Why History?

In England it is, or used to be, a big event to turn 21. At my 21^st birthday party I made place-cards with verses for each of the guests, who represented different eras in my young life. One was for a fellow-student at University College, London, where we were undergraduates, studying for what was called an Honors Degree in History. On her card, I wrote:

Why we both took History
Has always been a mystery.

Truly, apart from the sheer fascination of the Past, there was little value in History as an academic major. You could of course become a teacher, a relatively poorly-paid profession at any level – but my own teachers at the College were, almost without exception, so dull and uninspiring that I had no desire to join their ranks. The other alternative was to be a Historian, writing books and articles which, in all likelihood, few people would ever buy or read.

As things turned out, during the next decade or so, I dipped my toe in both of those unattractive possibilities, with results which might be most kindly described as “meager.” My highest academic attainment as a teacher (if you don’t count the extremely unorthodox “floating university” on which I taught for two round-the-world semester voyages) was as an “Associate Professor of History” at a small Community College in Oregon, where a “free speech” controversy I stirred up soon resulted in my disgrace and dismissal (palliated somewhat only 40 years later by my being invited back to speak as a Guest of Honor). None of my students, to my knowledge, has ever benefited from any class-time spent with me.

As for becoming a Historian, I did indeed write, and eventually publish (in 1989), one solid work of social History, about a subject which had interested me ever since I came to settle in Southern California in the 1950s – the cultural impact of the “mass automobile” upon that region, which, in the 1920s, had been the first area in the world fully to experience it. The book was called The Great Car Craze, and its chief distinction (so far) has been to become required reading for one class for one term at one Southern California college.

But studying History did have certain side benefits. It sharpened my awareness of how we get our information about the past, what sources are more, and less, trustworthy, and how biases inevitably enter into historical writing. It made me appreciate the writings of ancient “authorities,” like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch – even with all their faults and shortcomings. There were also more modern writers like Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and those who made History, as well as wrote it, like Winston Churchill.

But what can we really learn from History? I am forced to repeat the bitter comment, variously attributed, that “Nobody has ever learned anything from History – except that nobody has ever learned anything from History.” The classic example might be that of Hitler, who failed to learn from Napoleon that it’s a bad idea to invade Russia, especially in the winter – also that supply lines are critical, and the farther you go in, the more vulnerable they become.

History, like Geography, tends to be ethnocentric. I have a collection of world maps published in different countries, each map showing its own country right in the center. And what I learned from studying history in both English and American schools is that Americans tend to see their history as beginning around 1776, with the Revolution – but to the British, that is more or less where American history ends – because that is where America stops being British.

Of course, American History is itself a separate field of study – and in fact I chose to major in it at London University. All my professors there were British – and I learned that one of the best biographies of Abraham Lincoln had been written by an Englishman – Lord Charnwood.

Fortunately or otherwise, we get much of our historical information nowadays from movies and videos, which have to compress complicated subjects and years of events into a few hours of entertaining drama. But of course, most human experience does not lend itself to such treatment, and the patient historians who try to piece together what really happened must be content to see their careful work gather dust on library shelves.

Nevertheless, the Past is still there, even if its true History will always be a mystery.