Meet the Faculty: Louis Hyman

Professor Hyman is a historian of work and business at ILR. He also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City.

What interests you most about your specific field?

I love studying history because I am curious about not only how the world is now, but how it can change. What can we do to make it different? What can we not do? It is hard to imagine a new future if you don’t know how different the past truly was.

What do you enjoy about working with ILR students?

I love that we draw on other aspects of the social sciences. In my Labor and Capital in Old New York class, there’s an assignment where we use t-tests and linear regression to examine bank records from a 19th-century immigrant savings banks. We complement the math with more traditional archival material and it’s fun working with students to draw on such interdisciplinarity to pull out stories that would otherwise be hidden.

Why do you believe it’s important for students to understand what you teach?

Our lives don’t prepare us for change, yet change nonetheless comes. History offers us the experiences of other people, other times, other places, and as a discipline, historical arguments emphasize the ways in which those lives changed over time. When the world changes, analytic models can fail. In those moments of discontinuity, we tend to draw on history—this event X is like that prior event Y—to guide our decisions, and that is why it’s so useful. In my field, economic history, the short-run can be well-understood through economics, but when the markets are turned upside down, everybody turns to history.