Professor Mahoney - as we called him when we first met him - was still finishing up his doctorate so he was still close enough to being a student that he seemed to identify with us just a little better than the other professors. Most of the other history professors were in the latter stages of their careers, which made Mahoney a breath of fresh air. His classes were FUN.
History had pretty much been a part of my life. I joke that we've probably seen every fort on the east coast, but I don't really remember going to the beach until I was 14 (I don't count the trip that happened when I'd just turned 4 because it's a little hazy). I'd dressed up in 18th century costumes and traveled to rendezvous since we celebrated the bicentennial. Daddy is a huge American history buff we'd often hear stories of how our neck of the woods was settled. "It was down on the other side of the Cheat River, when we came up on this meetin' in the middle of the night...." History was everywhere. Taking history classes was inevitable.
The thing that Dr. Mahoney taught me, the thing that brought randomness into order, was the concept of social history. Now, there's a high falootin definition of the theory of social history, but to break it down into layman's terms, social history takes into account the way people lived. It's not just a series of dates and the study of wars. Social history values the entire picture of life as our society evolves.
Social history doesn't just mark the industrial revolution. Social history looks at the way people lived before the machines, the threat the machines brought to their way of life, the emotional reasons the Luddites rose up, the art and architecture that resulted, the population movements that ensued. It looks at the entire picture. And suddenly Mama talking about the lines of furniture or the designs in dresses changing from the 18th to the 19th centuries fit into Daddy's talks of battles and freedom. And every antique began to tell a story.
Even though I wasn't a history major, those classes opened my eyes. Instead of seeing a corset cover, I can tell you the class of person from the fabric and cut. Instead of seeing stitching on a sampler, I see the precursor to home schooling. Instead of seeing a wooden bowl, I see how that bowl fit into a family's life. I identify antiques by thinking about how we developed as a society. I probably couldn't tell you the important battles of the civil war or dates of international treaties, but I probably could tell you how people lived, what they wore, the kind of music they played and how they fed their children in a particular period of time. History is relevant to me in a way it wasn't before I took those classes.
Dr. Mahoney is still at my college teaching history - and I'm pretty sure he's still sharing obscure Irish and Czech punk music with students like me (I doubt I'd ever heard 3 Mustafas 3 without him). I don't know if what he's teaching as revolutionary to them as it was to me. I do know, however, that I'm very thankful he chose a little college town in WV to ply his trade.
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