and what more do we forget
May. 19th, 2010 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbThe interesting thing about history is its incredible variety.
I'm sitting here staring at my bookshelves, wondering what book I should read when I recover my brain - and no, it hasn't grown back yet - and it struck me. There really is a vast amount of difference in what I'm interested in now, a difference that would hardly have occured to me in school.* The differences between a Xenophon and an Apuleius are nearly as great as the differences between the Njal's saga and the plays of Marlowe. In the last few years, I've read books on literacy in ancient Greece and the role of royal women in medieval Byzantium, on Roman imperialism and Genghis Khan, narratives of women from WWII and the development of Victorian commerce, Cretan prehistory and Judean prophecy.
Beside me, right now, are books on early Greek science, a discussion of a medieval magical compendium, a book on the fall of France in WWII, Plutarch's On Sparta and two volumes of Biale's Cultures of the Jews. My shelves are slightly biased towards paperbacks on various periods of English history - apart from things I've bought for college or related subjects, my nonfiction-acquiring habits tend to lean towards stuff I pick up in the bargain section for two or three quid on a whim. Sad, considering there are many things I'm more fascinated in than English history. But even within English history, there's a vast difference between Edward I and William of Orange's overthrow of James II.
A lot of the history reading is done on a whim. No one told me to read Judith Herrin's Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, or Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. Either one of those is several years ago now, but they rather opened my eyes to the variety of historical experience. The principal requirement of a good historian is imaginative empathy combined with a detached analysis of the available evidence. Empathy is one of the virtues that history, properly taught**, inculcates. Xenophon's view of the world - and his place within it - is incredibly alien. The same goes for Polybius, who I'm reading at the moment, or the author of Njal's Saga, or even, getting a little bit closer to modern, Sir Walter Scott.
I find it hard to understand people who claim to have no interest in history. That's like not having any interest in other people.
There are three history books that, quite literally, changed my world. First is the aforementioned Gulag. Regardless of the author's merits, it was the first "serious" history book I read (I was still in school, and utterly unused to a bibliography that runs over a dozen pages), and it opened up an entire new vista of ways to think about history: not just Dates and Important Personages, but the social worlds of different sorts of people, many of whom are not remembered as individuals, but only in aggregate. It opened up the idea that forgotten individuals are, or should be, just as vital to history as Great (Wo)Men.
Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was my first experience of a history that examined the interconnected effects of economic and social constraints on a specific class of persons: maritime workers in the golden age of sail. It was a struggle to read, but ultimately a rewarding one.
But it's Xenophon's Anabasis that probably marks the greatest change. Properly speaking, I suppose it's not exactly history, but more a self-aggrandising sort of memoir. I'd read some of the ancient sources before - Tacitus, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus - but Xenophon is the first time I enjoyed the experience. The Anabasis marks the first time I felt confident about being able to meet an ancient author on his own ground, so to speak.
So if I end up in academia, it's probably Xenphon's fault. Well. If I'm allowed to blame the guy who's over two thousand years dead.
*What did I get taught in school? Oh, right. Early Christian Ireland, Plantations, Plantations, 1798, Catholic Emancipation, the Land League and Home Rule, Sinn Féin, Irish government 1922-1969. A smattering of Greek and Roman history - a very poor smattering - and a for-children's version of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, with all the really interesting detail removed. And European history 1870-1966, with neither of the World Wars or the Spanish Civil War included. I can't say I can argue with the teaching choices there, though: the wars are fairly popular documentary topics, after all.
**I do object to the teaching of history in school as Important Events and People. Really. It's a dry, dull way to teach: social and economic considerations and the concrete details of daily life (you can tell I have an archaeological bias, right?) are at least as important, and far more interesting. I mean, I've forgotten a lot about the Land League, but I remember that Michael Davis lost an arm in a factory accident as a child, used compensation money to get educated as a journalist, and spent a while in prison for running guns. That's a more interesting discussion, right there, about the social, economic and political situation of his time than where and when he met Charles Stewart Parnell.
I'm sitting here staring at my bookshelves, wondering what book I should read when I recover my brain - and no, it hasn't grown back yet - and it struck me. There really is a vast amount of difference in what I'm interested in now, a difference that would hardly have occured to me in school.* The differences between a Xenophon and an Apuleius are nearly as great as the differences between the Njal's saga and the plays of Marlowe. In the last few years, I've read books on literacy in ancient Greece and the role of royal women in medieval Byzantium, on Roman imperialism and Genghis Khan, narratives of women from WWII and the development of Victorian commerce, Cretan prehistory and Judean prophecy.
Beside me, right now, are books on early Greek science, a discussion of a medieval magical compendium, a book on the fall of France in WWII, Plutarch's On Sparta and two volumes of Biale's Cultures of the Jews. My shelves are slightly biased towards paperbacks on various periods of English history - apart from things I've bought for college or related subjects, my nonfiction-acquiring habits tend to lean towards stuff I pick up in the bargain section for two or three quid on a whim. Sad, considering there are many things I'm more fascinated in than English history. But even within English history, there's a vast difference between Edward I and William of Orange's overthrow of James II.
A lot of the history reading is done on a whim. No one told me to read Judith Herrin's Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, or Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. Either one of those is several years ago now, but they rather opened my eyes to the variety of historical experience. The principal requirement of a good historian is imaginative empathy combined with a detached analysis of the available evidence. Empathy is one of the virtues that history, properly taught**, inculcates. Xenophon's view of the world - and his place within it - is incredibly alien. The same goes for Polybius, who I'm reading at the moment, or the author of Njal's Saga, or even, getting a little bit closer to modern, Sir Walter Scott.
I find it hard to understand people who claim to have no interest in history. That's like not having any interest in other people.
There are three history books that, quite literally, changed my world. First is the aforementioned Gulag. Regardless of the author's merits, it was the first "serious" history book I read (I was still in school, and utterly unused to a bibliography that runs over a dozen pages), and it opened up an entire new vista of ways to think about history: not just Dates and Important Personages, but the social worlds of different sorts of people, many of whom are not remembered as individuals, but only in aggregate. It opened up the idea that forgotten individuals are, or should be, just as vital to history as Great (Wo)Men.
Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was my first experience of a history that examined the interconnected effects of economic and social constraints on a specific class of persons: maritime workers in the golden age of sail. It was a struggle to read, but ultimately a rewarding one.
But it's Xenophon's Anabasis that probably marks the greatest change. Properly speaking, I suppose it's not exactly history, but more a self-aggrandising sort of memoir. I'd read some of the ancient sources before - Tacitus, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus - but Xenophon is the first time I enjoyed the experience. The Anabasis marks the first time I felt confident about being able to meet an ancient author on his own ground, so to speak.
So if I end up in academia, it's probably Xenphon's fault. Well. If I'm allowed to blame the guy who's over two thousand years dead.
*What did I get taught in school? Oh, right. Early Christian Ireland, Plantations, Plantations, 1798, Catholic Emancipation, the Land League and Home Rule, Sinn Féin, Irish government 1922-1969. A smattering of Greek and Roman history - a very poor smattering - and a for-children's version of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, with all the really interesting detail removed. And European history 1870-1966, with neither of the World Wars or the Spanish Civil War included. I can't say I can argue with the teaching choices there, though: the wars are fairly popular documentary topics, after all.
**I do object to the teaching of history in school as Important Events and People. Really. It's a dry, dull way to teach: social and economic considerations and the concrete details of daily life (you can tell I have an archaeological bias, right?) are at least as important, and far more interesting. I mean, I've forgotten a lot about the Land League, but I remember that Michael Davis lost an arm in a factory accident as a child, used compensation money to get educated as a journalist, and spent a while in prison for running guns. That's a more interesting discussion, right there, about the social, economic and political situation of his time than where and when he met Charles Stewart Parnell.
