Study Guide
What Is History?
What Everyone Always Says
"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."
This bit of wisdom comes from George Santayana, who wasn't a historian. He was a philosopher and writer. I won't pick on poor George because his aphorism (often misquoted) has been repeated by so many people that it clearly fits into some social preconceptions. There are a number of things wrong with the statement.
How much of the past is one required to remember before being saved from repeating it?
Do I have to remember it as an individual or is this a sort of societal remembering that has to be done? Do we all have to remember the same things?
What is this repetition anyway? If I don't remember that plate armor is heavy and awkward, am I doomed to choose it over Kevlar?
Next time you hear the phrase used, pay attention to the context and the message. Most of the time, I think you will find, the speaker is making some observation about some Bad Thing that we humans seem to do repeatedly, such as getting into wars or neglecting the poor or the like. Rather than merely saying that getting involved in a war is a chancy business, the speaker hopes to invoke History to lend weight to his argument.
Don't let him get away with it. Or, let it go with a shrug. It's not likely the speaker will put up with you long enough to hear the argument anyway.
So, let us dispense with this "wisdom" right up front. Failing to remember the past—any of it or all of it—doesn't doom one to much of anything at all. People are perfectly capable of making bonehead decisions regardless of what history classes they've taken.
History is Teaching by Examples
This comes from Thucydides, though it's often attributed also to Voltaire (the latter was too clever to have said such a thing; here's what Voltaire said: "History is a bag of tricks we play upon the dead."). It's no trivial thing to call out Thucydides, but I'll do it anyway, at least partially.
I agree with the statement if the teaching is at the level of the individual. People can learn. Societies do not learn because "society" is an abstraction. It has no memory, no mouth, no brain. "Society" is a convenience we humans use to describe something we observe so we don't have constantly to descend into unnecessary details.
Each of us may indeed learn from history, but I resist the notion that history teaches, for that imbues history with an active spirit and implies that it has something to teach. Rather, when one reads history one may come away with insights or understandings in the same way one does when one reads a novel. What you learn from a novel might well be different from what I learn from the novel. Indeed, the same reader might learn certain things when reading the novel at age twenty and learn other things when re-reading it at age fifty. The novel doesn't have some set list of things to teach, but the readers have a great long list of things they might learn.
All of which leads to a nifty little quote from John Stuart Mill: Few learn much from history who do not bring much with them to its study.
Which says in few words what I've said in many.
History is written by the winners
No it isn't, and there's plenty of evidence. This quote comes from George Orwell, who was more or less professionally gloomy and had little hopeful to say about much of anything.
Winners of what, pray tell?
History is only a confused heap of facts
G.K. Chesterton said this, and he was almost as gloomy as Orwell.
History is a confusion only if one regards it as merely facts. History is also interpretation; indeed, one could make a pretty good argument that history is mainly interpretation (the deconstructions argue it is only interpretation).
History is a myth that men agree to believe
Well, well, looks like Napoleon was a deconstructionist.
There's a good deal to this, but modern deconstructionists carry it too far. There is a great resilience in certain historical "facts" that persist regardless of how many academic articles are written showing them to be false. Why do they persist? Because they fit in with certain expectations, certain things people want to believe about the past, not least because that in turn fits in with things they want to believe about the present or the future.
In this sense, people need to have some sort of history. It doesn't have to be true or accurate history; in fact, that sort of history rarely serves. It needs to be easy and catchy and memorable. In earlier societies, people didn't have written history so they just made stuff up. Nowadays we have written history but people still will make stuff up. It doesn't matter because that process is socially quite separate from the professional discipline of history.
The Corsican General's point is wrong, though, in that it confuses the two. It tries to pass off "history" in the sense of the academic discipline as "myth" in the sense of social recollection and agreement. He may be forgiven: in 1800 there was no scholarly profession of history.
Quoting Myself
So, what is my own take on all this?
History is a discipline, not a subject. In a similar sense, chemistry is the study of chemical reactions; it isn't the chemical themselves. People too often confuse "history" with "the past" — take a look at the quotes above in that light.
More correctly, the word history has come to mean "the past" in varying degrees and it's perfectly right to use it in that sense. But when taking a course in history you must also be aware of history as a discipline.
Going further, in the practice of history there are professionals and there are amateurs, just as there are professional astronomers and backyard astronomers. The amateur may well know a great deal about the stars, may even make an occasional contribution to the profession, but the amateur is not a professional. Part of what college courses in history do is introduce students to the profession of history.
When trying to understand something, I like to turn to the words themselves. What is the origin of the word history?
It's Greek. It means inquiry or research or investigation. Early on, it meant mainly just that—any sort of inquiry. Herodotus came along and wrote a history of the Persian Wars. In that work, he says, in the very first sentence, These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus
….
Notice that the word is plural. This isn't just an inquiry, it's a collection of inquiries, a series of questions with multiple answers. The only unstated piece here is that it is about the past, not the present.
It's their word, so they get to say what it means. History is inquiry into the past. I like this definition because the emphasis is on a verb rather than on a noun. History is an activity, not a thing. That's why you will often find me referring to the discipline of history rather than to the subject of history.
Last Words
History is the witness of time, the lamp of truth, the embodied soul of memory, the instructress of life, and the messenger of antiquity.
That's Cicero: a bit overblown, as usual, but pithy nevertheless. As usual.
Having disagreed with Thucydides, I'm almost compelled to agree with Herodotus. Or Livy. The latter said (I read it once; if someone can supply me with the source, I'll be very grateful): all historians are liars
. This is a wonderful quote because Livy was known in the Middle Ages as "Livy who never lies."
Herodotus, though, should get the final word:
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Why Study History?
This question becomes easy to answer in light of the above. Study history because you want to.
Don't study it because it's "useful" in some way, because it isn't. A hammer is useful. History isn't a hammer.
History doesn't have utility; history has value. You know, like art or friends or travel. These have value because they enrich our lives.
With a hammer, once you get its utility out of it, that's all you get out of it—all you ever can get out of it. But with travel, friends, art and yes with history, you can return over and over. In fact, the more often you travel, the more often you turn to friends or art, and the more often you study history, the more you receive from it.
That's way better than mere usefulness.