THE CORE CURRJCULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
405
Both ex-Nazis and ex-Communists had been utopians of the sort who
believed that the revolutionary ends they sought justified any means they used
to seek them and to realize them. First the Nazis and then the Communists
suffered the failure and collapse of their dreams, and with them the end of
history as they could define it and interpret it, which was an heroic struggle
for the achievement of their utopias. Mter that struggle was defeated or aban–
doned, written history for them became nothing more than the ideological
defense or expression of the prevailing cultural system, written by its acade–
mic servants, who were grubbing away endlessly in archives for what they
called "facts;' devoid of any theoretical approach or ennobling purpose.
And so we come to the "end of history," when history reaches a "van–
ishing point" and we live in the era of "postmodernism" or "posthistory."
It
is tempting to speculate what European theorists of such conflicting
schools as Communists and Nazis have in common that might bring their
thinking together in opposi tion to tradi tional narrative his tory, the oldes t
of humanities disciplines. One speculation, and it is only that, is that it is
possibly something in their own pasts, into which they would not welcome
scrupulous historical investigation. But that of course is a speculation not
susceptible to historic proof.
Few historians in the American academy pretended to keep up with
the outpourings of the postmodernists or their successors, even with the
parts bearing directly upon their own discipline. For the most part they
went about the traditional work of research, with some internal contro–
versy about methodology perhaps, but with little or no sense of threat or
menace by the theorists and postmodernists. Nevertheless the influence,
theories, and attitudes of European origins did come to be felt in various
ways by history and its place in the academy, here and some places abroad.
The usual agents of the transmission, however, were not historians but the
molders and shapers of educational fashions who persuaded administrators
of what, for the time being, is correct in the way of a curriculum.
Currently in vogue is relativism about truth and knowledge, and out of
vogue are traditions and rules of academic disciplines.
One effect upon history is the disfavor that has fallen upon courses
defined chronologically and geographically with boundaries-from, to,
and where. More in vogue are courses identified as "studies." Thus the
proliferation of offerings such as "peace studies," "race studies," "black
studies," "gender studies," "media studies," "shopping mart studies," with
emphasis on the present and its concerns and problems. Studies of great
popularity may gain status of a department even, or they may be placed in
existing departments and become colonizers of such departments. The col–
onization of old history departments by such invading "studies" is in many
cases transforming the traditional curriculum.
