Though I can’t claim that sort of familial connection to my subject matter, I do now think that I have to confess another kind of familial debt. My grandfather passed away a week ago, and though I wouldn’t have realized it on my own, I think that he played an important role in my formation as a historian. Both in my research and in my teaching, I’m fascinated by the way that people assimilate the new knowledge gained from travel and autopsy to the knowledge they previously had—or thought they had—on the basis of oral and textual tradition. While glossy brochures from study abroad programs routinely promise that the experience of different cultures will “broaden one’s mind/horizons,” I am less certain that travel is ever such a uniformly mind-expanding experience. For tourist sites must disappoint as often as they gratify, and foreign cultures must also offend or provoke as often as they educate. Going abroad is a complicated experience, which answers questions and quiets doubts as often as it raises them.

My grandfather served in World War II, and I remember that of all of the things that we talked about over the years, it was his experience in Northern Italy (in and around Livorno, aka Leghorn) that I remember most vividly. Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow soldiers, my grandfather lived most of his life in small town America—with the one glaring exception of a few months, or even a few years, spent in Europe, Africa, or the Pacific islands. I still remember thinking the first time that I heard him talking about his service how strange it would be to see my grandfather—whom I strained to picture outside of Snyder County, PA, let along across an ocean—sleeping out in the fields of Tuscany. And yet that’s exactly what he was doing as an 18- or 19-year-old. I wouldn’t presume to say what, exactly, the experience meant to him; but suffice it to say that it taught him as much about the superiority of the American way as it did about the charm of espresso. I’m sure that it was mind-expanding to encounter a foreign culture, but it was also a self-ratifying experience that confirmed that the homeland that had sent him there to fight for that foreign culture’s liberty was about as good as it gets. (I daresay that he never changed his mind, which made recent American foreign relations a heated topic!)

I’m not sure about the methodological soundness of it, but I know that every time I read a medieval or early modern travel account, I think of my grandfather in Italy. Historians are always tempted to find rupture and change, to be blinded by the flash of something new or different in their sources. Historical travel accounts are most interesting when they reveal the impact of the New, Different, and Other, right? When we can see Europeans transformed by their encounter with foreign peoples? I’m not so sure. The questions that I ask of my sources have at least as much to do with what struck my travelers as merely… different; perhaps even… disappointing. The marks that such seemingly anticlimactic experiences leave on travelers are deeply significant, but they often go unnoticed. Not unlike my grandfather’s influence on me, actually.

If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.

Indeed, something is wrong, though not in the way that the student means it. While I’m all for rewarding effort, and I try to recognize improvement as well as raw performance in my grading, ultimately grades are meant to account for something more complex than enthusiastic compliance with course expectations. They should reflect a student’s mastery of material; those who have learned both the skills and the content that the instructor attempts to impart should earn higher marks than the students who have not. Learning is not simply about following a recipe, completing tasks, or ticking boxes; it’s about reflection, struggle, false starts, and‚Äîeventually, hopefully‚Äîmastery. Merely “doing” the reading isn’t the same as processing it.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about this article, however, is not its documentation of students’ increasing sense of entitlement or decreasing sympathy with the goals of education. Anyone on the front lines of college teaching must surely have noticed that already. What bothers me more is the fact that faculty seem so happy to go along with it. How else can we explain the fact that A’s and A‚Äì’s make up fully half of Harvard grades? It’s been suggested that the answer may lie in the steadily-increasing quality of our student body. The more harrowing the admissions statistics, the better the quality of student work, one supposes. That may in fact be true‚Äîperhaps our current students are better at completing the kinds of assignments we tend to give them‚Äîbut isn’t it a failure of higher education if we respond to that trend by simply giving all of our students A’s?

In any case, what has caught my eye today is the Spanish government’s decision to extend citizenship to the descendants of refugees who fled the country during the Civil War of 1936‚Äì1939. From the Reuters report:

As many as 500,000 children and grandchildren of Spaniards who fled the country during Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship can now apply for Spanish citizenship, the Justice Ministry said Monday. Citizens who left Spain from 1936, when its three-year civil war began, until as late as December 1955 — and their descendants — are eligible to apply by producing documents showing that they left the country during those years, the ministry said in a statement.

The decision is interesting not least of all for the impact that it will have on (for lack of a better term) ‘amateur’ historical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War. In my many trips to Spain, I’ve come across a striking number of amateur historians and antiquarians determined to discover, reconstruct, and perserve memories of their town or family which the Civil War, and the post-Francoist “pacto de olvido,” have all but erased. In C??rdoba, for example, I met a young seminarian determined to write a history of the leftist campaign to execute priests in and around his village. In the Archivo Hist??rico Nacional in Madrid, I met an elderly man hoping to unearth evidence that a family member had been executed while a political prisoner of the Francoist regime, in the hope of collecting reparations payments from the state. I can only imagine the number of people I will find on my next trip to the archives…

While democratic Spain has become famous for its unwillingness to deal openly with the legacy of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship‚Äîmy favorite author, Javier Mar??as, has written searingly of the silence in his newspaper column and his recent novel Tu rostro ma?±ana‚Äîit’s been my experience that policies like this recent decision to extend citizenship to exiles reflect (and stimulate) a lively humus of amateur history and fragmentary commemoration that may be doing the job of settling accounts with the past that Mar??as and others would rather see conducted at a more public, or professional, level.

This is not to say that I agree or disagree with this, or any other, commemoration policy. Rather, it’s just to observe the resilience of historical memory, and the odd ways that it surfaces, in societies whose official stance toward the past seems to be one of studied indifference.

Click here to read the full article in the New York Times.

• In early March, I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for a conference, organized by Halvor Moxnes, on “Holy Land as Homeland.” While most of the speakers focus on the supposed origins of modern biblical criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’m planning to use my paper—entitled “Nihil sub sole novum? Early Modern Approaches to the Holy Land”—to encourage the group to look further back, to the Renaissance, for important precedents for later scholars’ historical and archaeological approach to biblical antiquity.

• In mid-March, I’ll be at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles. Together with Daniel Stein Kokin and Marion Leathers Kuntz, I’ll be part of a panel on Early Modern Promised Lands. My paper, entitled “Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions,” traces the legend that Spain was settled by Jews from the Babylonian Captivity through its various incarnations in Renaissance historiography.

The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports.

Read the full article here.