What is History?

Henry Ford, industrialist

“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

Chicago Tribune, 1916, quoted in "Henry Ford: Collector," The Henry Ford Museum, https://www.thehenryford.org/history-and-mission/henry-ford-collector/

“When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk and I think so yet.”

American Legion Magazine (1932), quoted in "Henry Ford: Collector," The Henry Ford Museum, https://www.thehenryford.org/history-and-mission/henry-ford-collector/

The author of Ecclesiastes

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

Ecclesiastes 1, English Standard Version

L. P. Hartley, novelist

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

The Go-Between (1953)

Roy Porter, medical historian:

“The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.”

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 13

C. S. Lewis, medievalist, Christian apologist, author:

“Each of us finds that in his own life every moment of time is completely filled. He is bombarded every second by sensations, emotions, thoughts, which he cannot attend to for multitude, and nine-tenths of which he must simply ignore. A single second of lived time contains more than can be recorded. And every second of past time has been like that for every man that ever lived. The past … in its reality, was a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments: any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination. By far the greater part of this teeming reality escaped human consciousness almost as soon as it occurred. None of us could at this moment give anything like a full account of his own life for the last twenty-four hours. We have already forgotten; even if we remembered, we have not time. The new moments are upon us. At every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of “history” falls off the world into total oblivion.”

Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014), 133.

Ursula Le Guin, novelist

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it--can we even remember it--until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it.

Ursula K. Le Guin, <i>Tales from Earthsea</i> (New York: Harcourt, 2001), <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106019071353">http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106019071353</a>, xii.

William Shakespeare, the Bard

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, Macbeth, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.5.5.html

Marilynne Robinson, novelist

“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. . . . [W]e all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations.”
Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 197–98.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, historian

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

<i>Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History</i> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x030254635">http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x030254635</a>.

Virginia Woolf, novelist

For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.

All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded. . . . [I] went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore . . . holding your torch firm in your hand.

<i>A Room of One’s Own: And, Three Guineas</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 116–17.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, social scientists

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

The Communist Manifesto (1848) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

Napoleon Bonaparte, general, emperor, dictator, prisoner

“What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.”

Emmanuel-August-Dieudonné de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène: Journal of the Private Life and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon at Saint Helena, Vol. 4, Part 7 (London, 1823), pp. 251–252.


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Why is history important?

James Baldwin, novelist and essayist

"Americans keep wondering what has "got into" the students. What has "got into" them is their history in this country. They are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them. Many Americans may have forgotten, for example, the reign of terror in the 1920s that drove Negroes out of the South. Five hundred thousand moved North in one year. Some of the people who got to the North barely in time to be born are the parents of the students now going to school. This was forty years ago, and not enough has happened—not enough freedom has happened. But these young people are determined to make it happen and make it happen now. They cannot be diverted. It seems to me that they are the only people in this country now who really believe in freedom. Insofar as they can make it real for themselves, they will make it real for all of us. The question with which they present the nation is whether or not we really want to be free. It is because these students remain so closely related to their past that they are able to face with such authority a population ignorant of its history and enslaved by a myth. And by this population I do not mean merely the unhappy people who make up the southern mobs. I have in mind nearly all Americans.
These students prove unmistakably what most people in this country have yet to discover: that time is real."

"They Can't Turn Back," Mademoiselle (August 1960), reprinted in James Baldwin, <i>The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985</i> (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 228.

William Faulkner, novelist

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
<i>Requiem for a Nun</i>, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Vintage, 2012), 73

It's all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, awe have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need a even a fourteen year old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when sombebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim." (190–191)

William Faulkner, <i>Intruder in the Dust</i> (New York: Vintage, 1991).

Iggy Pop, frontman, The Stooges

In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of [Edward Gibbon's] The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin [first published from 1766–1789]). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. . . .

The best part of this experience came after the fact—my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit:

  1. I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day.
  2. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins – military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial – are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective.
  3. The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not.
  4. I find out how little I know.
  5. I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things.

I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.

Iggy Pop, “Caesar Lives,” <i>Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics</i> 23, no. 1 (2015): 187, <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.23.1.0187">https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.23.1.0187</a>, https://www-jstor-org.proxy.kennesaw.edu/stable/arion.23.1.0187, excerpted at https://ibelievethatimayknow.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/caesar-lives-iggy-pop-reflects-on-the-applicability-of-the-history-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire/

Livy, historian of ancient Rome

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

<i>The Early History of Rome: Books I-V of The History of Rome from Its Foundation.</i>, trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1971), <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015002203688">http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015002203688</a>.

Horace, poet and political commentator, c. 20 BCE

Interrogate the writings of the wise,
Asking them to tell you how you can
Get through your life in a peaceable tranquil way.
Will it be greed, that always feels poverty-stricken,
That harrasses and torments you all your days?
Will it be hope and fear about trivial things,
In anxious alternation in your mind?

Horace, The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition, trans. David Ferry (New York: Macmillan, 2002), I.18.

Simone Weil, French mystic and freedom fighter, c. 1942

"We cannot be made better except by the influence upon us of what is better than we are.
"What is better than we are cannot be found in the future. The future is empty and is filled by our imagination. Our imagination can only picture a perfection on our own scale. It is just as imperfect as we are; it does not surpass us by a single hair's breadth. We can find something better than ourselves in the present, but mixed with the medocre and the bad; and our discriminative faculty is as imperfect as ourselves. The past offers us a partially completed discrimination. For, since it is only the eternal that time cannot harm, the mere passing of time effects a certain separation between what is eternal and what is not. Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past as in the present. This is true above all for the past which is temporally so dead that it offers no food for our passions."

Simone Weil, "The Romanesque Renaissance," <i>Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings</i>, trans. Richard Rees (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 44–45

Alisdair McIntyre, philosopher

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'

Alasdair C. MacIntyre, <i>After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory</i>, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x002038722">http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x002038722</a>, 216.

Graham Swift, novelist

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man—let me offer you a definition—is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making things up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall—or when he's about to drown—he sees, passing rapidly before him the story of his whole life.

<i>Waterland</i> (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), <a href="http://archive.org/details/waterland00swifrich">http://archive.org/details/waterland00swifrich</a>, 62–63

Alan Jacobs, literary scholar and author

We must cultivate what the great American novelist Thomas Pynchon calls "temporal bandwidth"—an awareness of our experience as extending into the past and the future. In Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen explains that temporal bandwidth is "the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.” If we want to extend our bandwidth, we begin with the past, because exploring the past requires only willingness. . . . To increase your temporal bandwidth in the direction of the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of, for example, descending in wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tweet you didn’t take time to understand. You realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment – which, it seems safe to say, tend not to produce a tranquil mind. Another benefit of reflecting on the past is awareness of the ways that actions in one moment reverberate into the future. You see that some decisions that seemed trivial when they were made proved immensely important, while others which seemed world-transforming quickly sank into insignificance. The “tenuous” self, sensitive only to the needs of This Instant, always believes – often incorrectly – that the present is infinitely consequential."

Alan Jacobs, “To Survive Our High-Speed Society, Cultivate ‘temporal Bandwidth’” <i>The Guardian</i>, June 16, 2018, sec. Opinion, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/temporal-bandwith-social-media-alan-jacobs">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/temporal-bandwith-social-media-alan-jacobs</a>.

"By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the moment. Our attention thereby becomes free." (49)

G. K. Chesterton, journalist and novelist

"Tradition means giving means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, Company, 1909), 83.

<!-- ### George Santayana, philosopher
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

[In context:]"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp."

The Life of Reason; or, the Phases of Human Progress (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), 284, https://archive.org/details/lifeofreasonorph01sant/page/284 -->

Joel Breakstone, researcher

"When the Internet is how we become informed citizens, traditional ways of reading are not merely ineffective (Gigerenzer & Gassmaier, 2011; Hertwig & Engel, 2016; Kozyreva et al., 2020). They’re dangerous (Caulfield, 2018; Warzel, 2021). As far back as 1971, Herbert Simon presciently noted that information overload results in a scarcity of attention. Today, when advertisers, corporations, lobbyists, clickbait sites, conspiracy theorists, hate groups, and foreign governments work overtime to hijack attention, often the wisest thing to do is not to read, but to preserve attention by practicing strategic ignoring (Wineburg & McGrew, 2019). Under conditions of limited attention, the most crucial decision to make is where to allocate it."

Joel Breakstone et al., “Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait,” <i>Educational Researcher</i>, May 26, 2021, 0013189X2110174, <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211017495">https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211017495</a>. Preprint

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Pub: 10 Nov 2021 14:40 UTC

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