One good thing about teaching history to college students is that, when I meet people for the first time, it’s easy to explain what I do.  Everyone knows what a history class is.  And most people respond pretty positively to me.  “History?  I love history,” is a frequent comment, which is often followed up by, “I sure didn’t back in school, though…”

From what I can tell, most people didn’t enjoy their history classes back in high school and college.  A big part of this is probably because they were forced to take history classes, along with algebra, and literature, and many other courses.  History is just another class to check off on a long list.

A lot of people also didn’t like history because, to many people (both teachers and students), history is a just list of names and dates to be memorized.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, 1492, 1776, 1865: they’re all things to memorize quickly and then just as quickly forget after the exam is over.

The people who are into history as adults can enjoy it without having to worry about exams, essays, and grades.  They can read biographies or historical novels, they can watch the History Channel or documentaries, they can visit places like Valley Forge or Colonial Williamsburg.  The history they experience isn’t just a bunch of unconnected names and dates; it’s often stories that relate, in some way, to things that are happening today.

Grog to Grits is an example of this kind of history.  This is popular history, which means I’m not writing to a bunch of college people, I’m writing to everyone who is interested in food history in its various forms.

Which brings us back to the question of exactly what food history is.

There are lots of different kinds of historians out there.  There are political historians, who study what happens in Washington, D.C.; there are military historians, who study battles and wars; there are different kinds of racial historians who study history from the point of view of groups like African Americans or Hispanics.

I’m a cultural historian, which means I’m interested in how large trends in society affect people on an everyday basis.

Let me give you an example of this.  In the late 1940s, in the years after World War II, there was a huge housing boom in this country.  Not many houses had been built during the Great Depression in the 1930s since no one had money, and not many were built during the war because materials were rationed.  The postwar houses were meant to be affordable, and to keep costs down they were smaller than prewar houses.

So that’s the large trend: lots of relatively small houses being built.  How small?  In one huge housing development the average square footage was 750 square feet.  The average new American house these days is about three times that.  And this was in the midst of the Baby Boom, so these were families with 2, 3, or 4 kids.

The people who moved into those houses were affected by the size of the houses in a number of ways, but the way I’m interested in has to do with cooking.  With kitchen space, and living space, at a premium, both cooking and eating were pushed outside.

The result? The popularity of barbecuing skyrocketed.  The 1950s was the big time for barbecuing in this country.  Before that, outdoor grilling was one of a number of ways of preparing meats; after that, barbecuing was the way to prepare meats.

That’s what I’m talking about regarding the connection between large cultural trends (like small houses) and how people live their everyday lives (like how outdoor grilling even today is quite popular).  I’m interested in connections in history, not just obscure facts.  While obscure facts can be entertaining, delving into the connections in history can be a lot more illuminating.