What history is

Two books, one question

In the fifth century BC a Greek from Halicarnassus, a city on the coast of what is now Turkey, wrote the first sentence of what we still treat as the first history. It names him, his city, and his purpose. This is the presentation of his inquiry, runs the sentence, “to the end that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time,” in the 1890 English version of G. C. Macaulay, and that the great and marvelous works of Greeks and non-Greeks may not lose their renown, and, not least, that people may remember why they fought one another. Herodotus was born about 484 BC and died about 425 BC; both dates are inferences from thin evidence.

His word for the book was historiē, and it meant “inquiry”: finding out by asking. It comes from a verb meaning to ask, or to be a witness. Only later did “history” come to mean the account itself. In Herodotus a history is not a heap of facts about the past but an investigation with an investigator in it. He tells what he saw, what he was told, and, in one famous sentence, that he is “bound to report that which is reported,” though he is “not bound altogether to believe it.”

About three and a half centuries later, at the other end of the Eurasian continent, a second founding book was finished. Nothing suggests that either author had heard of the other. Sima Qian (司马迁, Sīmǎ Qiān) was born in 145 or 135 BC (scholars have long argued over which) and held the office of Grand Historian at the Han court in Chang’an, a post that mostly meant the calendar and the stars. His father, Sima Tan, had held it before him and, dying about 110 BC, charged his son to finish a history of the world they knew. Then came the Li Ling affair. In 99 BC a general, Li Ling, with about five thousand foot soldiers, was surrounded by the Xiongnu and surrendered. Sima Qian spoke up for him. Emperor Wu was furious. Sima Qian could not pay the fine that would have spared him, and in 99 or 98 BC he accepted castration, a punishment that carried deep shame, rather than die with the book unwritten.

In a letter attributed to him, addressed to a friend named Ren An, he explains why he went on: to probe the boundary between Heaven and humankind, to master the changes from ancient times to the present, and so to complete the words of one school (究天人之际，通古今之变，成一家之言). The letter is dated 93 or 91 BC. Whether it is a genuine letter or an early literary imitation is still argued, so this course calls it “the letter attributed to him.” The book itself is not in doubt. The Shiji (史记, Records of the Grand Historian) has 130 chapters and about 526,500 Chinese characters: twelve basic annals of rulers, ten tables, eight treatises on subjects such as ritual and the calendar, thirty accounts of hereditary houses, and seventy biographies. It runs from the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu, roughly 2,500 years.

The Chinese word for history, 史 (shǐ), is older than either book. The ancient dictionary Shuowen (about 100 AD) defines it as one who records events. So the Greek word begins with the person who asks, and the Chinese word with the person who keeps the record. The two traditions then meet at one question: how can what people did be kept from being lost, and how can you tell a trustworthy record from a story?

The whole past, and what is left

Think of yesterday in your own city. Millions of things happened: meals, quarrels, deals, accidents, the weather. A small fraction was written down or photographed, and a smaller fraction will ever be told as history. What historians work from is a remnant, and what they tell is a selection from it.

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott made the point with three pasts, and Hayden White (1928–2018), the American historian and theorist whom Lesson 4 meets in full, took them up in his 2014 book The Practical Past. The whole past is everything that ever happened. The historical past is what professional historians build from authenticated evidence; White calls it a highly selective version, a construction. The practical past is the past that ordinary people use to decide what to do: how to start a car or how to cook an omelet. This course follows White in treating the historical past as constructed. That does not mean invented. It means chosen, and chosen for reasons that can be examined.

Try it. The activity below holds ten true facts about one episode, the Great Fire of London in September 1666. Pick a lens and a page limit, and see which facts make the cut. No version is false. Each is a different history of the same four days.

The series this course draws on adds a claim about animals: that what separates people from other animals is awareness of a past and a possible future, and that animals live only in the present. The first half is a fair sketch. The second half is too strong. In 1998 Nicola Clayton and Anthony Dickinson showed that western scrub-jays remember what they hid, where, and how long ago: after four hours the birds dug up the wax worms they preferred, and after about five days, when worms would have rotted, they went for peanuts instead. In 2007 the same group found that jays hid more food in the room where they had learned there would be no breakfast. In 2009 Mathias Osvath reported that a chimpanzee at a zoo in Sweden, Santino, calmly stockpiled stones in the morning to throw at visitors when he later grew agitated. Whether such animals travel in the mind to a past or a future, as people do, is still argued; in 2007 Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis found no convincing evidence yet. What no other species is known to do is keep a shared, written, argued-over account of the past across generations. In this course’s reading, that is what history adds.

Science and art

The man usually named as the father of modern historical method is Leopold von Ranke, a German born in 1795, who taught in Berlin from 1825 until he was old and died there in 1886. In the preface to his first book (1824) he wrote that people had given history the job of judging the past and teaching the present for the sake of later years; his book, he said, would not take on so high an office, and “wants only to show how it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Those last words became the motto of “scientific history.” He gave the field its working habits: go to the original documents, such as the reports of Venetian ambassadors; compare accounts of the same event; doubt the later chronicler. His first book had an appendix testing earlier historians against their sources.

Ranke also said, in lecture notes, that history differs from other sciences in being also an art: a science in collecting, finding, and penetrating, an art in giving new form to what has been found. In this course’s reading, that is the right pair of words. The collecting can be checked; the giving of form cannot be avoided. Herodotus and Sima Qian each had to decide where to begin, what to include, and whom to make the center of the story.

Ranke also distrusted systems imposed from above. A historian, he thought, should reach any generalization by way of the particular, not start from it. The series this course draws on puts the same point in a sentence: history, unlike philosophy, looks at human affairs and how they connect, and does not ask for the ultimate essence behind them.

Cause, not only sequence

Putting events in order is not yet explaining them. E. H. Carr, in What Is History? (1961), wrote that the study of history is a study of causes: the historian keeps asking “Why?” The dates are the easy part. Take the summer of 1914. On 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb student. On 23 July Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum, and on 25 July Serbia accepted nearly all of it. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July. Russia ordered general mobilization on 30 and 31 July. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August, and Britain declared war on Germany late on 4 August.

Those dates are not in dispute. Why the war came is. Fritz Fischer argued in 1961 that Germany used the crisis for a bid for world power, and the argument set off a long German controversy. Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers (2012), found no single villain: five great powers drifting through mutual distrust, with risk-takers in every capital. John Röhl and others still hold that Germany’s leaders deliberately risked a general war. Annika Mombauer has observed that the verdict has swung back and forth for a century: German guilt after 1919, “nobody’s fault” in the 1930s, German responsibility again in the 1960s, and now more often shared responsibility. The dates are the same in every one of these books. The arrows between them are what differ.

This is why the series stresses that time order and cause order are not the same. In this course’s reading, a result that shows up late may have been prepared long before, and something that comes first may be only a coincidence. Test your own sense of the difference.

Wisdom after the fact

The series offers a tidy division of labor: philosophy is wisdom before the event, history is wisdom after the event. The line is good, but it has a wrinkle. The famous sentence about understanding backwards is Søren Kierkegaard’s, and it is a jab at philosophy. In his journal in 1843 he wrote that it is quite true, as philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards, but one forgets the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And Hegel, in the preface to his Philosophy of Right (dated 1820), had already said it was philosophy that comes late: “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering,” in the old English version of S. W. Dyde. For both men, understanding comes after, and acting comes before. History is the discipline that takes the “after” seriously. It can see causes and consequences that the people living through events could not.

What is that late understanding for? White’s answer in The Practical Past is that since the early nineteenth century professional history has made itself a science by cutting itself off from practical questions such as “What should I do?” That left the practical past to novelists, family memory, and ideology. It is one scholar’s argument, but it names a real tension: historians want the past as it was, and everyone else wants a past to live by. In this course’s reading, the answer is to keep both: history as a check on the stories we use to act, and the stories as a reminder of why anyone asks.

Whose story?

“History is written by the victors” is a saying with no known author. It is often credited to Winston Churchill, but no such sentence of his has been found. What he did say in the House of Commons in January 1948 was that he would leave the past to history, “especially as I propose to write that history myself.” The saying is too tidy, as it happens. Sima Qian wrote as a punished man. In 548 BC, according to the Zuozhuan, the Grand Historian of the state of Qi wrote that Cui Zhu had murdered his lord, and Cui Zhu killed him. His brother wrote the same words, and was killed. A third brother wrote them again, and was let go. By then a historian from the south, Nan Shi, had set out with his own bamboo slips to carry on the record, and when he heard that it was already written, he went home.

A popular piece of wordplay says that history is “his story.” It is not: the word comes from the Greek historiē, “inquiry,” and his is not in it. But the pun has a point. It was in print by 1817, and feminists took up “herstory” around 1970; it appears in Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970). The serious work was done by historians: Mary Beard’s Woman as Force in History (1946), Joan Kelly’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977), Gerda Lerner’s The Majority Finds Its Past (1979), and Joan Scott’s 1986 essay on gender as a category of historical analysis. Their shared point is that what is in the record depends on who kept records and what they thought worth keeping. The whole past is larger than the historical past, and some of what is missing can be recovered.