Puzzle Master

Historian Steve Beaudoin likes working out the puzzles of the past

I first got into history because I loved the stories,” says Steve Beaudoin. “I loved the stories of the past.”

As a teacher of history at Centre since 1997—and a self-described “natural-born talker”—he tells plenty of stories to his European and world history classes. He admits, however, that one of his favorite classes, a trial of Napoleon, has the students doing most of the talking.

“The lawyers on each side marshal everything they have,” he says. “They each want to win that case.”

He hopes what students learn in his classes will be “useful” to them even if they don’t become professional historians.

“I want them to be able to look at a wide array of [unfamiliar] information and be confident that they can do something with it, that they can make it useful,” he says.

History, he argues, can play the same role that literature and art do in trying to explain the human condition. “We don’t have to do it simply with fiction, we can do it with facts, with what happened in the past,” he says. “By looking at our past we understand ourselves much better.”

Beaudoin was in the sixth grade when he first decided he wanted to teach. At Bates College, in his home state of Maine, he majored in French and history, then combined those interests in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon with a dissertation on poor relief in late 19th-century France. He was interested in state development, in particular how municipal authorities cooperated with private charities to solve a problem.

His research took him to France for a year, where he trawled through boxes of old records and came to realize that he was much more interested in the writing part.

“I’m not that crazy about archives,” he admits. “I like the puzzle of doing history, the putting it all together once you’ve got the material and you’re sitting down to make sense of it.

“That’s the fun part.”

Recently he extended his earlier work on poverty into a book with a more global view, Poverty in World History (Routledge, 2007), part of a series covering single-issue themes in history. He’s also compiled a book of readings, The Industrial Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), which looks at industrialization in countries other than England.

One of the biggest challenges he faced in writing Poverty was time: the book took six years from contract to print. Another was meeting the publisher’s adamant directive to keep it short, since its market is as an inexpensive, supplemental text. It was hard to cover six centuries in just 124 pages, he says, but he managed to do it.

Although he’s unlikely to use the book in his classes, he believes the project is nevertheless relevant to his teaching.

“There’s always a tension at a small liberal arts college that your teaching life is almost completely removed from your research life,” he says. “I’ve been lucky enough to be able to integrate them. It all feels kind of seamless. Even if I’m not going to use the research in class, I don’t view the writing I’ve done as divorced in any way from what I do at Centre.”

In part it’s because the things that he writes aren’t for other historians. “They’re for students,” he says. “And so I always keep them in mind.”

Beaudoin returned to France for a year in 2000 as director of the Centre program in Strasbourg. He also spent a term in 2004 as co-director of the College’s London program. In his free time he says he watches too much television and likes to plan, everything from a kitchen renovation to his next research project. He’s considering the Caribbean island of Martinique, legally an overseas department of France. Given its distance and very different culture, he wonders how French laws and social policies might have adapted.

Besides, he adds, “I think Martinique would make a great CentreTerm class in January.”

—D.F.J.

Centrepiece
Centre College
600 West Walnut St.
Danville, KY 40422

Phone: (859) 238-5717
Fax: (859) 238-5723
E-mail: alumnews@centre.edu
or johnsond@centre.edu