Social History: Fill & Download for Free

OK. I’m not going to tell my own. I just can’t. But, I will tell one of my colleagues’ stories that he tells on himself all the time.This young male patient was in the ER for an STD (sexually transmitted disease) check and he is lying in the ER bed when the ER doctor is interviewing him in front of his female companion who is sitting in the corner. In the course of the interview my friend is getting a social history where you ask about their habits and so forth. At one point he asks what the young man does for a living. He says “I’m an oversize escort.” My ER doctor colleague is puzzled by this and asks him, “You mean, you date big women?” The patient just looks at him with his dumbfounded expression on his face while this sinks in. He then says in a shocked tone “no … no, I drive a truck in front of trailers being pulled down the interstate to tell other drivers that we are coming.”Apparently, the guy’s girlfriend fell out of her chair laughing.

Diplomatic/geopolitical history.It doesn’t seem all that weird on Quora, but it’s weird for several reasons:None of my physician colleagues care one bit about this stuff.Most people make a face when I share that this is one of my hobbies. It’s almost as though I’d told them that I’d signed up for an extra course of homework to do in my free time.It’s fallen out of fashion among academic historians. Social history is more en vogue. It’s possible to specialize in American Civil War history without learning about a single battle.The same goes for politics and healthcare policy. I spend much too much time on that stuff. I would probably be doing a lot better on my standardized exams if I spent a bit less time on history and politics…

This is an interesting question because it really shows how poorly we teach American social history, even to teachers.A big reason black Americans adopted the “African-American” label is because the majority of them do not know what their country of origin is because their ancestors were brought here as enslaved people. That Africa was not at the time divided so neatly into “countries” as Europe is a smaller factor. But it was a matter of recognizing that they do not — cannot — know where their ancestors lived with much more specificity than “Africa”.Most Americans of (primarily) European ancestry want to identify with their ancestral country(ies) of origin; that’s why we have Hibernian Halls, Knights of Columbus, Polish-American community centers and other organizations devoted to people from specific countries in Europe (not to mention the mountains of “Kiss me I’m Irish/Polish/Italian/etc. merchandise).I can trace my ancestry back and know which Scottish clan a large part of my ancestors came from. The average black American simply can’t do that.