History offers students an opportunity to think and discuss sophisticated topics. For this reason, I may have been perceived as conservative, even though in my extraprofessional, political life I have always been a left-leaning liberal with libertarian undertows.
Getting across this point has always been more important to me than raising consciousness about past injustices or rallying students to the heroism of dissenters and reformers. Complexity in human affairs arises from the fact that human beings are never single-minded in their efforts and decisions, and events never slide along a predictable cause and effect continuum. Since we toss around complex with the same abandon as nuanced, I'll define how I think of complexity in history. I devised ways to make complicated matters more accessible rather than simplifying the complexity. What the study of history offers above all is an opening to the complexity of human experience. Perhaps because I began teaching at a university underfunded for research and overly funded with students with modest academic aptitude, I learned early in my career that the key point of teaching is to move students from one intellectual level to a higher one.
Appleby is past president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Society for the History of the Early Republic.
Her books include "Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s," "Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans," "Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination," "Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England" and a recently published presidential biography of Thomas Jefferson. Appleby is at the pinnacle of her profession through her powerful engagement with important ideas and controversial issues. Throughout her 40-year career, her scholarship has examined the formation of an 'American' political ideology, with particular focus on the connections between the history of ideas and the history of economic institutions, policies and practices. She is one of the United States' foremost historians of the early republic. Joyce Oldham Appleby is professor emerita from UCLA and retired in 2001 after teaching there 21 years.
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