How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History Of History

discussions.

Preface

This is not a book about history. Rather, it’s a book about history books. You might well ask, Why would I want to read a book about history books? That’s a fair question. If you don’t read history books, there’s no reason at all. You can put this book down right now and save yourself some time and money. I’ll get over it. But if you do read history books, then let me explain why you should read it.

I’ve been reading, writing, and talking with people about history for a quarter of a century. By and large, the people I’ve encountered have a pretty good grasp of what history is and what a history book is. The former is the past and the latter is a true story about the past. These two plainspoken, intuitive, commonsensical definitions of history drive over-thinkers absolutely nuts. History, they often object, can’t be that simple. To prove that it’s not, over-thinkers write long books called things like Microhistory, Macrohistory, Metahistory, Hyperhistory, Quantumhistory and so on. Now these books, though hard to read, are interesting if you are excited by parsing, arranging, and rearranging words. I confess I am enthused by these things, but that’s because most of my friends are over-thinkers and that’s the way over-thinkers roll. But I can tell you with considerable assurance that these books, individually or as a bunch, do no damage whatsoever to the plainspoken, intuitive, commonsensical idea that history is the past and a history is a true story about the past. You needn’t take my word for it; you can just wade into these books and find out for yourself. Honestly, and with no disrespect to my colleagues, I would not recommend this option unless you happen to be unemployed or a graduate student. Instead, you could just think for a moment about every history book you have ever read. What was it about? The past. What form did it take? A story. There you have it: as good an inductive proof as one could ever want.

So people already know what history is whether they know they know or not (or, I should add, whether they have been convinced by over-thinkers that they don’t know). That’s not the problem. The problem is that most folks who read history books don’t really have a firm grasp of what a history book is. I can hear you saying: Of course I know what a history book is, you pretentious dolt. It’s a book about history. True enough. That’s a good definition of a history book. But if that’s all you knew about what a history book is, then—and here’s the punch line—you would not fully comprehend the true story contained in a history book. Everyone knows you should not judge a book by its cover. Fewer people realize that you should not judge a book by its contents, where contents means a set of words united into sentences placed one after another on a physical or electronic page. The Reverend Martin Luther King said, famously, that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but rather by the content of their character. The first part works for books; the last part doesn’t. The measure of a book is not just what it says, but how it says it.

It’s this part—the how—that is the problem. Most history readers never consider the how when they sit down to read about, say, Reverend Martin Luther King. It’s hard to blame them for this neglect. After all, the interesting part of a history book is first and foremost the story it tells, not the ink and paper, bindings and pages, sentences and paragraphs, chapters and sections, footnotes and bibliographies. These things are media, not messages, and most history readers are rightly interested in messages. Yet we all know—or should know by now—that media themselves have messages built into them (and I don’t mean when you play them backwards). These messages are often hidden, and almost always subtle, but they are there nonetheless. A simple example from the history of books demonstrates this verity. The Gospels were popular books in medieval Europe, as they are today in modern Europe. In terms of contents, the Gospels are the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (allowing, of course, for some textual variation). But in terms of media, the medieval and modern versions are very different; each has its own story to tell. The medieval version was likely handwritten in Latin on something like velum by clergymen for other clergymen. The modern version was probably printed in some vernacular language like Russian on paper for purchase by consumers. The way a book is produced, the form it takes, and the way it is distributed all tell us something about what’s inside and the society that produces it.

It follows that if you want to have a complete understanding of the content carried in a medium, you also have to understand something about the medium itself. To grasp what’s inside a history book, you have to understand how history books are written, what form they take, and the way they are distributed among other things. In sum, to comprehend history—the past and stories about the past—you must comprehend the artifact history book. And that is why you may want to read a book about history books.

The purpose of this book, then, is to give the reader some understanding of what a history book is in a kind of anthropological sense. We want to know about how our tribe (so to speak) began writing history books and when; about which tribe members write history books now and how; about the kinds of history books the tribe’s history-writers write and for whom; about what form the tribe’s history books take; about the tribe’s history publishers, what they publish, and for whom; and, finally, about how the tribe uses the history books after they are published. Doubtless other questions will arise as we proceed, but this is a good start.

As I said at the onset, this book is not a history. I have no intention of telling you a true story about the past; rather, I want to tell you the whole truth about history books. If I stuck to the facts as a historian might, I could not accomplish that goal, at least in a very entertaining way. If, however, I allow myself a certain poetic license, I think I can get the job done and keep you, gentle reader, from turning on the TV. I have, therefore, opted to tell the whole truth about history books via a historical fiction. The setting of this fiction is, well, historical: our world, past and present, and more particularly the contemporary United States. Though I made nothing up about this setting, I will confess altering some names to avoid offence and nitpicking about what actually happened. I’ve not changed the names very much, so I imagine most clever readers will easily guess who or what I’m actually talking about. The fiction I have put in this setting—that of Elizabeth Ranke—is, well, fictional: there is no Elizabeth Ranke, never was and never will be. She is not, however, exactly fictional. Rather, she is a composite based on my observation of people in the historical profession. Who she is and what she does, as they say in the movies, are based on actual events. She is typical, though she is not actual.

Enough throat-clearing. Now, without out further delay, let’s meet our protagonist. She wants to write a history book.

Chapter 1

The History of History Books

We historians used to make up meaningful stories. Now we just write true ones.

—Reinhardt Friedrich Freiherr von Teufel

Elizabeth Ranke, nearly BA, is 21 years old. She’s white, bright and, though awfully ambitious, polite. Her family lives in a smart suburb of a large city on the East Coast of the United States. Her father is a professor in the humanities at a mid-level college and her mother is a lawyer in a small downtown firm. She has one younger brother, Martin, and no further additions to the clan are planned. The family self-identifies as middle class, but the Rankes rest comfortably in the top 10% of Americans in terms of wealth and the top 2% in terms of educational attainment. They always vote Democratic and know few people who don’t. Elizabeth attended a top-ranked public high school, where she was an excellent student. Upon graduation, she matriculated at a very selective school, Twiddletwaddle College, in another city on the East Coast. She’s a history major and will take her degree—with highest honors—next May. She works hard and has high expectations. Now, in her penultimate semester, she’s thinking about graduate school. She wants to write a history book.

As we’ll see, she will. But before we follow her from BA to PhD to published historian, we should pause to note that both Elizabeth’s aspirations and the artifact she wants to produce are, historically speaking, rather novel. To us, historians and history books are just part of the early twenty-first-century American scenery. Like interstate highways, McDonald’s, and MTV, the two have just always been there. That’s probably what Elizabeth thinks at this stage in her career. Her parents know about historians and history books; her grandparents knew about historians and history books; and her great-grandparents, well, she doesn’t really know much about them, but it seems reasonable to suppose they did as well. But the fact of the matter is that hers is not a very reasonable supposition at all. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the time when her great-grandparents would have been coming of age, historians and history books were rather unusual. For it was only then that the institutional machinery that produces historians and history books was being established in the United States. Had Elizabeth been in her great-grandmother’s shoes, she almost certainly wouldn’t have wanted to become a historian or to write a history book. Almost no one did or could.

This is not to say, of course, that prior to 1900 there were no historians or history books. Though it would be too much to claim that Herodotus is a household name (would that it were so), many college graduates will be able to say that he was a Greek historian who lived a very long time ago, probably in Greece. Some few of them may even be able to propose that he wrote a history book called, appropriately enough, The Histories. Though this dim recollection is only half-right, it’s not all wrong. And importantly for our purposes it’s right enough for us to be sure that people we would call historians were writing true stories about the past we would call histories long before we were born.

The act of writing history, and therefore the historian and the history in their generic senses, are not new. But the profession historian and what we’re calling a history book are new. They were the product of a very specific time, place, and set of circumstances. This is important to bear firmly in mind, because the first step in comprehending the artifact called history book is the understanding that history books are not everywhere, always, and of necessity, but rather here, now, and contingent. This is what Elizabeth, still a novice in the trade, doesn’t see and neither do most people who read history books. The truth, however, is that historians and history books are not to be found in most of the human past; until very recently, historians and history books were not to be found in most places on the globe, and it is entirely possible to conceive of a here-and-now present in which neither professional historians nor history books find any place. If Elizabeth were reborn at random in time and space, chances are overwhelming that she wouldn’t want to be a historian or write history books. She probably wouldn’t even know what these things were. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine an alternative—and not entirely impossible—reality located exactly when and where she was born though without historians or history books.

That, fortunately for me and my colleagues, is not what happened. Though it’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact historical origins of anything (human events, alas, don’t really work like that), it’s not too much to say that Germans invented the modern historian and history book in the mid-nineteenth century. More accurately, they invented the modern research university. The word research is the important one here. Universities had existed in Europe for about 800 years when the Germans broke ground. But they were first and foremost religious institutions designed to teach novices (and not very many of them) about, well, religion. Naturally they taught other things—mostly, it seems, Aristotle—but Christianity infused them all. Since the truth of Christianity (and, for that matter, of Aristotle) was manifest, there was no real need to go digging around for new knowledge, and in most places such endeavors were actively discouraged. Some brave folks did research, and we know their names well, perhaps too well: Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and so on. They were exceptions. The rule was learning old stuff by rote. What else was required when everything worth learning had already been revealed in the Holy Scripture or received from Aristotle?

By the early nineteenth century, however, a number of important, powerful people in Europe began to believe that finding out new things might just be a good thing. They’d seen some new things in action—calculus, steam engines, morphine—and thought that having more of them around would be (as we would say) in the national interest.