Miles Smith left South for conservative ‘Disney World’

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Miles Smith left South for conservative ‘Disney World’
Miles Smith is a visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College.
Courtesy | Miles Smith

Getting a job at Hillsdale College out of graduate school is like going on your first date with Jennifer Lawrence, according to Visiting Professor of History Miles Smith. He said as much with his Southern twang and a matching merry twinkle in his eye. 

When Smith was offered a job at Hillsdale in 2014 just after finishing his PhD at Texas Christian University, he accepted post haste. 

“This place is like heaven. Are you kidding? I’m a relatively conservative guy — it sounds like Disney World. I was like, ‘How does this place even exist?’” 

Smith was hired to fill the temporary hole left by Professor of History Bradley Birzer who left for sabbatical in August, 2014. Now, Bizer is on sabbatical again, and Smith happily returned to Hillsdale to fill his shoes for the year. 

He is teaching two upper level histories, Jacksonian History and History of Sectional Crisis and the Civil War, and also Western Heritage. 

Though history was written into his blood and his hometown — Salisbury, North Carolina— Smith originally pursued political science in college. Both his father and his grandfather loved to study history, particularly local history, and his small, old, Southern hometown provided ample subjects for their inquiries. 

But when he went off to college, Smith began his studies in political science. 

“All we did was sit around and talk about how everything was terrible. I was like, well, ‘I’d rather talk about everything being terrible, but not have to put the type of emotion into it that political scientists do,”’ Smith said. “So I switched my major to history and kind of never looked back.” 

Moving from his small town of Salisbury to Charleston for undergrad also shook Smith’s perception of his place in the world, he said. Suddenly aware of the bigger, older world of Charleston, with its historical, intellectual, and developmental significance Smith said he was struck by the idea “that there was a history bigger than my own story.” 

This realization, Smith said, led him to his specific field of study within Southern history: the Atlantic world. 

Growing up, Smith was bathed in Civil War stories, facts, histories, and narratives. He said that thinking about the Civil War, in which 620,000 men lost their lives and the nation was torn apart, was too much of a “downer.” He wanted to look into something else less studied, something concerning new growth and the spreading of ideas. 

Charleston, Miles explained, is really a part of the Atlantic world. It is certainly Southern, but also connected to the Caribbean, West Africa, and Western Europe. Because it was a migratory hub, studying Charlotte reveals how all these social, economic, intellectual, and cultural currents come together, both in North Carolina and the broader South. 

Though perhaps because of these attractions, Miles laments that North Carolina, currently with a population of 10.5 million people, is the ninth most populous state. “Yeah, there’s too many people there now,” he said with a laugh. 

Back in 2014, Assistant Professor of Politics Adam Carrington struck a fast friendship with Smith, and said he was disappointed to miss Smith’s return this year, since he is away on sabbatical. 

“Intellectually he has a wide breadth of knowledge about the Jacksonian era and about American religion, especially in the South,” Carrington said. “I think he brings in family and personal variants that can really make that real to students. I think socially, he is someone students are drawn to because he can really connect the stories that he’s telling us in the classes with the students themselves.” 

Smith said that he loves his research, but that what makes the academic life worthwhile is teaching and forming those personal relationships between himself, his students, and the history they study together. 

“You will love your students because you see their ability to kind of understand their own intellectual journey,” Smith said. “As you become a part of that, it helps you to really care about them as a person, but more importantly, just as a person who’s learning. They’re actually diving into this stuff in a big way for the first time, especially the freshmen.” 

Senior Adriana Maljanian is taking Smith’s Jacksonian History class. She said she appreciates that he has actual experience living in the places he teaches about.  

“It lends a great deal and story,” she said. “I mean, we are talking about slavery right now in the South, and he’s talking about the ways in which his family has been influenced by that, and his own perspective.”

Smith himself had something of an ‘freshman’ period when he first arrived at Hillsdale in 2014. As an Americanist — not a trained classicist— he said he was daunted by the Western Heritage reader Chairman of History Mark Kalthoff handed him a mere two months before he began teaching. 

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to become kind of a semi-expert in this huge book pretty quick,”’ Smith said. “I remember just kind of freaking out like, ‘How am I gonna do it?’ So you kind of do a lot of prep work and then what was amazing is as a department, everyone just helped me out. I was really lucky that we have amazing colleagues. If I have a question about something I can go to Dr. Gaetano or Dr. Stewart, or Dr. Hart and kind of say, ‘Well, how do you teach this.’ And so it was easy.” 

This community of intellectuals, and simply good people, has made Smith feel at home in Hillsdale and eager to return this year, he said. 

Born and raised in a poor, textile town of 30,000 people with a small, hyper-affluent section, Smith said Hillsdale is familiar to him.

“I really enjoy a small town life,” Smith said. “I think there is just something about it that is peaceful in a society that is running running running after more and more and more and more and more.” 

Smith, a localist at heart, said he has enjoyed getting to know the quirks of Hillsdale. He discovered the Thai curry at Coffee Cup Diner early on and is regular lunch customer. He recently found Deck Down Under, “great sushi” only a half hour away in Jerome. He also enjoys tennis and kayaking with friends, and spending evenings reading at Rough Draft. Though there are not ready made “things to do,” in Hillsdale, Smith said he enjoys the creativity and community required to generate his own entertainment. 

“Adult life can be lonely, but here it’s just so remarkable because you’re involved with everybody’s lives in a good way. People are always saying, ‘Hey, can I use the truck,’ and then they’ll invite me over tacos or something like that. And so it’s a really easy place to live.”