Visiting professor Smith: An Old South historian

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Visiting Assistant Professor of History Miles Smith IV (Madeleine Jepsen/Collegian)
Visiting Assistant Professor of History Miles Smith IV (Madeleine Jepsen/Collegian)

In an environment where historians struggle to find both steady employment and academic freedom, members of the Hillsdale College History Department are blessed with both, according to new Visiting Assistant Professor of History Miles Smith IV.
Smith, a native of Salisbury, North Carolina, specializes in studies of the Old South. Growing up in a small, rural Southern town, Smith was surrounded by history.
“[I] grew up just thinking about history,” he said. “My dad was interested in it. My grandfather was interested in it. I got to college, and hated my original major. When I switched to history, I was fascinated by everything. It was a mindblowing expansion of all I can know.”
He graduated from the College of Charleston in 2006, with a B.A. in history. Smith went on to receive a Ph.D. in history from Texas Christian University in 2013, where he became fast friends with another Hillsdale professor, Distinguished Visiting Professor of History Samuel Negus.
When Negus informed Smith of the temporary opening left while Professor of History Bradley Birzer taught at University of Colorado Boulder, Smith leaped at the opportunity to teach at Hillsdale, due to the college’s well-known reputation for academic freedom and teaching based on first principles.
Thus far, Smith has taught four different courses at Hillsdale: Western Heritage, American Heritage, Sectionalism and the American Civil War, and Jacksonian America.
As a scholar of the Old South, Smith said that Sectionalism and the Civil War was the class he found himself most comfortable teaching. He went on to say that teaching American Heritage was his favorite, because his students connect with it the most and actively engage with the course material.
“I teach the best students in the world,” Smith said.
Sarah Strubing, a freshman considering a history major, took Smith’s Western Heritage class last semester.
“I think he’s a really intelligent man who enjoys coming to class,” she said. “He’s also really approachable. I always enjoyed starting off my days with his class, even if it was early in the morning.”
Smith said he hopes to help students “gain a sense of humility that ought to come along with studying at a place like Hillsdale.”
He said most people do not have the opportunity to gain knowledge of the higher things, and that Hillsdale students ought to recognize and be humbled by that.
“Without an accompanying mastery of at least one-tenth its measure of grace, such erudition is worthless,” Smith said, quoting John Quincy Adams.
Smith said that this “nexus of knowledge of grace” is what he aspires to teach his students.
“It’s okay to be elegant and educated. We don’t have to act like automatons,” he said.
According to Smith, the Hillsdale faculty has been a shining example of this link between elegance and erudition. In addition to maintaining his old friendship with Negus, Smith has taken the opportunity to make many new friends in the history department and beyond.
“Everyone has been consumate professionals. I struggle to think of a single time anyone has been unwelcoming on this campus,” he said.
Apart from the snow and cold weather, Smith said the biggest challenge lies in living so far away from his friends and family back home. Quoting Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe, he called this the “tyranny of distance.” However, because of the ease of modern communication and the strong network of friends he has built here in Hillsdale, Smith said this tyranny is easily overcome.
Smith’s plans for next year are undecided, although he said he hopes to stay at Hillsdale.