Indiana Jones and the legacy of the passive voice

In all of my career, I've not been chased from a cave by a humongous boulder. I haven't attacked a tank from horseback. I've never witnessed human sacrifice. And I have not flown around the world, hunted the Holy Grail, crash-landed in the Himalayas, or escaped a Nazi dirigible.

Yet.

But I was Indiana Jones for Halloween last year.

I still wear the hat sometimes, even when it gets me made fun of. (I also have a gimmick bullwhip — I couldn't find a real one — and a safari-style shirt.)

Anyway, the tale I tell today began a few weeks ago. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" opened today in theaters, and I wanted a local tie to this national event of the most import. So I called the history department at Fort Hays State University, from whence I graduated some 12-1/2 months ago.

I was hoping to find a professor or student there who first embarked on the grand adventure of history because of some inspiration they found in the first three Indiana Jones movies. So I put out a few feelers, asking former fellow students if they — or anyone they knew — fit that description. No such luck.

I asked a former professor the same question, and I got a slight chuckle for an answer.

"No," the professor told me. "But what would be an interesting story is if you found someone who said they were inspired to study history by Indiana Jones, and they found out it was exactly what they expected."

My professor was alluding to the true, real-life stories experienced by many historians. They are not stories of archaeological adventure, of seizing artifacts from long-buried hiding places, of racing the forces of evil for some relic with awesome, untold powers. Much of the study of history is done from inside a library. Lots of it is reading and writing. And writing. And reading.

This professor frequently provides his students with a "list of forbidden practices." They do not mention desecration of burial grounds or improper artifact collection techniques. They described how not to write a history paper, with a host of common errors young writers make; violation of the forbidden practices list could result in the lowering of a grade.

They include items such as "don't use contractions" (oops), and "no one-sentence paragraphs" (again, guilty).

The point is, historians usually are much more concerned about the passive voice than they are about spiders and snakes and Nazis on our tail.

But I don't have aspirations of academics and I don't intend to write historical dissertations. (Mostly, because it would require me to work.) So effective historiography (yes, that's a real word, and no, I don't really know what it means) is not my chief concern. I like to think I'm an effective writer, but when I was still in college I constantly struggled between the competing styles of concise news stories and deep history papers.

For what it's worth, I'm incredibly grateful I decided to study history when I did. All of our high school teachers told us "their" subject was the most important for anyone to learn. But I tend to side with the history teachers in that discussion. Because history gives us a few things that are utterly priceless: It shows us the mistakes (and some of them are tremendous) that have been made before, so we can learn from them. It shows us some measure of our quality of life -- when we look at pictures from the Dust Bowl, it's tough to worry about any current woes we face. And it shows us that we should have some respect for what we have -- no society ever to grace the earth has been as prosperous, open, equal and free as ours.

So I am deeply grateful to Indiana Jones. And to the makers of the "National Treasure" movies. And even to those who brought us "Fool's Gold." Because pop culture can — and does — play a huge part in glamorizing historical study, and that is no small thing.

That last point is one I know well. Because I was drawn to history by the likes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and David Farragut. And, probably just as much, by Indiana Jones.