In the summer of 1813, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson reflecting on lives lived through consequential times. His observation, that they had passed their lives in serious times, resonates across the centuries. History students today face their own serious times, and the question of why history matters has never felt more urgent or more contested. In the United States, history majors are declining, history departments are shrinking, and critics openly wonder whether the discipline still holds value in college curricula. My recent article in the History Education Research Journal, titled 'My Friend! you and I have passed our Lives, in Serious Times,' takes that question seriously by asking students themselves.

The study draws on 103 undergraduate essays from a public state college in the south-eastern United States. Students in five sections of US History until 1877 were asked to write a reflective essay addressing one central prompt: Why study history? Four guiding questions shaped their responses: How does history help us in our everyday lives? How does it help us understand ourselves and the world? What purpose does it serve in the college curriculum? And how does it prepare us to be active citizens? Data analysis was guided by the McNeill–Stearns framework, a lens I developed in earlier work that draws on two landmark defences of history by William McNeill (1985) and Peter Stearns (1998), both written for the American Historical Association. Together, these two historians articulated complementary rationales for why history matters, and the framework synthesizes their perspectives into a practical tool for analysing student attitudes and beliefs about the discipline.

Three primary themes emerged. The first and most significant I have called prudential uses of history, a concept borrowed from Arthur Chapman and colleagues. Students, overwhelmingly and often movingly, articulated history as a practical tool: for preparing for an uncertain future, for avoiding the repetition of past mistakes, for drawing analogies that illuminate the present. More than 70 percent of essays referenced the theme of repeating history. One student described history as 'an insurance policy, so we don't mess up in the same way over and over again.' These responses are simple on the surface, but they reveal something important: students see the past as a living resource for navigating contemporary life, not a static body of facts to be memorised.

The second theme, identity, was almost as prominent. Students connected history to personal and ancestral heritage, to understanding who they are and where they come from. These responses were deeply individual, though they also opened onto larger questions about whose histories are taught and whose are omitted. The third theme, citizenship, captured students' belief that history prepares people for active civic participation, from voting to critical thinking in an age of misinformation.

What this study ultimately suggests is that students already sense why history matters, even when they struggle to articulate it in formally academic terms. Understanding those intuitions is not incidental to history teaching. It is a starting point for building history education that connects meaningfully to students' lives. In serious times, that is work worth doing.

‘My Friend! you and I have passed our Lives, in Serious Times’: undergraduate reflections on the purpose of studying history by Christopher W Berg (Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, USA) is published in History Education Research Journal, volume 23

Christopher W. Berg is a scholar of history education and curriculum whose work examines how educators cultivate disciplinary thinking and professional judgment. His research explores historical thinking, disciplinary knowledge, and the intellectual formation of educators, with growing attention to how AI reshapes reasoning and assessment. Berg’s work appears in venues such as History Education Research Journal, Historical Encounters, World History Connected, and Curriculum History, and he co-edited, with Theodore Christou, The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education (2020). He is Program Lead and Associate Professor at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, and holds a Ph.D. in Education and an M.A. in History summa cum laude.

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