It is a chilling fact that the history I grew up with is not taught in school anymore.  New subjects are being taught in place of European History, American History, some ancient history and a little bit about South America.  That summed up the content of the history curricula.  We never had time for or got around to the history of Asia.  In fact, being taught to teach history back at the end of World War II, we never got to teach what happened in the first half of the 20^th Century.  Wars and their outcomes were always popular with teachers. It was assumed since we lived through that time; it need not become fossilized and be added to the format with which we were familiar. The traditional fields of study were so filled with graduates who needed theses and dissertation topics. I thought the History Of Africa might be a fertile subject.  But, Africa was too far away.  I thought the history of ideas was a good place for me; so I studied Utopia in literature and in the communities established on so-called utopian ideology.  The problem here, as I learned, was that there were as many different utopias as there were people who thought them up.

Along with the new technologies where printed books and newspapers could be studied, such services as Google and other search engines can find you answers to questions that teachers asked of students.  In fact, you could go up to a web page where history (non-provenance) was reproduced in "Wikipedia", where the input was added by non-historians.

I confess that I do not know the new curricula that are taught in the classes of history in the public schools, much less what goes on in the colleges and universities.  I had a terrible time in European History. This was my worst subject and poorest grade because of the plethora of kings, wars and their intersection with religion, Reformation and free thought.  I could not get the dates down in proper order.  And then, there was the plethora of names and the order they appeared in.

This confessional was caused by "Great Caesar's Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" which I found at the bottom of page C1 in the Arts section of today's NY Times.  The article by Patricia Cohen gave me much to think about but no clear idea of the courses which have replaced the traditional ones which constitute my understanding the world past and present.  She reports the shrinking importance "not only of diplomatic history but also of traditional specialties like economics, military and constitutional history."

As interests have shifted so has the content of what we used to call History. Few traditional courses are offered and fewer articles are published.  The whole field in which I used to move confidently has become a foreign country with a language I no longer recognize.  I suspect that my degrees are not recognized as legitimate badges of coming of age in the professorial fields that were cultivated in at least Rutgers University at the mid-point of the Twentieth Century.  My models for professors were a bit fossilized themselves and I suspect I have become one of those myself.  Well, as the saying goes: the more things change, the more they remain the same.  Our world has changed many times during my life-time. The children of the 21^st Century will have problems dealing with the content of the new history subjects that are being created in the halls of learning even as we speak.