One can never deal with real history until this becomes part of his gut:
“History is not about the past. It is about OTHER PEOPLE’S PRESENT.”
I love to read history books written in the 30s and 40s. It is hard to believe today, but real, serious history books dominated the market back then. If you want to know why, look what happened to the sequel to Gone With the Wind.
Margaret Mitchell died before she could write a sequel, even if she wanted to, but the book is still so popular that a major publisher kept trying to get a sequel written in the 1990s. But the reason that book was so popular was the reason they couldn’t produce Volume II: It dealt with a desperate, serious time in American history.
GWTW dealt with a people today’s generation is taught to regard as aliens.
So to avoid all the Political Incorrectness, they had the new book about IRELAND. Scarlett went to Ireland and Brett Butler was dead.
No blacks, no problem.
And no book.
Today’s histories always spend a lot of time trying to show how Jefferson or Franklin or whoever the book is supposed to be about really had completely Modern Opinions.
This is what one calls a Just-So Story. The term Just-So Story used to mean fairy tales for childen, where the good had to prevail and everybody lived happily ever after. Today’s history books always describe how historical figures were really pointing the way to Modern Correct Thought.
In other words modern history is written for modern children, average age forty or so.
Modern history is written about the PAST, not other people’s PRESENT. It is written about how they led to the Only True Faith of Political Correctness.
You will see these words: “He was a man of HIS time.” Clearly the writer is writing about his own time. That is not what history is about.
There are three reasons to study history, and the third is now forgotten:
1) You study history to find out how another person’s PRESENT was;
2) The fact tht you are in the present and have to strain to see how his present looked is only useful if yu see point 3):
3) There will be OTHER presents.
Newspapers are there to describe current thought and current events.
To a real historian, the present is just where he happens to be.
#1 by Shari on 06/11/2006 - 9:07 pm
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“The past is other people’s present.” I think I have realized this before but hadn’t such a good way to state it. Just because a generation loses a war doesn’t change their mind, it just makes it harder pass along what they would like to the next generation. Winning a war doesn’t make anyone wiser either. But I suppose it is easier to believe propaganda when you “win.” At least for a while. And yes, this present isn’t forever.
#2 by Elizabeth on 06/13/2006 - 8:57 pm
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There’s a subspecialty of history known as “historiography.” Simply put, it’s
the study of the methods of and the information available to historians of
the past.
A lot of Marxist …um… nonsense shows up in it, mainly when the subjects are
20th century historians known for their involvement with Communism or Socialism.
Basically, competent historians, whether they were writing in the 5th century B.C.,
the 3rd century A.D., or more recently, used three basic source materials:
(1)what written history was available to them; (2) interviews (whether with folks
who’d been eyewitnesses or folks who had talked to eyewitnesses) and (3) letters.