Daniel L. Smail on Deep History, Lateral Learning, and Bike Lanes
Daniel L. Smail is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: You’ve done cool interdisciplinary work bringing history and biology together, largely through the nexus of evolution. What do these two fields have to learn from each other?
DLS: One side of biology is paleontology, which is one aspect of the way people think about evolution. I’ve done a fair amount of reading in paleontology — some general things, more pop science, and some more careful, detailed research articles. The thing that really strikes me is how there are so many features of paleontology that are directly commensurable to trends in history. They just use different vocabularies.
FM: You’ve argued that the brain can be a helpful tool to use to shed light on history, and on deep history particularly. Can you explain how biology can then be a tool to help expand the scope of ways that history can be studied?
DLS: An example that I’ve been really interested in over the years is chronic stress. All people are capable of feeling chronic stress, and this is true for animals as well. That’s universal, but it can lead — this is an insight by the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky — to situations where chronic stress can turn people dispirited and passive. It can become an instrument of power to manipulate structures in such a way that you get a dispirited population that suffers from chronic stress. So it becomes something where power can intersect with the brain and human society. We just can’t leave the brain and biology out of the way in which we think about the past.
FM: Switching gears slightly, how would you define “deep history” as a field?
DLS: In the Euro-American world, for a long time, they thought that human history was coterminous to the history of the Earth, and they thought that both of those were about 6,000 years. Then we had this massive time revolution in the middle of the 19th century, associated with Darwin, associated with trends in archeology and trends in geology. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out of history. Everyone, within the space of a few decades, realized that the history of the Earth and the history of humanity was much, much longer than had previously been thought. What happened is that, although people began to understand by 1900 or 1930 that humans had a past that was much deeper than the part accorded to history, they didn’t stretch the concept of history to include that deeper past.
“Deep history” is the idea that whenever we think about humans, we have to think about the whole stretch, and that means thinking about different methodologies.
FM: How did you get into that as a field of study?
DLS: My father was a history professor, he taught modern 20th century Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin. He was a really interesting and creative guy, and at some point in the 1970s he started teaching a course that he called “The Natural History of Man,” and it essentially corresponded exactly to what I call deep history now.
He came down with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 1990, 1991, and by the time I had gotten a job at my first university, he wasn’t there anymore. He had fallen so deeply into dementia. I think it was 1998 or ’99 when I thought, well, I can teach this, because I was curious about it too.
FM: You teach two different GenEds: “Deep History” and “Harvard Gets Medieval.” What do you like about teaching GenEds specifically, as opposed to a smaller course in the History department?
DLS: I’m a very non-traditional historian. History doesn’t own the past. That’s the whole point about deep history. Lots and lots of people do the past. Economists study the past, sociologists study the past, geneticists study the past. There’s very few people who aren't interested in the past on this campus. It’s just in everything that we do. One of the things I really love about GenEd classes is that I get a whole diversity of people in the classroom. I'll get historians, people in government, and the occasional economist. I’d love to get more WGS students in the class, because I do a lot of WGS stuff, especially in “Deep History.” I also get lots of people in math and natural sciences.
It’s really fun.
FM: I heard from a friend who took “Deep History” that there are fun pedagogical techniques in the course, like you can “phone a friend” during assessments and get graded based on their answer. What’s compelling to you about that sort of activity?
DLS: The phone-a-friend thing was a method that I picked up from a colleague in the business school. He’d written an article about this technique that he had for quizzes. His proposal was that you have a quiz that might have ten really hard questions. For one of them, rather than giving your own answer, you can choose any member of the class and say, “I’m going to accept that person's answer instead of my own.” The point of it is hidden. It’s meant to promote lateral learning. Normally, when students think, “I won’t get a chance to speak. Why should I bother listening to this person over here, what they’re blathering on about?” But when it turns out that you might want to use that person's answer on the quiz, you listen carefully
It’s actually not about the quiz at all. It’s all about developing interest in what other students are saying and listening to them.
FM: The “Harvard Gets Medieval” course that you teach is about objects, specifically the historical objects that are in Harvard’s vast collections. Have you or your students in the process of this course found things that really surprise you that Harvard was holding them?
DLS: One of the one of my favorite stories about unexpected stuff was actually in the “Deep History” class, not the “Harvard Gets Medieval” class. There was a student who got fascinated by a token supposedly given to a Roman legionnaire after 20 years of service that was in the Peabody. He was super fascinated, did an object biography of this token, and did a lot of studies of Roman soldiers and Centurions and the rewards they received for service. He sent us an email halfway through the semester — we’d recommended that he go and talk to a colleague in the Classics Department, just to get a sense about what Classicists would say about it. Our colleague told him, “It’s a 19th century forgery.” So he’d grown in utter despair about this. Both Matt and I said, “That’s fascinating. Write about 19th century forgeries of ancient objects, because that’s a wonderful topic.”
FM: How do we look at history differently when we study it through the lens of objects as opposed to texts?
DLS: One of the things that I particularly like about objects is, if you think about text, and especially if you think about older texts, we have a very limited range of texts. In the 20th century you can find documents and texts on anything you want to find out about. But as we go further into the past, the range of things, insights that you get into the human mind, get smaller and smaller, because not as much survives. Plus, there’s different styles of literacy and writing. But the objects are continuous. You can pick up an object and see things that you cannot see in texts.
FM: A lot of your research focuses on the Mediterranean region and Europe. What draws you to that part of the world?
DLS: I went to graduate school — I had French, I had a little Latin — and I was thinking that I was going to be a French historian. And I am a French historian, to some extent.
I mentioned that I have somewhat unusual tastes for a historian. I don’t like to work at the center of historical or even academic inquiry. I like to work in the edges. If you think of academic space as being like a galaxy where there's great gravitational wells that pull in lots of scholarship, that's where amazing scholarship is done. There’s also interstellar space, where there’s fewer people, but they’re working in this interstellar space between these gravitational centers. I’m an interstellar space person. For me, going to the Mediterranean was getting away from the center of gravity of French scholarship. I wanted to get into out-of-the-way, obscure subjects that no one, at least in this country, knew anything about.
The weather is lovely too.
FM: Did you always want to be a professor?
DLS: No, I didn’t. When I graduated from undergraduate, I moved to Boston with my wife fully intending to go into a career in publishing. I worked for a publishing company in downtown Boston for two years before applying to graduate school. It wasn’t even a gap year; I had no intention of going to grad school.
FM: We’re living in turbulent political times right now. I’m curious about how the study of history impacts your interpretation of the events around us. Does it compel you to activism, or does it offer some zoomed-out perspective?
DLS: The latter. It’s not that I don’t get involved in activism, but when you take a long, long view, shit happens constantly, and things come out the other end. We’re not always happy with the way that things come out the other end, but the one thing about the long term perspective is that it lowers the blood pressure. I have a number of colleagues that I admire and respect who work primarily on the 20th century, and I can imagine them saying that, “Well, the problem then is it leads to a kind of moral cowardice, because everything's going to be fine.” I’m acutely sensitive to that issue. For me, the crisis is the environment and the climate. That's where the shit is going to hit the fan.
FM: I see you have your bike here, and you’re an avid biker, even in the snowy weather outside. Bike lanes are a hot topic in local Cambridge politics right now. Do you have any opinions about what should be done about the biking infrastructure in Cambridge?
DLS: I’ve been biking ever since I started here in 2006 on the Minuteman Commuter Bikeway. I live in Lexington, so it’s a ten mile commute. It’s a long, long trip. In the Covid years, I shifted to going in winter as well. I do it partly for health reasons, and partly because it keeps me off the road, going back to climate concerns. I try to do what I can to reduce emissions. Most of my commutes down on the Minuteman Bikeway, where there’s no bike lane. It’s only on Garden Street where I hit where the new bike lanes have popped up.
The real problem is that we’re trying to retrofit a transportation system that wasn’t designed for bicycles to have more and more bicycles. Places like the Netherlands, where they really invested in it, wholly separate streets and things like that, that’s the way to go. I’m in favor, but I sure wish we would make the investment to do it properly, rather than have bike lanes tucked behind cars.
FM: Are you reading any interesting books right now?
DLS: I recently finished Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Demon Copperhead.” It’s kind of a fan-fiction of “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens, but told in Appalachia in the 21st century. So it takes the story of “David Copperfield,” but it’s also a rebuttal to JD Vance in his depiction of Appalachia.
FM: If you were a superhero, what would your superpower be?
DLS: When you read thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff from the 14th and 15th centuries, you acquire forms of what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge. You acquire an intimate understanding of patterns and shapes and forms in massive amounts of material. But you can’t really say how you know it. You just know it.
The super power would be to be able to upload all of the things that I’m interested in, because there’s millions, maybe tens of millions, of pages of documentation from the period that I can study, and I only have time to read tens of thousands. If I could encompass all of that somehow, that would be so cool.
FM: Is there an exciting project you’re working on right now?
DLS: I just finished a book. I’m really excited about this. When I was researching in the archives in Marseilles in 1998, I came across this boring case where a woman’s husband came to court and said, “This guy owes her six florins for a debt that he hadn’t paid.” At that point, I’d read hundreds of similar cases.
Ten days later, the man who was accused of not paying his debt showed up in court. “Not only do I not owe this debt to this woman, but she is my slave, because I never manumitted her.” I read this case, and I said, “What is going on?” At the time, I never read anything about slavery in the 14th century.
I found another case related to this. It was a second stage of this same dispute between this formerly enslaved woman and her enslaver. For ten years, I had no idea what to do with it, because it was not something I knew how to compute. Eventually I started working on it, mostly with graduate students, and essentially put together a life history. This woman is a formerly enslaved North African woman from Tunisia, possibly Morocco, who was enslaved first to a guy called the Admiral of Sicily, who was active in the region of Sicily and Naples. She was captured by a Marseille privateer and brought back to Marseille as a slave, and then she clawed her way to freedom, and it was an extraordinary story. She sued her former master for a debt, sparking the longest continuous running case in the archives of Marseille. It’s a micro-history. I just sent it off to the press three weeks ago.
— Magazine Editor-at-Large Ellie S. Klibaner-Schiff can be reached at ellie.klibaner-schiff@thecrimson.com. Follow her at @ellieklibschiff.