What is History: Right or Wrong

When I tell people I enjoy reading history, I often get the sort of stares I think sado-masochists must get all the time.  And it’s true that what frequently passes for history these days is too-often a thinly disguised jargon-fest whose only purpose is to show off how many long words the author can command.  But that’s not the history I enjoy reading.  It’s not even what I mean by history.

The Story

A good history is to me, first of all a human story.  This may seem obvious but how many histories have you read that were nothing more than incomprehensible lists?  Lists of dates, of places, of events, of dates.  All without context or any seeming relevance to the subject (say the life of a soldier who had lived through Dunkirk or an American who had smuggled himself over to Great Britain in 1940 and fought in the Battle of Britain)?  I’ve read my share—and have come to the conclusions that these lists aren’t history either.  To me they’re just another way of showing off.  “Look,” the researcher seems to be saying, “Look how much reading I have done!  Aren’t you impressed?”  No, actually.  Because it’s not enough to provide a list of all your trips to the library; to write history you must also learn to discard the unnecessary.  Any writer can tell you that.  For if you don’t prune the details that clutter rather than illuminate your story, you will lose me, your reader.

Tell Me What Really Happened

Of course if all I wanted was a good yarn, I’d probably stick to fiction.  I read well-written history precisely because I want to know what real mean and women were up to and why they did what they did.  And it’s because I want to hear those real people’s voices that I expect the historian to use primary sources.

Secondary sources (other people’s interpretations of what happened) can be a good guide for historians when they’re first delving into their subject but if they continue to rely on them, the biases of the people who wrote their histories are likely to become the historians’ own.  And then we, the readers, will be left with twenty books on the same topic that all say pretty much the same thing.  Who needs that?

History as Literature

So when I am trying to decide whether or not to start reading a particular history, I do two things: I flick through the book to see if it’s well-written or not and I look through the bibliography to see what sort of sources it lists.  If the book is well-written and if the bibliography is filled with citations of minutes, newspaper clippings, paintings, letters, court records, birth records, death records, memoirs, films, and the like then I am likely to try it.  If not, then not.

Because for me good history is literature that is about real people and real events.  Is it any wonder I enjoy reading it?