cross post from H-Teach <h-teach@msu.edu>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 1995
From: John Pankratz, Albright College
<JOHNP@JOE.ALB.EDU>
Back in the 70s I came to the 2-language requirement at Cornell not with
dread but with too much nonchalance. I passed the German ETS test, based
on two years of college study, but discovered that two years of high
school French would not turn the same trick. Nor did a quick reading
of Sartre's _Les jeux sont faits_. By then, my then wife had begun
studies in French history and the French language, and I cribbed enough
from her books to put together a passing score. Up to that point, I
suppose, the requirement seemed like a drain and a distraction.
My career with French took on a second birth when I joined my spouse
for six months of a research year in Paris -- again, a distraction, but
should one have to excuse a chance to live in Paris? -- an occasion I
improved by taking classes at the Alliance Francaise (Boulevard Raspail).
An indirect effect (or continuation) of that experience was a Fulbright
Year teaching American history (my field, after all) at the Universite
de Franche Comte in Besancon.
A further redemption of my linguistic education came when I went (sans
wife) to the Universite de Dakar (Senegal) for the first of what turned
out to be nearly four Fulbright years there -- that's four years of
work that I owe to the study of French. I returned to the US with a
competency in Wolof, a new wife (who speaks 6 languages), a daughter,
some work in African history, and some wonderful memories.
In my four person department at Albright I teach African and Atlantic
history in addition to American, and have struck up fast friendships
with whichever francophone and/or African visitors happen to pass by.
I've begun research on a comparison of the receptions of Rene Caillie's
Voyage a Tombouctou and James Riley's Wreck of the Brig Commerce, and
so have a chance to do French, African, and early 19th-century US
cultural history all at once.
The only lesson I'll draw here is that it's difficult to predict the
consequences of foreign language study by an American historian.