The Difference Between Studying History and Knowing Historical Trivia

I was in high school in the early 1980s. History was an afterthought even then. My history teacher was mainly the soccer coach. I am sure he had a degree in something, but I am not sure it was history. That has always seemed to be the running theme: the history teacher didn’t need to know history. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t care. The problem was that the school handed the subject to whoever had an open period, and that decision says everything about what they thought the subject was worth.

We got the American Revolution (dates and events), the Civil War (dates, events, and mostly slavery), and some of the Industrial Revolution (dates and facts again). All of my children went through basically the same thing. It was not a history education. It was “remember these facts for the test.”

Besides being bored, the only real result of my high school history education is this. If I had paid attention beyond making sure I could pass, it still would only have prepared me to be very good at the history questions in Trivial Pursuit.

I am about to start a master’s degree in American history, which is what got me thinking about all this. Before diving in with my own opinion, I figured I should do a little research first.

Trivia is not the enemy

Treating history as trivia isn’t the problem, exactly. You are still gathering facts, correct or incorrect. There is just no argument attached to them. They are taken as they are handed to you.

Studying history takes those same facts and asks what evidence stands behind them, what other people have made of them, and what interpretation the sources will actually support. Context, citation, historiography, all of it.

So the trivial facts are not the enemy. They are the material. The problem is that most of us were handed the material and told it was the finished building. We were left standing at a construction site with all the tools and lumber and no instruction on how to build anything.

That isn’t just my impression. When Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer surveyed a national sample of Americans for the American Historical Association in 2020, about two-thirds defined history as the facts of the past, meaning names, dates, and events. Only 17 percent defined it as an explanation of the past. When Burkholder put the same question to a room of working historians at an AHA session in January 2021, the great majority chose explanation, and nobody chose facts.¹

Same word. Two entirely different things behind it.

Take Bleeding Kansas

If it gets taught in school at all, it comes out as a list. Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854. Popular sovereignty. Settlers pour in from both factions. Lawrence sacked in 1856. John Brown kills five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie. Charles Sumner caned on the Senate floor. Kansas enters as a free state in January 1861. Fuse lit for the Civil War.

Those are the testable items. Here is what nobody tells you.

How many people actually died? For more than a century the number was around two hundred, which traces back to a single account published in 1857 and got repeated mostly because there wasn’t anything better. In 1995 Dale Watts went through the records and counted the political killings in Kansas Territory one by one. He found roughly fifty-six.² Nothing new turned up. Somebody counted.

Who was killing whom? Watts found the two sides killed each other in close to equal numbers, about thirty proslavery victims against twenty-four antislavery ones. The familiar picture of helpless Free-Staters being run down by Border Ruffians doesn’t survive the count. Watts is blunt about why the picture lasted. The antislavery side won, and the winners wrote the books.

What were they actually fighting about? Paul Wallace Gates argued in the 1950s that much of the violence was about land claims, speculation, and railroad routes, with slavery layered over the top. James Rawley argued in 1969 that racial hostility among free-state settlers was central rather than incidental. Nicole Etcheson makes a related case in Bleeding Kansas (2004), showing how both sides claimed to be defending white men’s liberty and self-government, which helps explain how free-state Kansans could oppose the expansion of slavery and vote to keep free Black people out of the territory at the same time. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s Bleeding Borders (2009) puts Black people, women, and the displaced Native nations whose land this actually was back into a story usually told as a fight between two groups of white men.

None of the dates changed. Every item on that list is still true. What changed is the death toll, who the dead were, what the fight was about, and who was even in it.

The trivia version isn’t wrong. It just isn’t history. It’s the residue history leaves behind after the arguing is over and everyone has forgotten there was an argument.

What a document looks like when you actually work it

Here is the same move with a different kind of source. In August 1862, Lincoln wrote a public letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune:

If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.

Read as trivia, that settles something. Lincoln didn’t care about slavery. Quote it, memorize it, move on.

Read as evidence, it opens a problem instead of closing one. Lincoln had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and read it to his cabinet the previous month. He was sitting on it, waiting for a battlefield win so it wouldn’t look like desperation. So the letter is a politician preparing the public for something he had already decided to do. That doesn’t tell you what Lincoln believed. It tells you what he judged the country was ready to hear, which is a different question and a more interesting one.

The facts of the letter and the history of the letter are not the same object.

This isn’t just my complaint

The conditions that produce this kind of instruction are well documented, and the American Historical Association’s 2024 report American Lesson Plan names them directly:

If there is any wholly inaccurate message being sent by our schools to millions of students and their families, it is that history is not important enough to command time, attention, and public resources.³

That lines up with what I saw: instruction stripped down to bare facts, platitudes, and foregone conclusions instead of anything you could call knowledge.

Look at where it ends up. In 1970-71, American colleges awarded 44,663 bachelor’s degrees in history, out of 839,730 total. That’s better than one degree in twenty. By 2020-21 it was 22,919 out of 2,066,463. Roughly one in ninety.⁴

And the experience is not generational. About 76 percent of Americans surveyed described their high school history classes as names, dates, and facts rather than asking questions about the past, and that figure barely moves across age groups. Mine and my kids’ are the same experience, four decades apart. More telling, 52 percent could not remember their high school history courses well enough to describe them at all, which is about what you would expect from a pile of facts with no question attached to hold them together.

So what does it cost

The obvious answer is that it makes the subject boring. That’s the smaller problem.

Among people who defined history as facts, only 17 percent said they were greatly interested in the histories of foreign peoples and places. Among people who defined it as explanation, that number doubled to 34 percent. Same pattern for the history of people unlike themselves, 17 percent against 32. Same again for events more than five hundred years ago, 19 percent against 25.⁵

Teaching history as a collection of facts quietly teaches something else along with it: that most of the past isn’t worth your attention unless it can be shrunk down to something you might be tested on.

And the substitute holds up well enough that nobody notices they’ve been handed one. It gets you through the tests. It makes you decent company during a documentary. It feels like knowledge. That is exactly why it survives.

So I’m starting this degree with a fairly specific question in front of me. I already know when Kansas entered the Union. What I want to learn is what to do with that.