Armistice day: history reading
It's Nov 12 (which is the skip-a-day dislocation of Nov 11 for weekday-holiday reasons), and it's 2018. Which means it's 100 years after the Armistice was signed ending the Great War, a.k.a. WWI.
This time of year I usually post something a bit scold-y about our failure to remember sensibly: about militarism and nationalism, jingoism, the distortion and glorification of a day that ought to mark our greatest shame and horror. Here and here are some representative scoldings. Or here in a more sarcastic form.
This year I thought I'd be more constructive, and relate the story of my own relationship to changing opinions on this matter. Because I would like to encourage anyone reading (especially younger people!) to take some time to do the same. It takes time and effort, but it's well worth it.
When I was in my mid 20s, I really had very little idea about the past, at least not much beyond a couple highschool history classes in which old-timey things were placed in some order and said to have happened in the before-color-TV era of the 1900s, or 1800s, or .. well gosh I couldn't really put my finger on which things and when. I read a bit of politics, but it was mostly of the radical and idealistic kind, and I was leaning vaguely towards (embarrassingly) neoliberal free-market beliefs about economics due to exposure to The Economist as a magazine that at least tried to report some kinda-global news every week, in between their editorials about "flexible labor" and "sclerotic regulation" and so forth. I had only a weak sense of how economic policy interacted with power, institutions, politics, human or civil rights, social justice, etc. etc.
At some point I was on vacation in Europe (by embarrassing coincidence, reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books) and I was visiting places with quite a bit of history on display, and I was increasingly realizing that (a) there was a lot more time with a lot more meaningful structure to the goings-on between (say) 1600 and 2000 than I had formerly been willing to acknowledge and (b) I was terribly under-informed about a lot of it. So I picked up a book that tried to do some History For Real (randomly: Roberts' History of the 20th Century) and devoured it.
This book astonished me. The 20th century was so full of absolutely bizarre, incomprehensible carnage, massive migrations of people, disintegrations and creations of empires, redefinitions of the global order .. I could scarcely believe how different the world of 1900 was from the world of 2000. It takes serious mental work to get a grip on, and everything I learned opened up a hundred new questions ("so X was Y at this time .. ok .. but how on earth did it get that way?")
So when I returned home I realized this was going to be like my main reading topic for the next while. And that while turned out to include a pretty focused ten-ish years (most of the duration of the Rust project, oddly) and a less-focused but ongoing interest through the present. Each book and each set of questions led to another, and I tried to put together a passable understanding of larger pieces of the historical puzzle. Hobsbawm, Braudel, Himmelfarb, Fisk, Harvey, Thomas, Taylor, Said, Polanyi, Bayly, Bulliet, Mumford, Tuchman, Holmes, Phillips, Fairbank, and on and on. I also got quite into listening to audiobooks, lectures (especially from The Teaching Company) and online courses (especially from UC Berkeley, though many of these have been discontinued or migrated to iTunes U). By now I'm perhaps at the point where I have a rough picture of a few hundred years of a few dozen major polities; and at least a smattering of the major signposts in the millennia or two proceeding, though it becomes increasingly fragmented and biased as it goes back.
Reading history is a never-ending process, but even the first few years engagement in the matter really sharpened my politics. The details make matters of policy that were previously vague or confused seem clear and vivid. It is one thing to have an abstract sense of the tension between (say) labor and capital, but quite another to have a timeline laid out of a century and a half of actual warfare over it, its reorganization of continents and empires. It's one thing to think vague thoughts about European imperialists overpowering colonized peoples sometime in the past, but quite another to go through the events country by country, massacre by massacre, famine by famine, dislocation by dislocation. It's one thing to know there was an Atlantic slave trade and that it was a terrible injustice, but quite another to read of the centuries of traffic, the thousands of ships, the millions of lives.
Reading history has also made me frustrated at the selectivity of memory. Especially on days like this, where so little about the circumstances and meanings of WWI is given the slightest discussion. And it does make me annoyed anytime someone tries to make a point in the present by waving their hands and saying "look at history!" as though history-as-a-whole supports them, as though there were a single obvious lesson to be learned from all of it. It has terrible depth and complexity, and one must always strive to read multiple treatments of a topic, by multiple people with multiple biases, multiple approaches to telling, emphasizing, omitting. Historiography -- the history of history-telling -- is a whole additional meta-field I have barely scratched the surface of.
But all that aside: I strongly recommend making the time for it. It's enriched my life in ways I never would have expected. Politics, sure; but also understanding and appreciating people I meet in life, places I visit, events in the news, the context of my life, my home country, my place in the systems of the world. I only wish I had taken up the habit earlier. Many people have the impression the entire topic hinges on military history (and popular writing definitely does over-produce military history) but historical writing is so much bigger and more interesting than that. Ignore the military stuff, you'll still have a vast and fascinating field to explore.
(It's especially fun to read in the modern world, where we have access to basically perfect mapping technology plus all of wikipedia. Any thread you want to tug on while you're reading, you can stop and read endless additional details on.)
This entry was originally posted at https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/262004.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
This time of year I usually post something a bit scold-y about our failure to remember sensibly: about militarism and nationalism, jingoism, the distortion and glorification of a day that ought to mark our greatest shame and horror. Here and here are some representative scoldings. Or here in a more sarcastic form.
This year I thought I'd be more constructive, and relate the story of my own relationship to changing opinions on this matter. Because I would like to encourage anyone reading (especially younger people!) to take some time to do the same. It takes time and effort, but it's well worth it.
When I was in my mid 20s, I really had very little idea about the past, at least not much beyond a couple highschool history classes in which old-timey things were placed in some order and said to have happened in the before-color-TV era of the 1900s, or 1800s, or .. well gosh I couldn't really put my finger on which things and when. I read a bit of politics, but it was mostly of the radical and idealistic kind, and I was leaning vaguely towards (embarrassingly) neoliberal free-market beliefs about economics due to exposure to The Economist as a magazine that at least tried to report some kinda-global news every week, in between their editorials about "flexible labor" and "sclerotic regulation" and so forth. I had only a weak sense of how economic policy interacted with power, institutions, politics, human or civil rights, social justice, etc. etc.
At some point I was on vacation in Europe (by embarrassing coincidence, reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books) and I was visiting places with quite a bit of history on display, and I was increasingly realizing that (a) there was a lot more time with a lot more meaningful structure to the goings-on between (say) 1600 and 2000 than I had formerly been willing to acknowledge and (b) I was terribly under-informed about a lot of it. So I picked up a book that tried to do some History For Real (randomly: Roberts' History of the 20th Century) and devoured it.
This book astonished me. The 20th century was so full of absolutely bizarre, incomprehensible carnage, massive migrations of people, disintegrations and creations of empires, redefinitions of the global order .. I could scarcely believe how different the world of 1900 was from the world of 2000. It takes serious mental work to get a grip on, and everything I learned opened up a hundred new questions ("so X was Y at this time .. ok .. but how on earth did it get that way?")
So when I returned home I realized this was going to be like my main reading topic for the next while. And that while turned out to include a pretty focused ten-ish years (most of the duration of the Rust project, oddly) and a less-focused but ongoing interest through the present. Each book and each set of questions led to another, and I tried to put together a passable understanding of larger pieces of the historical puzzle. Hobsbawm, Braudel, Himmelfarb, Fisk, Harvey, Thomas, Taylor, Said, Polanyi, Bayly, Bulliet, Mumford, Tuchman, Holmes, Phillips, Fairbank, and on and on. I also got quite into listening to audiobooks, lectures (especially from The Teaching Company) and online courses (especially from UC Berkeley, though many of these have been discontinued or migrated to iTunes U). By now I'm perhaps at the point where I have a rough picture of a few hundred years of a few dozen major polities; and at least a smattering of the major signposts in the millennia or two proceeding, though it becomes increasingly fragmented and biased as it goes back.
Reading history is a never-ending process, but even the first few years engagement in the matter really sharpened my politics. The details make matters of policy that were previously vague or confused seem clear and vivid. It is one thing to have an abstract sense of the tension between (say) labor and capital, but quite another to have a timeline laid out of a century and a half of actual warfare over it, its reorganization of continents and empires. It's one thing to think vague thoughts about European imperialists overpowering colonized peoples sometime in the past, but quite another to go through the events country by country, massacre by massacre, famine by famine, dislocation by dislocation. It's one thing to know there was an Atlantic slave trade and that it was a terrible injustice, but quite another to read of the centuries of traffic, the thousands of ships, the millions of lives.
Reading history has also made me frustrated at the selectivity of memory. Especially on days like this, where so little about the circumstances and meanings of WWI is given the slightest discussion. And it does make me annoyed anytime someone tries to make a point in the present by waving their hands and saying "look at history!" as though history-as-a-whole supports them, as though there were a single obvious lesson to be learned from all of it. It has terrible depth and complexity, and one must always strive to read multiple treatments of a topic, by multiple people with multiple biases, multiple approaches to telling, emphasizing, omitting. Historiography -- the history of history-telling -- is a whole additional meta-field I have barely scratched the surface of.
But all that aside: I strongly recommend making the time for it. It's enriched my life in ways I never would have expected. Politics, sure; but also understanding and appreciating people I meet in life, places I visit, events in the news, the context of my life, my home country, my place in the systems of the world. I only wish I had taken up the habit earlier. Many people have the impression the entire topic hinges on military history (and popular writing definitely does over-produce military history) but historical writing is so much bigger and more interesting than that. Ignore the military stuff, you'll still have a vast and fascinating field to explore.
(It's especially fun to read in the modern world, where we have access to basically perfect mapping technology plus all of wikipedia. Any thread you want to tug on while you're reading, you can stop and read endless additional details on.)
This entry was originally posted at https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/262004.html. Please comment there using OpenID.