Baird Johnson's 2024 Commencement Speech

Well… History did not end in 1992. Or 91 or 89 depending on whether you prefer the article or the book version of that thesis. Indeed, no undergraduate class since the end of the Cold War has been able to pronounce the continuation of our source of study more emphatically than ours. History goes on, and we have been experiencing it. Our collegiate careers began in historic darkness. Some of us were wrested from our first year on Stanford’s campus by the worst pandemic in a century. Others, like me, were denied that first year entirely. I experienced the outside world during my freshman year through a window — a window from which I watched the city that never sleeps turn into a ghost town. When New York roared back to life, it did so along with the rest of the country as some of America’s most ugly and deeply rooted issues reared their heads again. Just afterwards, the United States broke one of our most storied traditions — 228 years of peaceful power transitions in the federal government. But history doesn’t just happen at home. Our four years of college also saw hot war return to Europe and the dramatic and horrifying intensification of conflict in the Middle East. These are only the broadest strokes and barely scratch the surface of the transforming world around us. As we wrote our final papers, the subjects of future ones raged on in the background.

There is something to say for those term papers and what they became. The class of 2024 has completed enormous projects on topics as varied as Chilean migration in the nineteenth century to the role of Yugoslavia in an allegedly bipolar world. From anti-prison activism in the 1970’s to female saints in tenth century byzantine hagiography. 

Honors theses are not the only way we demonstrate and disseminate what we are learning. As a member of Herodotus for the last three years, I have had the immense privilege of reading 119 Stanford history papers. The journal we published this year is a testament to both the talent and breadth of our community. The papers printed therein span more than 2,700 years and take place across five continents. They are similarly varied in terms of discipline covering ancient, military, social, colonial, medieval, religious, political, and diplomatic history. They are all also, needless to say, excellent.

The excellence of all of our work would not be possible without the outstanding community that is the Stanford History Department. My engagement with this community began before I matriculated. Elizabeth Lindquister, a student at the time whose connection to me was as tenuous as being the friend — of the daughter — of the parent coordinator — at my high school — took the time and care to write me a number of emails before I enrolled in classes. The longest of them was more than three pages long and chock-full of helpful advice. Professor Winterer, whose prior connection to me did not exist, also generously helped me select my classes for my first quarters and eventually audit a class of hers that summer. While outstanding, these were only the first of a cascade of examples. At every turn here at Stanford, all those associated with the department have been supportive far beyond their obligations. I have quite the sample size here — of my 186 units at Stanford, 107 of them have been history courses. I never had a quarter without a five unit history class. Lest I inundate you all with illustrations, I can only offer the most cursory survey of these experiences. I have benefited immensely from the magnanimity of Professors Twitty, Mullaney, and Como. I owe the most to Professors Vardi and Gienapp. While I only met Professor Vardi during my junior year, I threw myself into her courses thereafter. They went a long way to shaping my experience here. Professor Gienapp has mentored me throughout my undergraduate career. He has been both present and enormously helpful from (literally) my first day of college to the last. He has meaningfully guided me through the eighteenth century and the twenty-first. I could not have asked for a better teacher. Beyond the faculty, my time at Stanford was made worthwhile by my fellow history students. I must particularly mention the three early Americanists — Eric, Parker, and Novia — with whom I have had a weekly dinner to discuss historiography for more than two years. Even though two of them are not graduating this year, they are all here today. One more person requires mention. Without Kai Dowding, everything would fall apart. It is as much her doing as ours that we are all sitting here graduating today.

In addition to people, my experience with history — and I hope and imagine many of yours — has been made up of little moments and details. Trying desperately at three in the morning to finish Edmund Burke’s Speech on Reconciliation with the Colonies as I even more desperately tried to choke down an obscene amount of truly awful spaghetti squash because I didn’t want to waste any food. Looking down to read Book 7 of Republic, looking up again more than two hours later and realizing that despite having no lapses in concentration I had read only seven pages, and going up the next day to the Postdoc TA-ing the class to tell him that Book 7 was perfect. Learning that in medieval Spanish marketplaces, figs could only be sold in pairs. 

That may be the most resounding cry of our discipline. Not the figs… the details. As all of us have encountered over and over again, very specific moments are almost always very complicated. To the extent that there are general truths, realities, or trends, they are made up of particulars. As a discipline, history is uniquely equipped to access these details and the towering edifice they can become. By championing the narrow over the general; the moment over the trend; the data over the model; the investigation over the theory; we can better see them all. Among the humanities and the social sciences — and perhaps this is not an unbiased perspective — history is best able to reckon with and make sense of a world which is at all times and in all places almost unimaginably complex.

This is, of course, not to deny the existence of general trends. We are in the midst of a particularly important one. Democracy has been declining in the world for almost 20 years. In one of my Stanford application essays — my fellow graduates will all vaguely remember writing a number of those — I mentioned fifteen countries which either fell into the grips of authoritarian leaders or barely resisted such attempts in our lifetimes. Things have not improved. From the brazen attempts against Ukraine to the more insidious machinations in Hungary, the idea of popular government is under threat. The sacred fire of liberty and self-rule is far from extinguished, but it is flickering — with greater oscillation than at any time since history allegedly ended and probably long before even that. There is no more precious value, nor is there a more essential role than to be tender of this flame.

There may also be no role more confusing. There is no clear, single action to take. Even more important, this is not the task of a single person. There is no way for one person to bear this weight. What, then, should any of us do? How can the burden be distributed? Who should uphold which parts? I don’t know. What I do know is that our time as history majors at Stanford has given us important insights. The first thing we learn in any history class is that things did not have to happen the way they did. Events only get to happen once, but they could have happened another way. Another thing we learn, especially in introductory courses, is that historians are really reticent to predict the future. These two insights are interrelated. Historians are so loath to predict the future because they have seen how poorly such predictions have gone in the past, yes, but they are so reticent also because the past has proven so essentially contingent. Those things which are most interesting to study are those things which could not possibly have been foreseen, and they happen all of the time. The Ottoman Empire was smashed in 1402 and sent into decades of disunion and civil war because of an ill-advised message which can only be described as trash talk. One of the most famous dates in human history, 1453, is unknown if something goes wrong with the delivery. If the logistics of Union soldiers voting in 1864 go wrong, we may be looking at a very worse version of the United States. If Sam Adams got sick in January of 1788 — or even if he just grieved more heavily for the death of his last son — the United States might have been little more than a memory by 1864. If millions of Soviet civilians did not manage to transport themselves along with more than 1,500 factories and power plants just out of German reach in 1941, there is neither a Soviet Union nor a Cold War in the aftermath of World War Two. Now, historians don’t deal with counterfactuals for a reason; we can only study what happened. This is all only to say that those things which did happen; those things which shape the world we live in, did not need to, and indeed sometimes should not have gone the way they did. Just as importantly, they depended on discrete acts, sometimes of very small groups of people.

This phenomenon, the essential contingency of history, is not a thing of the past. It will remain true, and it will be true of the fate of democracy going forward. Our learning here has taught us that we can’t predict the future, but it has also taught us that there will be key moments upon which things may turn. Knowing this offers us a profound advantage. It may be that someone in this audience today will be presented with such a moment. But we all know we can’t predict that. What knowing this should do is keep us from giving up because we don’t know exactly what to do. We can’t know exactly what to do because that is not how history works. What we can do is try to put ourselves in the right places and to be prepared.

Now that would be a terrific way to end the speech. It’s even the Boy Scout Motto. But they gave me a couple more minutes, and there is one more important detail about today. It’s Father’s Day. I am so immensely privileged to have three father figures in the audience. Jay and Elton, my God Fathers, have been with me every step of the way. That’s not quite right — they were there long before I could step. From day one of my life all those years ago they have been perfect role models and bastions of safety, comfort, and learning. I received all of this in spades from my dad, Robert Johnson. There is no way to do him justice here, but he has supported and loved me as much as one person can another. He has also been here throughout my college career, listening to me rehearse the arguments of papers hundreds of times and forcing his way through all of the readings I find interesting and send his way. I mean, he read “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” because I wanted him to. What more could a son ask for?

So, in light of the date congratulations to all of the fathers here today. In light of our lives, congratulations also to all of the mothers and other parental figures. And finally, most of all, congratulations to the graduating class of 2024!