History Book Club #2: From Global Currents of Empire and Exchange to Campus Community
The decline of reading has been in the news of late, with survey after survey showing that adults, teenagers, and children alike read for pleasure far less than they did even a decade ago. The causes of this decline are complex. Some may not think that reading is relevant in an age of influencers, TikTok, and AI, while others say that they find it hard to resist the pull of their phones. To make matters worse, even those who must read (e.g., university students!) report struggling to understand complex ideas and arguments in longer, more challenging texts.
There are many reasons to be concerned about these developments. For history professors Caleb Wellum and Mairi Cowan, some of those concerns include questions about what the decline of reading means for the understanding and writing of history—which requires an avid and diverse reading habit (not to mention a reading public interested in history books!)—and, more broadly, how it might affect the intellectual lives and community of undergraduates in tech-saturated universities.
With these concerns in mind, Professors Wellum and Cowan started a History Book Club in Fall 2024. Their goal was to form a convivial intellectual community with students that could model the benefits and pleasures of reading and discussing physical books together, as a campus community.
Building on the success of the first book club—which formed a community of readers by diving into the content and craft of Bathsheba Demuth’s The Floating Coast—Professors Wellum and Cowan convened a larger group of students over 6 weeks in the Winter 2025 semester to read and discuss Roger Crowley’s Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World in a relaxed, low-stress environment. For both semesters, the Department of Historical Studies provided funding to purchase a copy of the book for each participating student.
Crowley’s book provoked lively discussions over snacks in the Historical Studies seminar room—and even in the kitchen!—about how to write truthful and inclusive histories of the colonial past. Sometimes the students’ thoughts about events from centuries ago even resonated with the geopolitical and economic chaos of early 2025. The book had its detractors and defenders, but by reading it together over the course of several weeks, each participant came away with a new appreciation for the challenges of knowing and writing history, the pleasures of reading about the past, and the benefits of being and speaking together in an increasingly atomized world.
