Why Study History?

Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

• Editore: Baker Academic
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441244550
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: History of Religion

What is the purpose of studying history? How do we reflect on contemporary life from a historical perspective and can such reflection help us better understand ourselves, the world around us, and the God we worship and serve? In this introductory textbook, accomplished historian John Fea shows why Christians should study history, how faith is brought to bear on our understanding of the past, and how studying the past can help us more effectively love God and others. Deep historical thinking can relieve us of our narcissism; cultivate humility, hospitality, and love; and transform our lives more fully into the image of Jesus Christ.

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What Do Historians Do?

WHAT IS HISTORY? ANYONE WHO TYPES THIS QUESTION into an internet search engine will discover an array of answers. Henry Ford famously said, “All history is bunk.” Voltaire, the eighteenth-century philosopher, believed that history is “the lie commonly agreed upon.” The American satirist Ambrose Bierce wrote that history is “an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” In a quote that warms the heart of many historians, the Irish writer Oscar Wilde said, “Anyone can make history; only a great man can write it.” Are those who do not remember the past condemned to repeat it? The Spanish philosopher George Santayana thought so, and so do thousands of Americans when asked why students should study the subject. What is the purpose of studying history? What do historians do? Does everyone who conducts a serious study of the past qualify as a historian? “In my opinion,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon Wood, “not everyone who writes about the past is a historian. Sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists frequently work in the past without really thinking historically.”[1] What does Wood mean?

History and the Past

Any introductory conversation about the vocation of the historian must begin by making a distinction between “history” and “the past.” Most average people think that these two terms are synonymous. They are not. The past is the past—a record of events that occurred in bygone eras. The past is dates, facts, and things that “happened.” The past is what probably turned many of us off to the subject of history during our school years. Perhaps some of you may recall the economics teacher in the popular 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This teacher reinforces a common stereotype, made famous by Arnold Toynbee, that history is little more than “one damn thing after another.” Played brilliantly by actor Ben Stein, the teacher stands before the class in a tweed sport coat, tie, and thick glasses, rattles off details about the Hawley–Smoot Tariff Act and “voodoo economics,” and monotonously asks his bored students to finish his sentences:

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effect of the . . . anyone, anyone? . . . the Great Depression, passed the . . . anyone, anyone? . . . the tariff bill, the Hawley–Smoot Tariff Act which . . . anyone, anyone? . . . raised or lowered? . . . raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work . . . anyone, anyone? . . . Anyone know the effects? . . . It did not work and the United States sunk deeper into the Great Depression.

This teacher, with his knowledge of certain facts about economic life in America, might be a successful candidate on Jeopardy, but he is not teaching history.

We all have a past. So do nations, communities, neighborhoods, and institutions. At times we can be reasonably sure about what happened in the past. We know, for example, that the Battle of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, 1775, or that Islamic terrorists attacked the first tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. But at other times, as the chronological distance from a particular moment in the past grows greater, our memory starts to fail us. Sometimes the documentary or oral evidence that tells us what happened in the past is limited or untrustworthy. Whatever the case, the past is gone. Yet we would be foolish to suggest that it has not had its way with us—shaping us, haunting us, defining us, motivating us, empowering us. Enter the historian.

History is a discipline. It is the art of reconstructing the past. As historian John Tosh writes, “All the resources of scholarship and all the historian’s powers of imagination must be harnessed to the task of bringing the past to life—or resurrecting it.”[2] The past is messy, but historians make sense of the mess by collecting evidence, making meaning of it, and marshaling it into some kind of discernible pattern.[3] History is an exciting act of interpretation—taking the facts of the past and weaving them into a compelling narrative. The historian works closely with the stuff that has been left behind—documents, oral testimony, objects—to make the past come alive. As John Arnold has noted, “The sources do not ‘speak for themselves’ and never have done [so]. . . . They come alive when the historian reanimates them. And although the sources are a beginning, the historian is present before or after, using skills and making choices. Why this document and not another? Why these charters and not those?”[4] There is a major difference between a work of history and a book of quotations.

Historians are always driven by the sources—they cannot make things up—but they do have power to shape their narratives in a style that might be described as “artistic.” Too often I have heard historians describe their work entirely in terms of research. They spend years in the archives combing ancient records, and once the research is complete, they describe the next phase of the historical task as “writing it up.” This phrase implies that they will simply translate their research into prose form without paying any attention to the literary quality of what they are “writing up.” Anyone who has read a scholarly history journal knows what I mean. This problem is not new. In 1939 historian Allen Nevins, a strong advocate of making history accessible to general audiences, said, “The worst examples of how history should never be written can be discovered in past files of American Historical Review.”[5] (The American Historical Review was, and continues to be, the most important scholarly history journal in the world.) Such an approach to doing history is common when writing an academic paper, a master’s thesis, or a doctoral dissertation, but too often the bad habits learned in graduate school stay with historians as they enter their professional careers. In the 1990s an academic journal staged an annual “Bad Writing Contest.” One of the winning entries came from a scholarly article about the history of American imperialism. Here is a taste:

When interpreted from within the ideal space of the myth-symbol school, Americanist masterworks legitimized hegemonic understanding of American history expressively totalized in the metanarrative that had been reconstructed out of (or more accurately read into) these masterworks.[6]

While many historians do make an effort to write well, others do not. This is unfortunate because the effective and compelling dissemination of one’s work is at the heart of the historian’s vocation. Since the professionalization of history in the late nineteenth century (which we will discuss more fully in chap. 3), the literary quality of historical writing that defined an even earlier era has been largely lost, replaced by the accumulation of data and evidence in what professional historians call a “monograph.”[7] While there is much to learn from the skills and practices of academic historians, and historical narratives build off of specialized research, this particular development in the history of the profession has been unfortunate. Whether it is through a book, article, website, exhibit, lecture, or lesson, all historians present their ideas to the public in some fashion and should do so in ways that are accessible.[8]

The best historians tell stories about the past—stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most stories end with a lesson or a “moral.” While a historian may not explicitly preach the moral of his or her story, if told in a compelling fashion, the moral will always be evident to the reader. We use narratives to make sense of our world. It is how we bring order to our own human experiences and the human experiences of others. Jonathan Gottschall, in his recent The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, reminds us that the mind “yields helplessly to the suction of story.”[9] If a quick glance at the New York Times best-seller list over the course of the last decade is any indication, the history books that have reached the largest audience are written by narrative historians. Writers such as David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the late Stephen Ambrose have brought the past alive to ordinary readers through their gifted prose and storytelling abilities. They have proved that a book about the past, in the hands of a skillful historian-writer, can be a page-turner. This is because, as historian William Cronon writes,

As storytellers we commit ourselves to the task of judging the consequences of human actions, trying to understand the choices that confronted people whose lives we narrate so as to capture the full tumult of their world. In the dilemmas they faced we discover our own, and at the intersection of the two we locate the moral of the story. If our goal is to tell tales that make the past meaningful, then we cannot escape struggling over the values that define what meaning is.[10]

The Five C’s of Historical Thinking

Historians are not mere storytellers. Not only do they have the responsibility of making sure that they get the story right; they are also charged with the task of analyzing and interpreting the past. In other words, they need to think like historians. Historians Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke have boiled down the task of historical interpretation into what they call the “five C’s of historical thinking.”[11] I have found this introductory approach to historical thinking to be extremely helpful in teaching students how to go about their work as apprentice historians. According to Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, when doing their work, historians must always be sensitive to change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity. Let’s explore these ideas more fully.

Historians chronicle change over time. While there is continuity between past eras and our own, there has also been significant change. For example, the United States changed considerably between 1776 and 1900: the meaning of the Constitution was defined more clearly by a bloody civil war; the demographic makeup of the country changed immensely with the arrival of new immigrants; and access to democratic practices, such as voting, was gradually applied to nonlandholders, African Americans, and women. Historians trace these changes. As we will see, their task is to take their audiences on a journey by shedding light on the ways in which life in past eras was different from the world in which we now live. I am writing this paragraph on July 27, 2012. Earlier this evening I watched, with billions of other people around the world, the opening ceremonies of the London Summer Olympic Games. Many of you will remember these ceremonies for the scene, crafted by film director Danny Boyle, in which James Bond and “Queen Elizabeth” parachuted into the Olympic stadium from a helicopter to the roaring applause of the British faithful. I was struck by the way Boyle’s ceremony was based on the historical concept of change over time. The ceremony traced the movement of Great Britain from an agricultural society to an industrial society to a technological society. In essence, Boyle was delivering the world a very expensive and very elaborate history lesson. The historical task is inherently progressive because the historian is ever aware that things do not stay the same.

Historians think differently than others. When historians are confronted with a new development in contemporary life, their natural reaction is to wonder how such a development differs from previous developments. For example, historians might trace the process in which a town’s Main Street went from a thriving economic center to a depressed area filled with abandoned storefronts that they now encounter. Or historians might ask how the United States moved from a society in which news was spread orally to a society in which more people find their news via the internet. Historians themselves work in the chronological space between the predominantly oral cultures of an earlier era and our present-day internet culture. As Wood has written, “The historian is to describe how people in the past move chronologically from A to B, with B always closer to us in time.”[12]

Historians also study the past in context. First, historians, like any interpreters of documents and sources, analyze words in a given historical text as part of the message of the entire text. The context provides meaning. Politicians, for example, are often prone to ignore context when exploiting the words of their opponents for political gain. During the 2000 presidential primaries, Republican candidate George W. Bush’s campaign produced an advertisement against his opponent John McCain that referenced a statement from McCain’s hometown newspaper, The Arizona Republic. “It’s time,” the Republic stated, “that the rest of the nation learns about the McCain we know.” Coming from Bush in the midst of a hotly contested political primary battle, most people from other parts of the country would have assumed that what the people of Arizona “knew” about McCain would somehow hurt his chances of winning the GOP nomination. But actually, Bush’s campaign did not quote The Arizona Republic in context. The statement about McCain went on to say, “There is much there to admire. After all, we have supported McCain in his past runs for office.”[13]

Another example of how the past can be distorted when not understood in context comes from Christian political activist David Barton, one of the nation’s foremost supporters of the idea that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” One of the staples of Barton’s talks to churches around the country is the exhibition of an 1809 letter written from American founder and United States President John Adams to Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia doctor and signer of the Declaration of Independence.[14] Barton is quick to call attention to a section of the letter in which Adams writes: “There is no Authority civil or religious: there can be no legitimate Government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost.” This quote seems to support the idea that Adams was a Christian who believed that the third person of the Trinity was somehow responsible for the creation of the American republic. But what Barton’s audiences do not know is that he only reads part of the letter. A few sentences later, Adams makes it clear what he thinks about this notion that “there can be no legitimate Government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost.” Adams writes, “All this is all Artifice and Cunning in the secret original of the heart, yet they all believe it so sincerely that they would lay down their Lives under the Ax of the fiery Fagot for it. Alas the poor weak ignorant Dupe human nature.” In other words, Adams was being sarcastic. He was actually criticizing those who were foolish enough to believe that the Holy Spirit was in the business of establishing governments.[15] This kind of cherry-picking happens all the time, and it makes for the worst kind of historical interpretation.

Second, any event from the past should be understood in light of the circumstances, settings, or belief systems in which it occurred. This is especially the case when analyzing and narrating the history of ideas. The ideas of great thinkers, such as Plato or Thomas Aquinas or John Locke, are the products of the cultural worlds in which these men lived. Historians, as Peter Novick writes, are “loath to apply implicitly timeless criteria in judging what we describe and, historically, explain.”[16] For example, it would be absurd to suggest that someone living in early America was a homosexual because they were described in a letter or diary as being “gay.” The word gay, as most of us probably realize, was used very differently in the eighteenth century than it is commonly used today. Part of the historian’s vocation is to debunk context-free explorations of the past by looking closely at the evidence, exploring the larger social and cultural context in which words are used, and exposing these fallacies to the general public. As we will see in chapter 3, the past can sometimes be akin to a foreign country where people do things differently. Historians must always keep in mind the culture and belief systems of this foreign country as they interpret their sources and draw conclusions about their meaning.

Historians also realize that specific events in the past are best understood in relation to other events; in other words, historians are concerned with causality—the examination of cause and effect. In this sense, the historian moves beyond the mere recitation of facts and tries to explain why particular events happened in the way they did or how events have been shaped by prev...