马君朝

　　Writing well is a fine skill, but is it important? Yes, very! Many companies that came to recruit at Yale, including most of the well-known Wall Street finance and consulting firms, made no secret of their preference for candidates with solid writing skills. Each year these firms hire a large number of new graduates with majors such as history, English, and political science, but no formal finance or business education. Curiously, the undergraduate economics or finance curriculum at elite private universities such as Yale, Harvard and Princeton has a strong theoretical bent and is not immediately applicable to a career in a private firm. Indeed, most elite universities don't even have an undergraduate business program. In the US one of the most influential and lucrative professions is law, a field in which writing skills are indispensable. Not surprisingly, law school is one of the most popular destinations for Yale grads majoring in history.

　　The ability to use words well is highly valued and respected in Western culture. The two most "popular" figures on the Yale campus are probably Richard Brodhead, dean of Yale College, and sinologist Jonathan Spence. Both cast their spell on the Yale community through the excellence of their writing and public speaking. Spence's course on modern Chinese history once drew a first-day crowd of 650. He had to limit enrollment to 400, the capacity of the largest lecture hall at Yale. From my experience, Chinese students with an excellent command of English receive a lot of respect and attention from Americans.

　　So a history education is useful. Yet if the question "Why study history?" had been put to the 204 history majors in my class, chances are that they would have replied, "Because it's fun." And it is!. The study of history is enjoyable on several levels. The lectures are often the highlight of a history course. Boasting one of the finest history departments in the US, Yale has many history professors of superstar status. Often superb story tellers, they turn lecturessintosgrand historical drama. Jonathan Spence's lectures are known for his insightful anecdotes from Chinese history. In the famous course on ancient Greek history taught by Donald Kagan, students would applaud at the end of each lecture to acknowledge Kagan's impassioned eloquence. My personal favorite was Prof. James Heinzen's history of modern Russia: on the grand level, the Russian people's heroic struggle with destiny over the past 200 years is deeply moving.

　　Reading is another great source of enjoyment that I cannot help mentioning. In a typical history course, the professor lectures on historical developments in broad terms, while the reading for a particular week, usually a book on a specific subject, supplements the professor's presentation with vivid details and a more thorough analysis of something touched on in the lectures. Reading is really the blood and flesh of the course. In the class I took on the history of modern Germany, for example, Prof. Henry Turner focuses his lectures exclusively on the socio-political development of Germany since Bismarck. The reading includes the biography of Bismarck by AG Taylor, excerpts from German Marxist Eduard Bernstein's political writing and 19th century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke's lecture notes, Heinrich Mann's novel Man of Straw, excerpts from Hitler's Mein Kampf, Michael Allen's The Nazi Seizure of Power, and many other books. While a few, such as Hitler's Mein Kampf, were torture to read, most were fascinating. I spent many weekends in the library doing my history reading, and a good book to read was an important part of my Saturday "relaxation".

　　History is not only fun for people who study it, but also for the people who research it. When I talked with Prof. Turner about one of his books, he told me that the idea for it arose as he was browsing through the catalogue of some Nazi documents newly released after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the documents were personal letters from Franz von Papen, one of the key figures behind Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. Turner thought that they might reveal something about the power struggle immediately before Hitler's rise to power, so he asked a colleague doing research in Moscow to photocopy some of the letters. These, as it turned out, told a story about Hitler's ascent to power quite different from what most people had believed. Based on these and other documents, Turner wrote a book that brought our understanding of this period closer to historical reality. Almost ten years after its publication, the aged professor still got very excited over his book: "It was detective work. I had a lot of fun working on it."

　　No essay or book fully explains why people study history. The answer given by Donald Kagan, Yale's celebrated professor of ancient Greek history, captures the essence of the problem: "You only know why people should study history after you have studied history.