scale of my story is tiny or grand, my subject is people, not great flaming balls in the sky. I’m interested in what happened in that last three minutes, or maybe just a little bit before.

Which means I’m not quite sure what to do with Big History other than admire the intellectual audacity behind it. Any ideas?

*Or more accurately, someone beat me over the head with the idea.

**Or maybe a piece of grit.

***And as my best friend from graduate school will tell you, I love Big Buts. (Sorry, sometimes I can’t resist.)