MODERATOR'S NOTES

In some ways, putting out a history journal in the past year can have seem a silly enterprise, a foolhardy and shortsighted use of time during this year of living alternately. In our editorial discussions, the students struggled with what kinds of articles should be included during this extraordinary time. For the last several years the History Journal has had a dedicated theme and in the early Fall the pandemic consumed our thoughts as we started a second term learning remotely. Would Covid hold the same position in our consciousness when the journal was published in the Spring? Then the election became like no other US election (despite attempts to compare it to the 1800, 1824 and 1876 elections). Together with the January insurrection at the US Capitol, these political events endanger our very democracy, unsettling Americans and leading observers abroad to wonder at what the US has become. As the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole noted, “The World has loved, hated, and envied the US. Now for the first time, we pity it.”

As the editors proceeded to learn the skills of reviewing, selecting, copyediting, and layout and design they occasionally returned to the question of theme but without resolution. Instead they selected articles based on quality and sought a balance of geography and time period, thinking that perhaps a theme would emerge as a result of the selection and revision process. In late March or early April, it finally did – Staying Intellectually Alive.

It certainly seems in this crisis year that intellectual pursuits outside of medicine or saving our political institutions are almost sinful luxuries. To spend time reading about nineteenth-century missionaries in Hawaii, Irish boy scouts of a century ago might represent an indulgence our society can no longer afford. These periods of upheaval and dislocation are exactly when history matters. Vera Brittan, who interrupted her studies at Oxford to become a volunteer nurse in World War I, saw that after the war, there was really only one subject that mattered. Changing her studies from English to history, Brittan wrote after the war:

It’s my job, now, to find out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person can, from happening again. Perhaps the means of salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised, carefully concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting discovery to be acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women.

It is in this spirit of intellectual engagement with the past and the belief that historical inquiry illuminates our present that we offer this twenty-fifth edition of Sonoma State’s History Journal. We hope that you will enjoy it and that it will lead to interesting discussion as life face-to-face resumes.

Kathleen M. Noonan

Moderator, The History Journal

Professor of History