What Is History?

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My next talk is on the subject of what is history. Is history just a collection of facts? Is history always written by the winners? Is history propaganda? Is everything that happens a historic event? Is history subjective or objective? There is no doubt that facts are important in history but it shouldn’t be reduced to just remembering which kings and queens we had and the dates of famous battles. We need to understand the causality, the psychology, the social backgrounds, and political situation that created the World historic event happened in. Facts are the backbone of history but not the history in itself. Some events are o tied to specific date we just have to mention the date to know what happened then, 9/11 springs to mind. Other dates that might seem obvious however are less so than you might think. What date did WW2 start on? From UK readers I expect the answer 3rd September 1939. If you are in Poland you would be replying 1st September 1939. Britain and France gave Germany 48 hours to get out of Poland before declaring war. In America, the war started with Pearl Harbour on the 7th December 1941, which is what really made it into a World War rather than a European and Asian conflict. For China, WW2 started in 1931 when they were invaded by Japan. Our history is often taught to us a centred on our own national pride and interests. Our own less savoury activities are sometimes airbrushed out, as with the British part in the slave trade, or the Amritsar Massacre in India in 1919 when colonial soldiers opened fire on peaceful protesters and killed over a 1,000 unarmed Indians, Muslims and Sikhs. The inclusion of the event in the movie Gandhi provoked angry calls for it not to be represented there but luckily Attenborough left it in. Much school history in the UK until recent years at least focused on national pride, British inventions, our defeat of the Spanish Armada, our camaraderie and bravery under fire in the World Wars. Japanese text books gloss over the Nanking massacre and much of WW2. Soviet Russian history was very much from a Marxist perspective. Historians rarely get to write what they want first and then seek a publisher for it. Many are writing to commission for academic markets, a set curriculum, covering specific theme and topics and with pre-decided conclusions to be drawn from the work. The historian needs funding for his or her research and may worry about censorship if they make claim that prove too controversial. Leopold Von Ranke, a German historian in the 19th century, was regarded as highly objective which is why he was respected enough to be hired as the official historian for the Prussian monarchy. That left him in a very compromising position. He was recreating the past in a way that made it appetising for what wa for him the present day. Ranke argued that historians must record and present the past rather than passing judgement on it. Ranke argued that the way to be objective in history is to use only primary text material, work written by people from the time period studied, as first-hand accounts, not the often vast body of work written by other commentators in the years since the events your own history covers. The biggest problem with that is that even first hand primary material can be biased, censored, and reflects the emotion, patriotism, and prejudices of the people who created it. Some documents can even be falsified, as with the photos from Stalinist Russia which airbrushed out all images of Trotsky, who was also existed from numerous books, letters, etc. Also, going back to pre-18th century historic periods, there is a lot less written primary source material to access. On top of that, the historian is himself creating secondary evidence based on the primary information. To be truly objective, the reader should not read what he writes but go to the work listed in his bibliography instead. The very choice of what to write about, how it is researched, what evidence and facts are included, or not included, all changes the shape of the history. E H Carr, in his book, What I History? From 1961 argued that this process is to be welcomed. A history that is just a list of stated facts is just a dull meaningless chronology, useful to remember for a pub quiz, but not much more. The facts take on life if given a context and framework, just as a skeleton gets more interesting when we flesh it out. Similarly, our interpretation of the past and what we can learn from it is utterly impossible without the facts. Carr argued that the best historians are intentionally subjective and unafraid to be controversial while never sacrificing the facts. Supposing you wanted to write a biography of The Duke Of Wellington. The first thing to notice is that there is a lot written about him already, with 4,152 books about him on Amazon alone at present. What would you write about him that hasn’t been said already? Most of the facts are set in stone and easy to find out, when he was born, when he joined the army, the date of Waterloo, when he became Prime Minister, when he died. The more you develop a picture of his personality, the more easily you can think about why he chose to say and do the things he did. Early histories of Wellington were written in his lifetime, often rejoicing in his victory over Napoleon. Later historians were influenced by Freudian psycho-analysis, which led to many histories putting central characters on a virtual couch, assessing how their childhood and relationship with their families shaped their more famous behaviours and actions. Marxist historians would see Wellington as a champion of the capitalist order. Post World War Two historians compare his command skill to those of later generals, like Montgomery or Patton. Each new event in history gives even the historians studying the distant past new insights and new hindsight. History is a constantly revised canvas. History used to be seen as a science, but it isn’t. History is one of the social sciences, mixed with the arts and humanities. The facts of history tell us who, what, where, and when. Who (William The Conqueror) What – (led the Norman Conquest of England) Where (Hastings) When (1066). History is really about the other two questions, how and why. A recognition of the weakness and infighting of Saxon England, a need for expanding the Norman power-base, William’s claim that Edward The Confessor, the king who died without a heir, had promised him the throne only for Harold to grab it first when Edward died, which made William very angry and cheated, and many other reasons. Which reasons the historian chooses to go with affect the shape of the history to be created and presented. The facts won’t change but they can be given different contexts and levels of importance depending on the flow of the narrative. Carr argued that not everything that happens or even every fact about the past is a historic fact. He mentions an incident in Stalybridge in 1850 where a ginger-bread seller was kicked to death by an angry mob. Apart from immediately making the newspapers and a brief reference in the diary of one eye-witness, the incident was never taken up as important enough for any history writer to cover it in any context. To Carr it was therefore a non-historic event. I disagree with him. Just because no historian saw it as important enough to use it for any study, it happened. It affected the people who saw it and the attackers who presumably drew the attention of the law. It was a minor event compared to other 19th century social upheaval, and it would not be out of place in Engel’s study of the Working Class in Britain; it’s jut that like the tree that fell in the forest out of all human view and earshot, historians missed it. Carr’s reference to it, and even mine, give it some significance back. Clearly some events have stronger history than others. A fight in a pub in Brixton isn’t as big a news story as a political assassination, but it is arrogant to deny an incident in life as being non-history. Obviously what to include or not include in a history is a selection process conducted by the historian. A collection of every fact known about Hitler would fill quite a big book on its own, but the historian needs to pick which ones are important to his text and reject other material. It’s probably on record somewhere what Hitler put on his toast on the morning he invaded Poland, but it would be too trivial to bother finding out about it. The process of deciding what goes into a history and what is left out is what really makes a history. The facts are the raw ingredients. The historian, like a chef, decides what to make of them. He can only justify his decision through considered and qualified conclusions based on careful, yet often subjective understanding of the evidence, including but not exclusively, the facts. Arthur Chappell