History ain’t changed?

Insights from an old history book.

Our library (the combined book-hoards of our consultants) contains a number of books that none of us has yet read, for whatever reason.  Recently our tutoring consultant was reminded of one author he enjoys, Jacob Bronowski, and sought him out; it turns out that there was an unread history book by Jacob (in collaboration).  He is now almost done with the 500 or so pages.

The motivation for the book was a perceived inadequacy in the teaching of history at the university level.  The authors wanted to present the history of science as part of the general history of Western intellectual development, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.  Apparently at the time (the book was published a little over sixty years ago) the history of science was not taught as a subject, and not included in other history courses.  The authors were breaking new ground in following the development of political, philosophical, scientific and social ideas all together over some four or five centuries.

Things have changed.  The names in the book, Leonardo da Vinci, Hobbes and Locke, Descartes and Newton and the rest, would all be familiar to our tutor’s history students.  (Or, shall we say, should be familiar to them at least by the time of the final exam.)  Of course High School students (even those taking Advanced Placement courses) can’t be expected to master the depth of knowledge and analysis that Bronowski and Mazlish present; there’s a lot more other history to absorb in addition.  But the teaching of history has indeed progressed, in the direction our authors intended.

We were already aware that the writing of history has changed over time.  Our tutor read Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War a few months ago, and was struck by how much space was taken up by speeches urging or justifying a certain course of action.  That’s quite understandable; the Classical Greeks had a very oral culture.  There is rather less consideration of strategy and tactics than there would be in a modern account, and very little discussion of social or economic matters.

We had also noticed that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Medieval historians depended almost exclusively on documents.  The discussion of what had actually happened often turned on the interpretation of a passage in some text, requiring skill in scholarship (which is different from skill in science, though no less difficult if done well).  Sometimes more recent techniques show that the documents we have can be misleading.

The question arises: in what way is our present teaching, or writing, of history deficient?  What are we ignoring, that a later generation will include?  It would be arrogant to conclude that we’d finally got it completely right, that there was no further effort needed.  At the same time, including any more material means leaving out something we now have.  No doubt understanding the manor economy of the Middle Ages is a good replacement for memorizing the dates of the kings of England and France.  But there is always a trade-off.

And we haven’t even touched on the different ways of interpreting history.