This weekend’s question is inspired by an essay at the Guardian recently by Martin Kettle which began thusly:
Earlier this year, one of my children made a confession. He had reached adult life knowing almost nothing about the English civil war. Could I recommend him a book on the subject? I could, and I did. And a few months later, I saw that the Hampstead theatre in north London was putting on a Howard Brenton play, 55 Days, about the events leading up to the execution of Charles I. So we went to that too. As we were leaving the theatre we talked about Oliver Cromwell and the dramas and dilemmas of 1648-9. And my son said: “I don’t think any of my school friends know anything about the civil war. But everyone in this country ought to know about it. They all ought to see that play.”
And Kettle goes on to discuss how a lack of general knowledge about English history has had a negative impact on British culture. Which is a notion I can neither agree with or disagree with, though it has a ring of truth and I would agree about the same thing being said about the United States.
But that’s not quite what I want to talk about. This is:
Which bits of history do you feel you should know more about?
If you’d like to connect your lack of knowledge to a larger cultural decline, feel free. But I’d really just like for us to geek out on history and the bits that interest us most.
I wish I could know more about a part of human history that we probably cannot know much more about: What was human life like in prehistory, before we had writing and before we could record much? I love the Clan of the Cave Bear series of novels because, in spite of some of their problems, they create a compelling and plausible re-creation of Ice Age human civilization.
As for those parts of history that we do know lots about and I’ve simply been negligent in learning about, I’d like to learn more about ancient Greece and Rome. I feel like I have only the slightest grasp of those eras and their influence on our modern civilization.
You?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD/QOTW, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTW sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
Well, I am a bit of an amateur historian, so there is already a lot I do know. What I’ve been trying to do in the last ten years or so has been to step outside of my really pretty strong base of european and north american history and get more perspectives on colonialism around the world and what led to the colonialism taking hold. The sentence that sums it up for me is a sentence from Ursula LeGuin: “The ships always come to the new world at a bad time.”
(The pixie has, as a result, been getting a very different approach to the cultural context of history than I did growing up.)
I also have been trying to understand more than just from what I can glean from my hurried reading of the newspapers in the morning (and, yes, I read newspapers, find them better for my focus and I can carry them on the subway and I don’t need to worry about cell coverage or dropping them or the battery running down) on recent history, things already in the ‘past’, yet not, still affecting peoples’ lives, just not on the front pages. EG: great book by Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism. And the Genocide in Rwanda. Also Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization. Still affecting everyone’s lives.
I spent a couple of years a bit ago reading in depth in Quaker history. Lots of ‘testaments’, writings of George Fox, John Woolman, Margaret Fell, Mary Dyer,…then there is the recently published Fit For Freedom, Not For Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye.
Btw, you may have heard of this because it’s been getting a lot of press lately, but if you haven’t, I highly recommend reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Another very good book, although not new (although he did put out a new edition in the late ’90’s) is Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism.
In any case, where think my holes are is in places where I’m already reading. And, then, too, each person I meet contains multitudes, and I live in NYC, so each one opens up a vista of ignorance in myself. There is so much more I need to learn.
This isn’t an era, I need more study–because I, and, well most everyone here lived it, but, the years following 9/11. I think children who were born after those events when they’re of age really need to have this taught to them at great lengths in school, and to study it on their own. I think they need to know that even a great, and advanced country like ours can succumb to mass-hysteria. I think they need to know about the madness that led to the Iraq war. Or about a time when they didn’t have to get a full pat down by a TSA officer when they’re at an airport. Or a time before Homeland Security or the Patriot Act. They need to know that anti-intellectualism is dangerous, and it thrived mightily during the presidency of Bush 43.
A savvy teacher would draw parallels to another point in American history: The Red Scare and the Vietnam War.
Almost anything NOT having to do with wars. I just finished a book ‘Tracks in the Sea’ about the life and work of Matthew Fontane Maury who revolutionized sea travel, weather study, oceanography, US Navy practices and other things. I got to the end of the book and thought. How come we never heard about this guy in History class? He had at least as much influence on human activities as Sherman, Grant, Napoleon, you name them; and yet nada in history class. So… I’m sure there’s a lot more history out there about scientists, inventors, artists, medical people, educators, philosophers etc. etc. that I have heard little or nothing about.
I’d say more influence! I’ll have to read that book.
Edited to moan that the NYPL apparently has only 1 copy and it is for In Library Use Only. If I want to take it home, I’ll have to purchase a copy of my own. Mind you, it’ll go nicely alongside Bowdich, the two of them would have probably gotten along like that famouse house on fire.
There’s a great book calleg Longitude: The True Story of the Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. It’s about the man who invented reliable clocks so that longitude could finally be calculated effectively, which was a big deal, and only happened in the late 18th century. He had to deal with all sorts of nonsense from the Royal Society, who wanted their Lunar Theory to win the Longitude Prize. It’s really interesting.
The English CIvil War is an interestingly under-known time, especially all of the radical thinking that accompanied it – there was even one group called The Levellers who made Communism look weak and half-arsed and some other’s called Fifth Columnists who thought there should be no king because Jesus was coming soon to fill the role. I know a little of these things, but not as much as I would like to or shall.
I also know next to nothing about the Commonwealth Era under Cromwell, excepting the atrocities committed on Ireland and the banning of Christmas.
A proper even look at the slave trade would also be good.
I’d like to know more about Spain in the years preceding the Franco takeover. I know that there were all kinds of interesting experiments going on at that time before the Spanich fascists took over and snuffed it all out, but don’t know much more beyond a rough outline which may or may not be accurate.
I admit to be woefully lacking in almost any type of history. Of course, I have the basic knowledge that comes from schooling, and just every day living, but I’ve never explored it beyond that. I’ve spent so many years educating myself on everything plant and garden related that I simply wouldn’t have time for it, anyway.
While I certainly see the importance of what came before, I think it’s more important to focus on the now, and the future. Taking time to learn all about the details of the Civil War would do nothing for me. Same with any other war.
Now talk to me about Victory gardens, and how the government encouraged the populace to create them, and this is history that interests me.
So, to answer the question properly, I will say that I’d like to learn the history behind the National Park system. When and why people started seeing the importance of preserving land for plants and wildlife. Throw in the Forest Preserves, too.
This stuff I could read about without falling asleep.
Check out Ken Burns miniseries on the National Park system. It is really jampacked with info, and is stunning to watch as well.
I feel like I ought to know a lot more about the period after WW2 and about 1995, when I started paying attention to news, politics, etc. Especially in the U.S., so I could better understand current events, and the history of the middle east, since so many of the problems and conflicts there arose during that time. Nothing stopping me from getting some books, I guess. Except the potential awfulness of seeing that many of the problems could have been easily avoided, while we still suffer direct consequences.
Pick anything. The problem is, you can study even a small part of history your whole life and still find new things that change (or -should- change) your view on it. I’ve been a fairly serious student of WWII for over forty years and still find important (or at least fascinating) bits I was unaware of in any detail or even at all.
Right now I’m reading a history of Lark Force, the Australians sent to defend Rabaul and New Britain from the Japanese at the start of WWII who were abandoned to death or capture almost immediately when there was plenty of time to resupply, reinforce or evacuate them. There was never a chance the tiny group could hold against any force at all and everyone knew it, but there they sat, just because. Prior to this I was just loosely aware that the Japanese took Rabaul at the start of the war. Period.
And if you learned about WWII prior to around 2000, what you learned was most likely wrong because many very important documents and records were under a fifty-year classification. Don’t even get me started on the atomic bombings. Loads of crap from every direction with very few even close to the truth.
So it’s important to remember that no matter how much you know, it probably isn’t squat. Stay humble.
Southeast Asian history would be my #1. Also ancient meso-American history. Also early medieval European history, especially the Kievan Rus. Also African history in general, which no one ever talks about.
And I know we can’t know about this at the present time but I wish I could learn more about Minoan Crete.
I already know a lot about the Cold War but it is one of my favorite topics.
There is actually a lot written about “Africa” and the various nations therein, but, ime, that written by europeans is mostly in French and that written by the Africans often doesn’t get wide distribution.
The best single element of my education up to now was the Schools Council Project’s History ‘O’ Level, in which I benefitted from one aspect of the hippy-trippy experimental sixties. And one thing it has given me is an appreciation of history as something far more interesting than the “Actions of Great Men” (and I use that latter word deliberately).
The history that most interests me is that of “The Others”. For example, the last British history I read was A Radical History of Britain by Edward Vallance, which celebrates popular movements throughout the ages. Similarly, in Japan I’m far more interested in the life of the bonge (meaning the non-samurai ordinary people, though tellingly this word is almost unknown nowadays!). This also explains why I love Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari and Shindo’s Oni Baba, both of which take the perspective of the bonge.
But in terms of big holes, it’s South American history I really need to be getting into. Any recommendations gratefully received.
Two questions: Do you read spanish? Have you ever read any of the writings of Che Guevara or Simon Bolivar? Yes, they are mostly polemics, but they are artifacts, and not bad places to start. Personally, I haven’t ever seen a general book about S. America (just like I haven’t ever seen a general book about Africa or Europe) that is worth recommending. There probably is something out there, but I just haven’t come across it yet. I tend to tackle a place or culture by getting a work on some topic I’m interested in (like, strangely enough, sewers, or other public health systems) and then just work outwards from that. One book that has some interesting essays on some peoples in Latin America is the collection edited by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz and Joji Carino Reclaiming Balance: Indigenous Peoples, Conflict Resolution & Sustainable Development. Conflict resolution is another of my topics … Probably because I’m so bad at it.
Have you ever seen Walker?
Don’t read Spanish (or Portuguese), which I recognise as a disadvantage. Guevara and Bolivar I’ve read indirectly, but yes, I should tackle them head on.
I’m the same with my approach to history: I tackled Chinese Song Dynasty history mostly through the medium of law and local government, which does cover a wide range of human concerns!
Oh, and many thanks for the reminder of Walker, which is one of those films I keep being reminded I have to see, and keep forgetting.
Get. Walker. Now. lol.
Done. Many thanks!
Since I loved Alex Cox’s work (and used to enjoy his introductions to the Moviedrome series on, I think, BBC2) I kind of owe it to him to watch the “movie which destroyed his career”.
It is such a great movie. Someday, it will be called a masterpiece. I think it was Ed Harris’ first starring role. Joe Strummer did the soundtrack, which worked so very, very well.
I want to learn more about everything. I think the most important step is to get a general framework (which, boringly enough, often means the “names and dates” so despised by many academics; that way when I hear about a particular thing having happened in the 1870s I can think about other stuff that was going on then and try to build links between them…
(I had some perversely bad history teachers, including an Irishman who regarded Oliver Cromwell as the best thing EVER – possibly explaining why he was teaching in England… but even that history teaching sort of petered out some time around the middle of the Victorian era, and I’ve never formally learned twentieth-century history at all apart from a bit about the Great Depression in the US.)
There’s whole eras I’d like to know more about, but there’s a lack of documentation. The age I know very little about (and yet think I know a lot thanks to costume dramas) is the bit around the Hanoverian takeover era. We THINK we know a fair bit, it’s the start of the Georges on the throne, lots of costume dramas are set in this era and yet… the image we have of a stable society in this age is misleading. The last great invasion of Scots into England, the constant ferment about governance, the growth of modern institutions such as the office of the Prime Minister (which started as a term of abuse aimed at Walpole) and the fact that the grandparents of the stable society Gentlefolk were the people who knocked a King’s head off and arranged for another King to be replaced by his daughter and her husband. Serene times which actually were very turbulent. Plus by the time it got to the American Independance thing, the fact that English society was as divided as American society is totally overlooked (major split over here as to whether the King’s subjects in the colonies should have the same rights and freedoms as those in Britain) and yet we see it as a quiet time when the only thing that mattered was wearing the right bonnet!
Near where I grew up is a triumphal arch built to celebrate the Freedom of the Americas. It’s now crumbling obscurely into dust in thick woodland. It was built expressly to annoy the King who’d announced he was visiting (and promply turned tail and stormed off when he saw it). Decades later, Queen Victoria took a 50 mile detour rather than pass through the village. Yet we see this time now as the UK vs. the USA and stable.
I know so little about African and South American history or geography that I really have to read up on them both.
Right niw, I am reading a bio of Noah Webster, aka the dictionary guy, who was so much more–father of American patent law, first American lecturer who made a name fir himself on the circuit, connected with just about every big name in Revolutionary and Federal era America, started America’s first daily newspaper, and conducted the first medical survey of a disease in the world, etc., all while, according to the author, living with a form of OCD and depression for most of his life.