What is History?
"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce
"Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves." G. M. Trevelyan.
"To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt
"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Cicero
"The past is useless. That explains why it is past." Wright Morris
"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman
"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon
"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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 yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy
"What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." G. W. F. Hegel
"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life." Fernand Braudel
"The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." E. H. Carr
"If you do not like the past, change it." William L. Burton
"History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx
"An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel Eliot Morison
"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood
"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford
"That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius
"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke
"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna Comnena
"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud
"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact." Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Jackson Turner
History is the lie commonly agreed upon. (Voltaire)
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. (George Orwell)
History is more or less bunk. (Henry Ford)
History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. (Ambrose Bierce)
History could be divided into events which do not matter and events which probably never occurred. (W.R. Inge)
History is only a confused heap of facts. (G.K. Chesterton)
History is Philosophy teaching by examples. (Thucydides)
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. (Cicero)
The first lesson of history is the good of evil. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history. (Kahlil Gibran)
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (Santayana)
History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past. (Johann Huizinga)
A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. (Woodrow Wilson)
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, ... and possibly a tragic one. (Hermann Hesse)
History is a people's memory, and without memory man is demoted to the lower animals. (Malcolm X)
Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducible from it. (G.W.F. Hegel)
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. (Abba Eban)
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. (Gustave Flaubert)
Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here. (Thomas Carlyle)
If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written. (Samuel Johnson)
History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth. (Cicero)
History is the "know thyself" of humanity -- the self-consciousness of mankind. (Droysen)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx)
History is a science, no less and no more. (J.B. Bury)
History is past politics and politics present history. (E.A. Freeman)
We teach history only when it can be made into an entertaining anecdote, a procedure which is about as sound as leaving the teaching of sexual hygiene to a commercial traveller. (Aubrey Maran)
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. (Joseph Conrad)
History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . .The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. (Jane Austen)
The historian can learn much from the novelist. (Samuel Eliot Morison)
History is an argument without end. (Peter Geyl)
Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it. (Oscar Wilde)
History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it. (Otto von Bismarck)
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing. (Boris Pasternak)
Historical knowledge is not a variety of knowledge, but it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing. (Benedetto Croce)
Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence -- not detachment and objectivity. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can. It is perhaps because they can be useful to him in this respect that he tolerates their existence. (Samuel Butler)
It is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. (Brian Friel)
History and myth are two aspects of a kind of grand pattern in human destiny: history is the mass of observable or recorded fact, but myth is the abstract or essence of it. (Robertson Davies)
All statements about the past can be considered as very crude ways of expressing possible, hypothetical judgments about future experiences. (Pardon Tillinghast)
Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the redoing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the present. (R.G. Collingwood)
Nothing capable of being memorized is history. (R.G. Collingwood)
History... is a tool we use each generation or each year to help get along in the world, discarding the old tool for a new one whenever necessary. (Paul K. Conkin)
History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss. (W.S. Holt)
BALANCED AND USEFUL HISTORY. It is important for students to understand from "where I'm coming from" when it comes to how I will present material. This following article was instrumental in making me re-evaluate how I taught American history.
"Nothing Wrong with Teaching
What's Right About U.S."
Historians have focused on America's weaknesses, not its strengths.
By Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman
December 30 2001
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most Sovietologists were caught
flat-footed. With their lives' work based on the assumption of an enduring
communist state, they were ill-prepared to offer explanations when V.I.
Lenin's legacy went poof. Many American intellectuals find themselves
similarly empty-handed after Sept. 11.
The fall of the twin towers shook the twin assumptions of a generation of
scholarship: that America's relations with the Third World are essentially
wicked and that our country's domestic history can only be understood as a
continuing battle over race, class and gender. For more than 30 years,
scholars on the cutting edge of academe have helped students learn how to
identify where the U.S. fell short of its ideals, when it served only its
economic interests and how it turned a blind eye to those crushed by its
national ambitions.
Then came Sept. 11 and the spontaneous, heartfelt flag-waving that followed.
The America that academics had persistently characterized as "wrong"
had been wronged. Students returned to their classes changed. But they found
minimal guidance if they were looking for an intellectual bridge between love
of country and a sophisticated understanding of the nation's place in the
world. A lot of intellectuals burned that bridge decades ago. There are
numerous examples of the castigating tendency of American scholars, but my
personal favorite is an anthology I reviewed a few years back. This textbook
gave undergraduates three articles on World War II. The first was on Japanese
internment, the second on segregation of black troops in the South and the
third on harassment of Italian Americans. Every article discussed an aspect of
the war that was absolutely true, yet, collectively, they made for a portrait
of the war that was fundamentally false. No Adolf Hitler, no Emperor Hirohito,
no Holocaust--only an imperfect America battling its demons.
Historians who step out of this mold risk censure from academia's ivory tower.
Take professional attitudes toward Stephen Ambrose, arguably the nation's most
widely read historian, whose books frequently reach the best-seller list.
Ambrose is often disparaged as a superficial popularizer, but one senses that
what really bugs many fellow academics is his admiring portrayal of the
national experience and virtual silence on topics of race, class and gender.
Or take the critiques of Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, who for years has
suggested that something besides simple "American arrogance"
accounts for the Cold War. In conversation, and sometimes in print, other
historians often dismiss this careful scholar as an apologist for the powers
that be.
I understand modern historians' dilemma. As a fortysomething person, I grew up
with Che Guevara, Bob Dylan and the Vietnam War. I come from the activist
left, and I am proud of that heritage. I remain a liberal. Like many of my
colleagues, I hesitate to write books or give lectures that might appear to
whitewash America's character flaws or its choices as a superpower. But it is
time to admit that this generation of historians--with some notable
exceptions--has yet to deliver to students, and to the public, a usable and
balanced interpretation of the past.
Too many researchers have done a better job documenting the republic's
weaknesses than revealing its strengths. This lopsidedness ill serves both
foreign and domestic audiences. Our academic communities produce most of the
world's scholarship on the United States. Too often they implicitly encourage
critics in other countries to assume that America is culpable for all that
goes wrong. Foreign readers sometimes parrot the very things we have said
about ourselves. As teachers, we urge youth to learn from the country's
errors, but offer few lessons in what it has done right. How are they supposed
to build the future with only the blunt instrument of disillusionment?
I returned to the classroom Sept. 12 profoundly aware that I had not done
enough to prepare students to think complexly and comparatively. My dismay
deepened when one of them came back from a teach-in I had recommended
convinced that the real reason for the U.S. war in Afghanistan is to build an
oil pipeline across the country.
Since Sept. 11, I've been editing old lecture notes and asking students new
questions. Last week, at semester's end in my foreign-policy class, one
student summarized what she had learned by saying that the United States does
not help other nations just for humanitarian reasons. I agreed with her and
asked if she thought the same statement might apply to Mexico, from which she
commutes to school in San Diego.
But tinkering with classroom dynamics is not enough. We need to change our
approach more fundamentally. To begin, intellectuals should think harder about
how to apportion responsibility for world problems and stop reflexively
blaming America. That Saudi Arabia is undemocratic or that Israel and
Palestine have yet to resolve their conflict is not the fault of the United
States. Those countries are the primary actors in determining their fates. Our
country can answer for its friends no more than it can answer for its enemies,
sovereign nations all. We do not control the world, nor should we aspire to
Second, we need to recognize that the United States often has played at least
a decent hand in the game of world politics. Our country made its debut in
global affairs in 1917, when the intractable dilemmas of the Third World were
well advanced. Even so, Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which culminated in
the formation of the League of Nations, gave hope to colonized peoples that
self-determination was possible. During World War II the United States led the
effort to create the United Nations, the first body to give a voice and vote
to every country, no matter how small or poor.
These accomplishments do not obviate the fact that U.S. foreign policy has on
other occasions been hopelessly stupid, arrogant and even destructive. (The
ongoing punishment of Cuba is an example.) And, internally, issues of race,
class and gender have certainly fractured our society--but we work on them.
Many nations do not. We need to examine the U.S. within the context of world
history, comparing the nation not only with its ideals, but also with its
contemporaries.
Third, we need to be more self-critical if we want to exert the best
intellectual leadership. A few weeks ago, a conservative group associated with
the vice president's wife and former head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Lynne Cheney, published a list of quotes by academics about the
war in Afghanistan. The organization charged professors with being
insufficiently pro-American. Intellectuals have scorned the broadside as
"Cheney's blacklist."
It is easy to write off inflated, patently partisan criticisms made by people
we do not like. But that is a poor way to learn. It is far better to examine
why the critique resonates with the public. If some American intellectuals are
not as prepared to defend the nation as they are to criticize it, they may
deserve the accusations of "unpatriotic" that we have parried for 30
years. The political right will capture the American flag only if we hand it
to them.
Lastly, it would not hurt for professional skeptics to meditate--only briefly,
if it hurts too much--on the nature of American goodness. What the nation does
right is typically underrated, underreported and underappreciated by
academics. When I interviewed him for a book I wrote a few years ago, Canada's
top TV and radio regulator gave me a lecture on American cultural imperialism
through TV and radio airwaves. He surprised me by what he said next.
"Don't get me wrong," he interjected emphatically. "I have no
doubt that the Americans will always be the first to go to the mat for freedom
in the world."
This is a lesson that scholars can embrace and share. An open-minded
examination of America's historical willingness to defend freedom might help
those students with flags pinned on their backpacks to fit their newfound
patriotism with what they also learn about the nation's flaws.
The tragedy in New York and at the Pentagon rekindled respect for our country.
Academics who ignore this risk becoming as irrelevant as yesterday's
Sovietologists. Indeed, the twin assumptions of fin de siecle scholarship
deserve to come down. America is more than the sum of its problems. Some of
the nation's intellectuals may have been lacking this perspective on Sept. 11,
but it's a precious piece of wisdom we can take away from ground zero.
Taped to the door of Sam Wineburg's office at the University of Washington's College of Education are paired photos of dogs and their comically similar owners. Professor Wineburg greeted me with a pop quiz: "Which twins look most alike?"
Behind this playful question is an educational psychologist's interest in how people think, especially about history. Wineburg's "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Temple U. Press, 255 pages, [price]) shows that historical thought is not a natural process: it "goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to [understand] the past."
Wineburg told me his interest in this subject first awoke when he took a history class he couldn't ace with his good memory. He learned that histories aren't objective summaries of the facts but interpretations and arguments made out of information that's always incomplete. "But how did historians do that?" Wineburg asked. "Their books seemed like products of naturally systematic thought--which wasn't how my mind worked, but maybe I was just dumb!"
Wineburg's research into history and the mind has won many honors during his 12 years at the University of Washington. Through having students and professors think aloud while reading documents, he found that only novices just read something and decide what it means. "A historian's thought process is full of hunches and reverses, constant self-questionings and I-don't-knows," Wineburg explained.
Standardized history tests inhibit this kind of thinking, besides guaranteeing that students will seem vastly ignorant. "Periodically, starting with the first national survey in 1917, Americans have concluded from factual tests that kids don't know history. The conclusion isn't logical." Wineburg smiled wryly. "Kids have just never remembered the facts that adults sitting around a table making up a test say they should remember."
He pulled a U.S. history text from a shelf. "Why not teach how to question the facts? Here's Rosa Parks: 'Tired after a long day's work, she sat down in the front section reserved for whites.' Actually, Parks sat in the middle of the bus, available to anyone unless the front was full. Other accounts have her saying she wasn't especially tired and wasn't sure why she kept her seat when challenged. Did Parks intend an act of civil disobedience? Why do these historians disagree?"
Comparing documents, Wineburg added, "is detective work that kids are usually deprived of. It shows them that no single authority has the whole story, and it raises real questions of meaning." He paused, considering. "Every topic doesn't need endless debate. Students stay engaged once they realize history's not a fixed story they must swallow whole but a way of thinking they can apply to life."
Americans need this way of thinking, Wineburg told me. "We're deluged by conflicting, fragmented information that tries to steer us in particular directions. We need to raise citizens who ask themselves, 'Is this true? Who's saying so? What's the nature of the evidence?' Taught this way, history is a training ground for democracy."
Is such training too hard for schoolchildren? "We underestimate kids' abilities to think. Or we believe their self-esteem depends on having tasks they easily do. But we feel good about ourselves by doing things we thought we couldn't do, with capable people around to pick us up after a tumble and show us our reach can exceed our grasp."
"Historical Thinking" is an academic book, but not daunting or dry, and full of stories any reader can enjoy. Wineburg describes Primo Levi's moving encounter with the student who swore that if sent to Auschwitz he could have escaped. There's a chapter on drawings that schoolchildren made of their mental pictures of Pilgrims, Settlers, and Hippies for one of Wineburg's studies--readers can bypass the statistical tables and walk right into these young imaginations. The high-school history class discussion that veers off the rails is as gripping as well-crafted fiction.
Wineburg's conversation with me was no merely academic exercise either. "History gives us a kind of humility," he mused at one point. "I can read something written in 1860 but not know what it meant to live in 1860. I never lived in a world where you could wake up in the morning and go to an auction and buy people. Studying history, we think our way into what living in that world was like. It's the only form of time travel that exists."
