Why Study History?
If you have come across this blog on American diplomatic
history, you are probably a student of history, an American history buff, or
even a professional historian. Given your interest in history, I pose the
question, “Why study history?” In order to answer this, however, let us first
take a step back and determine, “what is history?” From there, we should then
ask, “who are historians?” By looking at the answers to these questions, we
learn the importance of historical learning and research and how this adds
value to our own lives.
What is History?
Merriam-Webster states that history is “a chronological
record of significant events, often including an explanation of their causes.”[1]
While this veers toward a definition of what historians do, interpret and
analyze events from the past, a definition that may have greater explanatory
value comes from E.H. Carr, who says history is more than just the selection of
appropriate facts. A “historical fact” is one that aids or supports an
interpretation that help us understand why something happened as opposed to
just “what happened.” It is only then that these facts become historical in
nature. Those facts and events from the past are insignificant and therefore
unhistorical.[2]
Barbara Tuchman takes another perspective that facts are
history whether they are interpreted or not. She defines history as past events
of which we have knowledge.[3]
Of course, there are those who acknowledge that history is somewhere in the
middle of these two definitions. Carl Trueman says that history is something
more than what “we simply dig up and drop into the specimen jar,” but less than
the other extreme of “subjective or social constructions that cannot be
assessed in relation to each other.”[4]
Who Are Historians and What Do They Do?
Who then, are historians and what do they do? Carr describes
historians as sifters of past knowledge and discoverers of the few significant
facts that become facts of history. He writes that the first requirement of a
historian is to simplify, clarify, select and omit. Thereafter, the main work
of a historian is not merely to record, but also “to evaluate; for, if he does
not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording?”[5]
Tuchman writes that the best historians are those who combine knowledge of the
evidence with “the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the
highest imaginative powers.”[6]
Such historians hold a view from the outside and have a conscious craft, which she
beautifully describes as “what his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the
historian. His exercise of judgment comes from their selection, his art in
their arrangement. His method is narrative. His subject is the story of man’s
past. His function is to make it known.”[7]
Nevertheless, historians, and therefore written histories, have
limitations. Historians see the past through the eyes of the present and in
light of contemporary problems, often leading to differing interpretations. Carr
notes that no fact of history comes to us pure; they always come to us
“refracted through the mind of the recorder.”[8]
Trueman notes that historians are greatly tempted to overlay ideas and values
that did not exist or did not have the same significance during the period being
studied.[9]
One must be aware, therefore, of the refraction and anachronistic tendencies of
historians.
Now that we know what is history, who are historians, and
how they go about their craft, we can turn to “why study history?” (“we”
being students, history buffs, and historians, of course). As Tuchman noted, history
is the story of man’s past.[10]
These stories are records of human behavior that then create compendia of past behavior,
which help suggest what will happen in the future. This predictive value is one
of the reasons why we study history. Using diplomatic history as an example, past
behavior suggests how nations will react to acts of aggression. In our present
day, history has predictive value in analyzing how China will respond to the trade
war by looking at previous trade wars with it or between other countries. Looking
at how nations responded to previous epidemics will help us learn what worked in
containing the spread of a disease.
Another reason to study history is to learn, not only the time
period being studied, but also of the time period of the historian and the
historian himself. We must be aware of the refraction and anachronistic
tendencies of historians, but we should not discount them because they aid us
in understanding the people who wrote those histories and the time period in
which they were written. Histories of the American Civil War written in the
1960s, for example, teach us about the social movement of the 1960s. The facts of
the Civil War, if you will, become the control variables, which test the
differing interpretations that emerge from Civil War histories.
Additionally, these different interpretations of the same
event create insight into the historians, who themselves are worthy of study as
representatives of their era, socioeconomic class, and nationality. Philip
Zelikow is one of those historians who is a product of his times. He worked for
two presidential administrations and participated in both ending the Cold War
and creating a governmental response to the 9/11 attacks. In To Build a
Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth,
Zelikow and Condoleeza Rice explored how the Cold War ended and how a new world
order began. However, we also learn about him, his perspective and
interpretation of these events as an American political conservative and presidential
appointee from the South, offering us insight into southern conservatism that
perhaps sociological or political studies would not. Therefore, in studying a
work of history, one is also studying the historian who wrote it.
Finally, studying history makes us better historians.
Trueman urges historians to read as much history as possible, “not only to
increase one’s general supply of historical knowledge, but to see how other historians
go about handling evidence and constructing narratives.”[11]
He also suggests that we read as widely and deeply into the time period we are
studying, including writings on culture, society, theology, and literature of
that day. He writes in every record of man’s story, “each is a real human
being, living in a real time and a real place, as impacted by the wider context
as much as anyone else; and the historian needs to understand that wider
world.”[12]
[1]. Merriam-Webster
Unabridged Dictionary, s.v. “History,”
Accessed March 24, 2020. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/history.
[3]. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, Practicing
History: Selected Essays, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1981), 26-27.
[4]. Carl R. Trueman, Histories and
Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton, Ill:
Crossway, 2010), 19.
[5]. Carr, What Is History? 12-22.
[8]. Carr, What Is History? 23-24,
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