History - Why is matters
by Lynn Hunt
(Cambridge, Polity, 2018)
We live in a moment obsessed with history, but it is also a time of deep anxiety about historical truth.
Page 1.
History is by definition a process of discovery and not a settled dogma.
Page 2.
Holocaust denial has become the model for those who want to lie about history.
Page 3.
Blatant lying about history has become more common owing to the influence of social media. The world-wide web has enabled historical lies to flourish because on the internet virtually anyone can post anything under any name, without prior scrutiny and with no possible sanction.
Page 4.
Insisting on historical truth has become a necessary act of civic courage.
Page 4.
Textbook authors and in particular textbook publishers will usually go to great lengths to avoid controversy in order to appeal to the broadest possible markets.
Page 6.
Monuments are always made for political purposes; they assert power, whether the power of a church, a sect, a political party, or a political cause, such as the Confederacy. Because of this association with power, changes of religious affiliation or political regime often entail monument destruction as well as monument creation.
Page 9.
The long history of the destruction of “antiquities” shows that monument destruction is part and parcel of life.
Page 9.
Vandalism and preservation can go hand in hand; the attack on monuments of the past prompted the revolutionaries themselves to think about cultural patrimony. Hated symbols could be preserved if they could be rebranded as art.
Page 10.
Some of the past must be preserved in order to maintain a sense of connection and continuity over time. The question is what should be preserved, and that is an inevitably political question.
Page 10.
The effort to instill a feeling of national belonging usually required a positive spin. Textbooks talked about national triumphs or tragedies but rarely about a government’s or people’s mistakes or misdeeds.
Page 12.
Traumatic events in a nation’s life often prompt major revision of the national narrative, as they did in post-World War II Germany and Japan and in the aftermath of decolonization in France and Britain.
Page 14.
Serious discussion of slavery hardly appeared in US history textbooks before the 1960s, a century after the conflict.
Page 14.
No US history textbook can be published today that neglects the history of slavery or discrimination against women and minorities.
Page 17.
A truth commission is a kind of history hearing set up on the premise that the full truth about past murders, imprisonments, tortures, and discrimination must be told if the nation is to move forward.
Page 21.
Recovery of history has become important in virtually every instance of transition from one regime to another.
Page 23.
The history of supposedly stable nations, such as Japan, the United States, or the United Kingdom, is also in question because of elements that have been forgotten, effaced, or repressed and are now coming to the surface.
Page 24.
Public interest in history is not simply rising; it’s skyrocketing.
Page 25.
Collective memories are shaped in many ways, from books and museums to television programs and internet rumors.
Page 28.
Collective memories do the most useful and enduring work of shaping identities when they are based on truthful accounts of the past.
Page 29.
Historical truth is two-tiered: facts are at issue in the first tier, interpretations in the second.
Page 30.
A fact is inert until it is incorporated into an interpretation that gives it significance, and the power of an interpretation depends on its ability to make sense of the facts.
Page 30.
Facts are not as simple as they seem because the past is never settled.
Page 31.
Historical facts rest on documents; documents collected in a systematic manner are more likely to be believed; and facts are necessarily provisional because there is always the possibility that the discovery of evidence in the future might call today’s facts into question.
Conspiracy theories arise int eh space created by the inherently provisional nature of historical facts.
Page 32.
Historical facts are only as good as the documents they rest upon, and some very influential documents in history turned out to be forgeries. One of the most infamous was the “Donation of Constantine,” purported to be a decree of the Roman emperor who died in 337 CE.
Page 33.
Fabricated facts sometimes die hard.
Page 34.
To get their facts right historians benefit from a host of scientific techniques that were often developed for other uses.
Page 35.
Historical facts rest upon the best available evidence.
Page 36.
The best available historical evidence depends in large measure, therefore, on how and why the historian looks for sources. It is rarely a neutral activity.
Page 37.
Despite its occasional reliance on scientific techniques, history is not a science. It is a literary art that uses scientific techniques where relevant but whose fundamental aim is to tell a true story.
Page 37.
The interpretations make the facts relevant. The world is filled with mountains of historical facts, but we only care about a tiny number of them at any given moment. We care about those facts that enable us to tell the story we want to tell.
Page 38.
The great variability of interpretations casts doubt on the possibility of historical truth. Since historians always write from points of view that are shaped by their personal histories and social contexts, their accounts cannot claim to be entirely objective.
Page 39.
The truest history is often written b y people with deep commitments on one side or another of an issue. Blandness is not the same thing as truth.
Page 40.
The truthfulness of any interpretation depends on its coherence and its ability to offer an explanation for the important facts. A coherent account is logical; it cites evidence that is germane and does not draw irrational conclusions from that evidence.
Page 41.
An interpretation cannot rely only on the facts that fit; it has to stand the test of possible counter-arguments.
Page 42.
The idea that history writing should aim for truth and a certain measure of objectivity reflects a particular perspective, that of historical writing as it has developed in the West especially int eh lst two centuries.
Pages 42-43.
University training of historians was designed to transmit and improve methods for determining historical truth.
Page 43.
History grew as an academic discipline in tandem with nationalism and a growing conviction of European superiority over the rest of the world. Historians rushed to tell the history of their own nations and focused in particular on the rise of the modern bureaucratic nation state as the preeminent sign of European superiority.
Page 45.
Complaints about “Eurocentrism” often include challenges to the standards of historical truth as well.
Page 47.
It does not require a university setting in order to aspire to truthfulness.
Page 49.
All history, whether written, oral, pictorial, or performative, relies on narrative form, that is, a story that claims to represent the past through some kind of chronological device.
Page 49.
Condescension toward unfamiliar forms of history is falling out of favor now, as is the contempt for more vernacular forms of history generally.
Page 50.
E.H. Carr’s What is History (1961) served as “the new testament of the historical method” in the 1960s because it argued for the importance of social and economic history at a time when most historians wrote about political elites and institutions.
Pages 51-52.
Even when a historical interpretation is based on true facts, is logically coherent, and as complete as a scholar can make it, the truth of that interpretation remains provisional.
Page 54.
To this day many believe that democracy, free markets, human rights, and the rule of law - all variations on Hegel’s freedom - are Western values; in this line of thinking it is not clear what values the East might have to offer.
Page 58.
The penchant for vaunting one’s own ethnic, cultural, or civilizational superiority is not limited to Western countries.
Page 58.
The same techniques that were used to reinforce ethnic or national identity and crate a sense of European superiority can also be reused to challenge the ethnic or national narratives and undermine the Western sense of superiority.
Page 60.
If there is no agreed standard, then there is no way of determining the truth about the past, however provisional; indeed, there would be n o way of even having a debate b that truth. To debate, two or more sides have go agree on the rules for debate, and to win a debate is to make better arguments. If an argument can be improved or disproved, then there is an implicit standard of proof.
Page 60.
Debates over history’s meanings are vital to the survival of democracy. They are a sign of its health, not its weakness.
Page 62.
Elite young men studied history to prepare themselves for politics and government.
Page 63.
History as a discipline was just on the cusp of professionalization in the United States in the 1870s.
Page 65.
Social history took off in the 1960s and 1970s as studies of parish registers, census lists, Inquisition records, police documents, conduct manuals, and household account books enabled historians move beyond parliamentary, diplomatic, and other official sources to get at the lives of ordinary people, whether in times of crisis or over the long haul.
Page 77.
Cultural historians studied the categories that people used to understand their worlds. Rather than analyzing the social make-up of crowds rioting during eh French Revolution, for example, cultural historians looked at the symbols the rioters challenged and those they favored.
Pages 77-78.
World history sometimes stands for a greater concern with multi-culturalism.
Page 84.
History still plays a vital role in crating national cohesion.
Page 84.
Nationalism has long been history’s friend but can on occasion become its chief enemy.
Page 85.
Debates about history take place when a polity is strong enough to allow rethinking and reframing of the nation’s past. Shutting down discussion about historical truth goes hand in hand with authoritarianism.
Pages 85-86.
History began as a pursuit by, for, and about elites, but as times changed, so did history writing and teaching. It may not be the first line of defense of democratic societies, but it is actually quote near the front because an understanding of history heightens our ability to pierce through the fogs of willful misinformation that constitute lying. Moreover, history strengthens democratic societies by providing constantly renewable fields of contests over identity.
Page 87-88.
One of its most enduring attractions is the way it can give us perspective on our present-day concerns and even afford a kind of relief from them.
Page 90.
History has its own ethics.
Page 90.
The discipline of history as it developed in the West has had three major approaches to time: seeking exemplars, projecting progress, and, most recently, what I call, for lack of a better tern, “whole earth time.”
Page 92.
History came to be seen as a single linear progression encompassing every region of the globe. The future came to stand for improvement, rather than degeneration form a previous golden age or simply a product of inevitable cycles of rise and fall. As a consequence, the past could not longer serve as an infallible guide to the present; it had to be overcome, even rejected. Historians now viewed modern peoples as superior to the ancients, and, as a corollary, portrayed Western Europe and eventually the West as superior to the rest of the world. The belief in progress - validated by the triumph of reason and science - helped solidify the Western sense of ascendancy over other regions; the West ad its version of secular modernity now represented the future of the entire world.
Page 93-94.
Until World War I, despite some siren calls of pessimism, most educated people in the West believe that knowledge was increasing, technology was impo5ving, economies were growing, education was becoming more democratic, and representative government was triumphing. Modernization was occurring everywhere, albeit at different rhythms and with ups and downs. The deadly and seemingly senseless trench warfare of World War I, the economic depression after 1929, and the ruse if fascism in the 1930s prompted grave doubts about the narrative of progress.
Page 96.
The belief in progress has not disappeared but it is now in question.
Page 97.
The discovery of the greater age of the earth did not immediately change academic historians’ conviction about what counted as history; everything before writing was deemed part of pre-history, the subject of archaeology and anthropology, not history.
Page 98.
Tearing down a monument or tarnishing a national hero is tantamount to sacrilege in the eyes of some people.
Page 99.
Globalization, immigration, and even modernization look different when viewed in the very long-term perspective.
Page 99.
History as an academic discipline assumed that humans were the proper subject of history, or at least humans who could write and therefore produce documents. Increasingly, however, historians have recognized that humans do not lie and have not lived alone on the planet and do not make history just in relation to each other.
Page 100.
Awareness of a deeper and broader sense of time has helped draw historians to studying the interactions between humans and their environment, their animals and machines, and their diseases.
Page 100.
Time zones did not even exit begore the end of the 1800s, and they only came into use because of the needs of railroad scheduling.
Page 102.
The history of humans’ relations with their environment, not to mention with each other, points to the need for respect as a necessary element in long-term survival.
Pages 103-104.
Tunnel vision is an occupational hazard that is aggravated by the need for specialization in order to make a mark on the field.
Page 105.
For the Romans, Europe was the land of the barbarians, the very antithesis of civilization.
Page 106.
Many historians ow agree that the dominant economic power in the world between 1100 and 1800 was China, not Europe.
Pages 106-107.
The French revolutionaries’ aspiration to break with the feudal past actually encouraged research into the past.
Page 107.
The future is meaningless without the sense of continuity.
Page 110.
There is very little agreement among professors or the public about what every education person ought to know.
Page 110.
Students prefer to take history courses on the most recent periods of time.
Page 111.
“Presentism” takes various forms and not just an interest in more recent history. It also includes judging people in the past by present-day norms.
Page 111.
Sometimes we have to judge the past according to our own values.
Page 112.
What do we learn from the past? For me, it is above all else respect for those who came before us.
Page 112.
Wisdom is not fundamentally altered by changes in technology, growth in population, or specialization of occupations. Wisdom can be found in learning about how people in the past confronted their challenges.
Page 113.
In societies without universal literacy, which means all societies before the end of the 1800s, visual forms played a major role: monuments, processions and parades, reliquaries, and woodcuts spoke more directly to ordinary people than did tracts, treatises, or official documents.
Page 114.
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of a human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
Page 115.