Why I Studied History — And What I Plan To Do With It
By Brooke Baxter
While walking with my family in Valley Forge Park, my dad commented that the eighteenth-century men who encamped there could not have been so different than us. A remarkable encounter with a George Washington reenactor who, despite my wholehearted best efforts, refused to break character seemingly legitimized my father’s statement a few months later. Although I did not recognize it in my fifth-grade brain, from then on, I started wondering about the personalities, motivations, fears, and longings of people in the past. I especially wondered about people whose personalities, motivations, fears, and longings have impacted my own life. Growing up in Philadelphia enabled me to connect books, particularly ones about revolutionary America, to the parks, buildings, paintings, and even my church’s graveyard that I encountered frequently. This exercise of connecting words on a page to physical places and things forced me to ask questions and seek answers that sparked my love of history. I realized that linking books with the historical places and objects that I experienced first-hand — what I later learned were called secondary and primary sources respectively — could breathe life into these figures from the past.
Two fantastic high school history teachers of mine taught a formal methodology of historical inquiry that mapped onto my childhood experiences with history. Mrs. Aldridge taught AP European History with a knack for introducing an array of secondary and primary sources that were diverse in perspective and form. Mr. Bryant’s “writing labs,” in which he assigned a packet of primary sources and prompted the class to write essays about them, exposed me to the investigative side of studying history, which is the facet of the discipline that I still enjoy most.
I kept an open mind about what I wanted to study upon entering Princeton. I took courses in politics, English, psychology, economics, and environmental science. The most intellectually stimulating course that I took in my first year was Approaches to American History with Professor Lozano. It exposed me to the beauty of the Pequod-published textbook. I reveled at the opportunity to piece together historical narratives using primary sources and became passionate about deriving meaning from seemingly disparate texts, pictures, graphs, and maps. Doing so showed me that effective pieces of historical writing allow the logical flow of primary sources to dictate arguments and narratives, a valuable lesson for the rest of my academic career.
The class that confirmed my decision to study history at Princeton was Professor Pravilova’s seminar on the History of Property. Professor Pravilova exposed our class to academic writing on ownership in its various manifestations: from natural resources, to money, to enslaved people, to brides. We read and discussed John Locke. We read and discussed Karl Marx. We analyzed the societies that their tracts impacted. Pravilova introduced me to an entire sphere of work that: 1) acknowledges the power of the pursuit of value and ownership as a motivator for people throughout history and 2) investigates what this pursuit has motivated people to do, how so, and for what reasons. In this class, I realized that I could combine my interests in politics, law, commerce, economics, and finance with my passion for history, which deeply excited me. As if focusing my course of study was not consequential enough, this class also helped me craft the most general form of the question that would guide my academic work from then on: who owns what, why, and what does this demonstrate about a particular society at a point in time?
My junior papers investigated two major international conflicts that transformed both society and its relationship with property — the American Revolution and World War II — by focusing on two colorful, articulate, genius men who acted as protagonists in each of them: Benjamin Franklin and John Maynard Keynes. Both Franklin and Keynes changed the economies of their respective societies by looking beyond economics and attempting to help other people while still generating value. Benjamin Franklin created a Philadelphia silk venture that gave work to the city’s poor and promoted colonial development even when it necessitated flouting British imperial restrictions. John Maynard Keynes derived a new method of war financing — through a system of compulsory savings — with the aim of enabling the greatest number of people to enjoy the “good life,” which he believed began with overcoming economic subsistence.
Sensing that I had only started to uncover the importance of Franklin’s silk venture, I built upon my first junior paper for my senior thesis. In this process, I learned what a joy it can be to revisit a topic with a previous foundation of knowledge that enables a deeper investigation through new discoveries and rediscoveries. By examining not only Franklin and colonial radicals but also British Whigs and authoritarian reformers, I learned that when analyzing the antipathy of one party, one should also investigate the counterparty to get a fuller view on their dispute. Oftentimes, though not always, aggressors have nuanced reasons for their actions, and it is worth knowing what those reasons were. The practice of seeking a wholistic view on conflict has benefitted my studies (and my personal life) immensely. Additionally, reexamining this topic with knowledge gained from Professor Kruse and Professor Zelizer’s modern American history classes, Professor Bell and Professor Blaakman’s class on democratic revolutions, and the process of writing the Keynes paper enabled me to identify what I believe to be one fundamental tension of the American economic system, which has persisted throughout its history: the strain between individual economic liberty and that of the nation.
In my career, I want to help mitigate the above tension by generating value for society, via a business venture like Franklin, policy intervention like Keynes, or perhaps both. Like those men that I studied, I want to create a product or technology that helps people protect their property — in its myriad forms — and thus betters their lives and the lives of those around them. And in today’s world, with the rise of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Web3, I see immense opportunity to do so, which excites me. Without my learning, guidance, and challenges in the History department, I would not have been able to articulate this fundamental career goal. And because of my studies in history, I will pursue this objective with sharp analytical skills, an understanding of past successes, an appreciation of the power of unintended consequences, a comprehensive way to evaluate conflict, and practice delving into the unknown. I am grateful that I will launch into the professional world with this intellectual foundation, which has been a labor of love to build.
