Hey folks, Fireside this week! As I noted a couple of weeks ago, things are probably going to get more than a little fireside-y over the next few weeks, simply because of the start of the semester – and a semester in which I am undertaking a set of entire new preps (that is, teaching classes I have not taught before), in this case Latin (first and second semester). That demands a bunch of time as you are planning each class meeting and assignment for the first time.1
In any case, I thought I would use briefly this week about how we defend history as a field and how that ties into the way we teach and talk about history.
The great disconnect here is that, when asked, the public regularly notes that they think history is important, but when their opinions are processed into political outcomes it is clear they do not think history departments or historians or really even history teachers are important. That interaction comes to a head with the notion that large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT) will replace historians, because I think both effects speak to the same cause, which is that while the public understands science as a process of discovery, they understand history – incorrectly – as purely a process of transmission.
When it comes to actually engaging with the public, teaching our students and defending our field, this is the rub. There is plenty of public support for history as a teaching field – which AI-boosters imagine LLMs can supplant – but not for history as a research field, which in turn betrays a crucial misunderstanding of what history is.
Put briefly, I think for the majority of the public, who has, after all, never gone beyond high school history class or at most a 101-level collegiate history survey, has a history as scripture view of the field. In this view, history is a set of basically known and static information – names, dates and so on – which does not change over time, but is merely transmitted, via textbooks and introductory courses, from one generation to the next, the way a religious text is transmitted. That view is why folks get so upset when historians say some of the history they learned in high school we now know is wrong, because if violates the basic principle they understand historical knowledge to function on. It is also why they see no real connection between historians doing research and history as a body of knowledge: ‘well, we basically know everything about the past, right?’
If you are reading this, I don’t need to explain that we do not basically know everything about the past (right?) but are instead discovering the past continually, both in improving our knowledge of the deep past but also understanding the new past which time, as is its nature, generates at a rate of one minute per minute.
Instead, what I want to muse on is why we are so bad as communicating this to the public.
I think the problem begins with how we teach high school and extends through how we teach it in undergraduate courses and discuss it with the public. I was struck that, when I took science classes in high school, the narrative of early scientists was a key part of the early weeks of the course. Invariably classes began with stories about figures like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Redi and Spallanzani, Newton, Einstein and so on. Those narratives followed a familiar pattern: first there was what people (incorrectly) believed and why they believed it, then the experiment the hero-scientist devised to test that belief and finally the new knowledge that was earned – often with a proviso for figures like Newton that even that model was no longer fully current, having been superseded itself.
In short, science classes pair a description of our best knowledge at the present with a story of discovery of how we came to know what we know now, with the clear implication that this method is how we will continue to discover new things.
By contrast in history this same story (we call it historiography – the history of the history) doesn’t generally attract sustained attention until graduate school. Students learn the names of rulers and thinkers and key figures but they rarely learn the names of historians. Likewise, instead of being presented with a process of historical discovery they are given a narrative of human development – it is not until advanced undergraduate courses that they begin to engage meaningfully with how we know these things. In my own experience the exceptions to this were almost invariably stories about the knowledge-making achievements of other disciplines – archaeology and linguistics, mostly – rather than narratives of historical investigation. So it is not surprising that many students at those introductory levels come away assuming that the narrative is pretty much fixed and has been known and understood effectively forever.
Instead, students of history generally only begin to learn even the basics of how their history came to be – again, that’s historiography – when they get to the graduate level. And that’s simply too late. Sure, you can’t present a mature historiography of Alexander the Great at the 100-level, but you can sprinkle the standard narrative with (accurate) stories of how our understanding of, say, Greek history has changed and improved.2
I think part of the reason for this is that historians are trained to be really skeptical of heroic narratives, because when we meet them in our sources, they’re usually nonsense. We’ve talked already about the flaws of ‘Great Man’ history – no surprise that historians are thus skeptical of ‘Great Historian’ history. And yet it is certainly fair to talk about our understanding of the past as something that has progressed substantially. A cutting-edge textbook on antiquity or the Middle Ages written in the 1950s or the 1900s would be remarkably wrong today (not least of which because it would likely feature some pretty bald racism). You’d probably have an oversimplified, over-generalized model of ‘feudalism,’ for instance, and have Rome treated as if it had an early modern economy. The Greeks would arrive, in that textbook, in Greece at the end of the bronze age, as ‘Dorian invaders,’ when we know they had already been in Greece for centuries at that point and did not displace the Mycenaeans because they were the Mycenaeans (before the 1880s, those would simply be blank pages).
We do, in fact, know more, indeed a lot more about the past than we did fifty, seventy, a hundred years ago.
As historians looking to justify our field as a research field – not merely a history-as-scripture ‘teaching’ field that transmits the ‘received truth’ about the past – we have to transition not just to telling stories about the past but to telling stories about how the past was discovered. I’ve tried to do that more and more here on the blog, foregrounding methods (like modeling in our recent series on peasants) and also at points progress in historical debates (as with Alexander and the Fall of Rome).
But I am one very small voice in the digital wilderness. I think this problem only begins to change for historians if we change the way we teach introductory level history courses, because that is how we change the way history gets taught at the high school level and thus how the public at large understands history. Not just a story about the past but a story about how we have come to know the past. That means changing our courses but also our teaching materials to better signal the role of historians – and for this to stick with students, specific historians – in making history. After all, no history professor has an ironclad grip on the historiography of every period they teach – especially as we often has to teach very widely – so this material needs to be embedded in things like college textbooks to be available for teaching.
And it means letting ourselves have narratives of ‘hero historians’ to match the ‘hero scientists,’ even if like Newton, we might caution that the historical vision of those ‘hero historians’ are not above further discovery and revision.
On to Recommendations:
Naturally, with a topic like that leading, there is higher education news to discuss and it is quite bad. Last fireside, we mentioned the combined moral and financial crisis at the University of Chicago. We now have a clearer look at what appears to be a massive pause – perhaps permanent – to a wide range of humanities programs there. Among other things, those cuts will make it nearly impossible to study cuneiform – the dominant writing system in the Near East from c. 3000BC to at least the fourth century (with the latest dated cuneiform inscription dating to the reign of Vespasian in 75 AD) – anywhere in the United States.
UChicago is hardly alone, as university trustees and administrators are using the financial pressure created by grant cuts to the sciences to justify the further cuts to humanities they already wanted to do. Thus deep cuts disproportionately to the humanities at the University of Utah, cuts at the University of Oregon, particularly targeting language programs, cuts at Virginia Tech, including shutting down the Religion and Culture program, a ‘prioritization’ plan that will almost certainly slash humanities to the bone at the University of North Carolina, and on and on. What I think needs to be reiterated here is this is a finance problem in the sciences, since it is their grant money being disrupted (they’re also disproportionately impacted by the drop in international students). When the humanities have a finance issue, they cut the humanities, but when the sciences have a finance issue, they still cut the humanities. Frankly, I do not think the slide can be arrested, because this ideology – which believes that only the sciences are really important fields – has been baked deep into multiple generations; we will have to rebuild these fields and their public support largely from scratch (and should begin doing so now).
For further reading on the wave of cuts to the humanities, note also Annette Yoshiko Reed’s essay on the topic.
Also worth reading this week is Sarah E. Bond’s discussion in Hyperallergic of the new open-access anthology How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (2025). As Bond notes, it is remarkably rare for ‘consolidated’ democracies to de-consolidate, but the Roman Republic (arguably a democratic-ish government) did so and so provides a rare piece of comparative evidence to think about how such deconsolidation happens (and thus might be reversed). How Republics Die is focused on this question and features an impressive list of contributors and contributions and is also well worth your time. The unfortunate thing about the Roman Republic, of course, is that the Late Republic is a story of failure, rather than of success in maintaining democratic norms, but we can still take guidance from understanding those failures better. We must try, for as Bond notes, “apathy will always be to the advantage of the autocrat.” The past is written; the future is not.
Outside of higher education, I suspect most of you are already well aware of Perun’s channel on YouTube, but I thought I would highlight last week’s video on the long-term economic ramifications of the human toll of war. The entire analysis is worth listening to. What equally struck me is how much this is, generally speaking, a change. For reasons we’ve been beginning to observe in our series on peasants, pre-modern populations (with high birthrates offset by high mortality) ‘bounce back’ from losses in war relatively quickly3 and they also have a lot of inefficiently utilized labor. As a result, the tradition of statecraft not just in Europe, but all the world over, often treated peasant manpower as an almost infinitely replaceable resource. But modern industrial societies utilize their labor far more efficiently and have family patterns which don’t ‘bounce back’ as quickly (if they did, we’d have trouble controlling population growth), which means the scars of war on a population last a lot longer and – as Perun notes – have ‘echoes’ because killing a large part of a generation in their childbearing years reduces the number of children in the next. All of which serves as another component in the thesis that war is no longer a profitable business – and yet our state strategies often continue to falsely assume that it is.
A late addition! I want to also recommend this video by Jamelle Bouie (the NYT columnist) asking “How many slaveholders were, there, really?” in the American south before the Civil War. It is a fantastic exercise in cutting data different ways to reveal assumptions about slaveholding societies. In particular, Bouie notes – and the evidence backs him on this – that while a small percentage of individuals owned slaves, a very large percentage (upwards of 30%) of free households did and beyond that many free persons not in slaveowning households were employed ‘in the slavery business’ as it were, as traffickers, overseers, ‘breakers,’ and so on. The video thus provides a really impressive brief exercise in realizing how thorough the penetration of slavery as an inhuman institution can be in a society. I think it is a useful thing to think about when we think about ancient slavery as well: the percentage of the total population enslaved for ancient Greece was probably marginally higher than the American South, for Roman Italy, modestly lower, so we ought to assume similar levels of penetration (and the horror and atrocity that comes with that).
For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend a book that keeps showing up in my bibliographies and citations here, but I haven’t recommended yet, which is A. Lintott’s The Constitution of the Roman Republic (1999). However, I want to add some caveats on the front that CRR is a bit unusual in terms of my recommendations. First, it is a bit pricier than usual (the paperback runs around $50, I think), but second and more to the point this is a more utilitarian, scholarly book than I normally recommend here. It is not, to be clear, badly written (far from it), but it is a bone dry utilitarian book that is exceedingly clear but not particularly lively or engaging. That is perfect for a reference work – which is fundamentally what CRR is – but I thought the warning would be fair: this is not a page-turner.
What CRR is, however, is the only recent complete overview of the functioning of the Roman Republic (focused on the Middle and Late Republic) in English.4 If you want to understand how the Roman Republic worked in greater detail than what you would get in an introductory textbook (or our own How to Roman Republic series), this is where you have to go. Lintott’s real question is about the nature of the republic, which he illustrates by cataloging its institutions and defining their functions and powers. The book is thus structures as a sort of frame: the first few short chapters introduce the question of the nature of the republic (and the difficulties of Polybius’ schematic of it), before the meat of the book works through the institutions of the republic – assemblies, the senate, magistrates (high and low), the courts, religion – in sequence to understand how all of the wheels and gears fit together. And then finally at the end, Lintott turns to Polybius, the nature of the republic and its later reception. That structure makes the book really handy as a reference volume – the scholar or student afflicted with a sudden question about the senate may easily flip to the senate chapter and typically find an answer.
Of course, as we’ve noted, the Romans had no written constitution: the Roman constitution was, as Lintott notes, mostly just what the Romans did and found traditional and right. And yet the system had rules, some written, many unwritten, by which it functioned. Going beyond the summaries provided by Polybius requires assembling and analyzing a huge body of individual examples of behavior within the political system, drawn from all over our sources for the republic (Livy and Cicero make up the largest chunk, though). One great virtue of Lintott’s is that he is open both about chronological variation and also about uncertainty, as there are certainly cases where we’re not entirely clear on how something functioned.
For a reader looking to learn more about the overall shape of the Roman political system, either out of curiosity or as a means of understanding current historical arguments about it, Lintott is the last stop before one reaches the raw material of the sources and extremely narrow and focused scholarly arguments about their interpretation. It is thus something of an achievement that the book that results is, if quite dry, easy enough to digest for the lay reader or early student of Roman history. As a result, Lintott’s work is one of those essential pieces of the library of basically anyone interested in ancient history.
- Made somewhat more challenging by the fact that this department uses their own ‘homebrewed’ textbook and curriculum, so I don’t have access to the wealth of existing assignments and resources I’d have if they were using a major textbook series, since the vocabulary and grammar sequence wouldn’t quite match up.
- Of course there is a secondary problem here that a major way our understanding of the past has improved since 1900 is greater awareness of people outside of the elite and places outside of Europe and of course there are political interests who very much do not like that and would prefer to go back to a history that ignored those things. But “political resistance to new knowledge” is a core part of the story-of-science too. “Jim Crow-era historians whitewashed slavery, but our sources prove them wrong and these historians (Kenneth Stampp and others) demonstrated that their claims about slavery and the nature of the Civil War were inaccurate” may make some parents mad but it is true and so we ought to teach it, beginning at the collegiate level as a story of new historical discovery (in addition to being a story about the true nature of the past).
- Mortality drops as the resource base supports fewer people, while birth rates, largely limited by female fertility rather than male availability, isn’t as hard hit.
- Something like M. Bonnefond-Coudry’s Le Sénat de la République romaine de la guerre d’Hannibal à Auguste (1989) fills a similar but not quite identical niche in French. Of course the foundation-stone for this kind of work is T. Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht (3 vols, 1871-1888), but as you may well guess by that date, quite a lot of Mommsen’s assumptions have been abandoned or substantially revised since 1888.
Don’t really have anything intelligent to add, so let me instead say “Kitty!”
Concur. And let me add a related rant of mine – the “don’t plagiarize” centred way that citations are taught to undergrads doesn’t help either.
Why are citations important? Because if you don’t do it right you’ll be guilty of plagiarism! Be sure to avoid plagiarism at all costs; here’s a statement for you to read on the grim consequences of being caught plagiarizing. The way you avoid such grim fates is to cite properly.
While it is true all that is a not unimportant reason for citations, their more important purpose is to show your evidence. How do we know what you just asserted in that statement is true? A citation is like a lawyer in a courtroom drama holding up a labelled bag and exclaiming “Here is exhibit A.” It is our evidence for the statement just made.
One might also add to Brett’s missive today that epistemological approaches in general — “how do we know if this is true or not?” are sadly weak across the board, not just in dealing with history, but here we are.
TGIF
I only learned the importance of citations almost by accident, in a university poli-sci class. The professor assigned a paper, I don’t even remember what it was, but said that as a test of the robustness of our arguments, that he was going to read them all from a hostile viewpoint; “I won’t believe you if you say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west unless you can point to a completely neutral almanac or something better saying so.”
That one assignment is what made it click, at least for me.
This doesn’t sound “almost accidental”. This sounds like the professor pulling a zen-master: “[at this level] I won’t explain what enlightenment is, just make you do this exercise and hopefully you will get it.”
Accidental was probably the wrong word there. The thing was, it wasn’t really a course in writing per se or meta-scholarship. The idea that this would be an exercise wasn’t on the syllabus. It was just something Professor Rosenberg threw out one day and at least got me to rethink it all. Probably was intended along those lines, but wasn’t really signaled.
I took a very basic law course at one point and one of the things that was pointed out is that plagiarism, fundamentally, is a crime of *attribution*. It’s claiming someone else’s work as your own, and in that sense is the opposite of a forgery (which is claiming that your own work is someone else’s)
Off the top of your head who would you give as examples of hero historians?
I presume Ranke rather than someone like Gibbon?
Marc Bloch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch
If “hero” means “famous guy who gets a lot of credit (rightly or wrongly)”, I’d say Herodotus and Thucydides, in that order.
For Anglophone Roman History courses at least Gibbon would surely be one such?
I’m no specialist in neither but I think this could actually point at one element the sciences have that the humanities do not: Mathematics as a sort of universal language beyond what any one particular lingua franca of the time can hope to equal. I think this is one additional factor why the sciences have been so much more successful at weaving together multinational teams (granted, mostly European) so to speak.
Where there are heroes, there might also be villains. I’d put Gibbon squarely in the villain category.
I can think of two or three reasons why someone might be considered a hero historian.
One is that they think of a new way of doing research or realise that there’s an untapped resource to research, or I suppose think of a new way to evaluate sources that we already have. Another, which may not be distinct from the other two, is that they come up with new questions to ask about the past and may or may not think of new ways to answer it.
On the other hand, a historian may put a new or influential interpretation on material that was already known. (A fourth I suppose is that they have an excellent and memorable writing style.)
Now, Gibbon put an influential interpretation on material that was already known. (And was good at writing quotable sentences.) But I don’t know whether he found any sources which weren’t already known or even asked any questions that hadn’t already been asked.
My understanding is that our host is thinking primarily of the types of historical thinking in the first paragraph.
Howard Zinn
David Graeber also, to a lesser extent, but for similar reasons.
Droysen more than Ranke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gustav_Droysen#
Not quite as much public impact, certainly not outside Germany, but Droysen shapes historiography like no other 19th-century German historian. Inter alia, he invents the term “Hellenistic” to describe the post-Alexandrinian empires.
And while his once-seminal work on the Hellenistic empires has been largely superseded, his Outline of the Principles of History (Grundriss der Historik) holds up reasonably well. https://www.archive.org/details/outlineoftheprin00droyuoft
As someone who was trained as an engineer but has an abiding interest in a lot of non-STEM things; one thing I always recall about the “heroic scientist” narratives in those introductory science classes is how well they emphasize the progress of scientific knowledge, as each one builds on a foundation of those that came before.
As an example, you have the atomic model. Rutherford was more correct than Thomson, and Bohr more so than Rutherford, and so on.
I’d suggest that any “heroic historian” narrative could similarly emphasize this progress, as Prof. Devereaux has so often highlighted here. It’d be more easy to make it clear that even ‘heroic’ historians can and should be improved upon, as they improved upon others. (I’d love to cite an analogous field of history and historians here, but I guess it goes to the point of this post that, um, I can’t!)
You make a good point — “Pop History” in my experience, seems to do the opposite of this. It’s not just that we’ve learned to understand the past better — it’s that all history you were taught before was lies and propaganda. Unlike current history, which pure apolitical truth…
Can you imagine someone treating Newton or Aristotle as harshly in modern pop science as Gibbon is in pop history?
On the other hand, you don’t have too people trying to argue for Galen’s theory of humors as the real version of medicine…
I greatly appreciate that this is not generally the tone this blog takes. The concept of reading older historians carefully and critically, but still reading them, seems core to most classical research.
Can you imagine someone treating Newton or Aristotle as harshly in modern pop science as Gibbon is in pop history?
Oh, I don’t know, in my experience scientists and science students tend to have a very dim view of Aristotle. (Newton is obviously one of the greatest scientific minds in history, so we all tend to revere him, quite rightly, even if he has been superseded in some ways). To the point that, I remember taking a philosophy class in college, and getting to Aristotle, and the teaching assistant said something like “My husband’s a biologist, so if there are any biology students here, I know you probably think Aristotle was a f***ing fool. But trust me, he was a better philosopher than he was a biologist.” (I’m paraphrasing, and she wasn’t quite as salty in the language, but that was the general essence).
Could somebody please quote some Aristotle on such an occasion?
“In a void, no one could say why a thing once set in motion should stop anywhere; for why should it stop here rather than here? So that a thing will either be at rest or must be moved ad infinitum, unless something more powerful gets in its way.”
This is Newton’s first law, two millennia before Newton.
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty interesting here, and made me aware of some things I didn’t know. Apparently Aristotle wasn’t quite as ignorant of biology as has been widely assumed since the 17th c, and his reputation has improved a little bit more recently.
Aristotle still represented the enemy of true science into the 20th century. Leroi noted that in 1985, Peter Medawar stated in “pure seventeenth century”[76] tones that Aristotle had assembled “a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility”…..Zoologists have frequently mocked Aristotle for errors and unverified secondhand reports. However, modern observation has confirmed one after another of his more surprising claims,[68] including the active camouflage of the octopus[87] and the ability of elephants to snorkel with their trunks while swimming.[88].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_biology#Influence
As a former philosophy student, my impression has always been that scientists’ issues with Aristotle are better viewed from a methodological point than his actual findings.
Like, he wasn’t necessarily wrong about a great many things he said, it’s just that his method largely consisted of, essentially, interpreting and analyzing stories he heard from other people (and these sources were of course varying degrees of trustworthy). Of course, the same could be said about a whole lot of theoretical biologists all the way into the 19th century.
Here is a partial defense of Aristotle as a scientist.
There’s something wrong with your link. It looks like a link but it doesn’t go anywhere.
Trying again.
This one works.
Perhaps not for Galen, but a significant share of people do take a 18th century theory of medicine to be correct.
Scientists are giants standing on each others’ shoulders. Historians are crabs in a bucket? (“The science wars” are worth a mention here as the two overly-simple epistemologies rubbing against each other.)
Galen’s theories are apparently still taken seriously by “alternative medicine” enthusiasts among Islamic communities in, of all places, South Asia. “Yunani” here means “Greek” (from “Ionian” originally).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unani_medicine
not to pick on Muslims here since Hindus, Christians and agnostics have plenty of people in their own communities who reject modern medicine too, like RFK Junior in the United states.
In fact, even today, there is a direct line from European nationalism/hypernationalism to alternative medicinical methods like homeopathy.
@Tambourine,
There is the somewhat wide range of theosophically attuned, Hinduism- and Buddhism-inspired ideas that were fashionable in Central Europe during the belle epoque. Typically, these involved vegetarianism, nudism, racial-ethnic mysticism, ideas about telepathy and other forms of extrasensory perception and muddy conceptions about self-improvement, both personal and national, via sports, eugenics and abandonment of rationalism. Homeopathy was one of the phenomena in this mix.
Many of the followers went on to become nazis or fascists. Some, though didn’t: for example, Friedrich Wolf (the father of Markus Wolf, later, the chief of East German foreign intelligence) was a communist and one of the foremost German promoters of nudism and naturopathy.
So, the
As another engineer, I would also suggest explaining the methods, assumptions and aims by which each historian tackled their subjects, which would inevitably affect the way the historian wrote down history and made their explanation for why things went the way they did.
Herodotus for instance had a focus on creating a common Hellene identity but that didn’t stop him from being accurate in certain aspects, Thucydides on the other hand was more interested in the reality of his time, though also critical of it; and of course, while Plutarch wouldn’t let reality get in the way of a good story, the way he presents his Parallel Lives is also illustrative of what was morally acceptable or detestable in ancient times and is still a source though one to use carefully.
Also, anothe other way to highlight the importance of historiography is presenting the ways in which the understanding of history affected the perception of the world. For instance, when the ruins of Great Zimbabwe were discovered in the 19th Century, they were wrongly attributed to anyone but the Shona people for a long time out of racial prejudice against them, something that’s still present in the many conspiracy theories regarding ancient buildings.
Teaching history as scripture is rather high on the pyramid of problems. I don’t know how it’s in other countries, but at least in Romania, highschool history is pretty much a carefully choreographed brainwashing campaign to justify today’s borders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Boia
If history were taught as objective scripture, that would already be a huge improvement.
Anyone else who didn’t get history in highschool?
I’ve found most that “general history courses” are soaked in propaganda, if only in the choice of what to teach (which is a huge choice). Getting away from that has generally involved getting into nitty gritty details, usually with a purpose beyond “Understand the Politics and Grand Events of this Time and Place.”
I’d say almost every course I took before college had that issue, and of the three I took in college two had it as well. The non-propaganda class was on the reformation, focused heavily on primary documents, and it certainly has at its heart challenging a lot of conceptions about the reformation… but it was also, unlike the others, eager to discuss and weigh the possible answers instead of ideologically determining them. It was also a higher level class than the others and only technically a general requirement.
I would accuse every country of doing this, including great countries like Switzerland or the USA. The history curriculum is very suited as a tool for nation-building.
We pay lip service to learning from the past or whatever, but the practical applications of historical knowledge for most of us round to nil. People care about corruption in how math is taught, because there are tangible consequences if students can’t do algebra. For history, accuracy takes a backseat to “politics”, because history is mainly useful for building communal unity.
The usual retort is that good history helps the populace make good political decisions, but that’s awfully close to the community consensus stuff. Are the Gracchi brothers an object lesson in the dangers of populism? A celebratory tale of popular triumph in the face of elite stonewalling and assassinations? A case study on the folly of democracy? A case study on the folly of oligarchy? An example for what happens when you advocate for political solutions before you understand the problem you’re solving? An example for what happens you stonewall the populace because you think you know better? Depends on what lens your society wants to use.
All of the above?
Or just unimportant? The history in Finnish high school curriculum leaves the political history of Rome to primary school, and there, the Gracchi are definitely not mentioned. In the high school, the ancient societies are mainly discussed as cultural, economic and technological environments, with very little emphasis on their politics. The actual political history in the high school curriculum starts from the Congress of Vienna. I think you can get a master’s degree in history here without really thinking the Gracchi that much. After all, they are just one elite squabble in the history of an ancient oligarchic government.
“highschool history is pretty much a carefully choreographed brainwashing campaign to justify today’s borders”
Better that than justifying different borders.
Better that than justifying different borders.
Well, the leading party in Romanian polls rn apparently wants to expand the borders by absorbing Moldova (peacefully, in theory), so i guess this might become an issue sooner than we think.
The article on the demographic history of Transylvania over on Wikipedia does show how complicated (and politically loaded) these debates can get though.
It’s funny just how much what is taught varies. In the UK I had almost entirely 0 history of science in my science classes. The most would be a vague chronology that Newton was after Galileo and before Einstein; but that came almost accidentally as education progresses through scientific theories of growing complexity.
History education, however, from the start of secondary onwards, focussed almost as much on source analysis as on history-as-facts. For example, when studying 1066 as a 12 year old, a key point was that the Bayeux tapestry was the Norman telling of the event, as much propaganda as fact. At 14 we compared English and Spanish sources describing the Elizabethan Spanish armada (both primary and secondary), analysing how and why they differed. In history GCSEs (exams taken at 16yo that mark the end of broad-topic education) we were presented with unseen primary sources, on topics in 20th century we had studied, and had to comment on their biases and reliability.
Whether this is still true now, and how much it varies between individual establishments, is beyond my pay grade. But it goes to show that we shouldn’t assume the way we were taught something is the way everyone was taught it.
Also in the UK I recall historiography being a mandatory first year undergraduate topic (for which we even managed to organise a guest appearance by Geoffrey Elton)
Concurring from Finland: I have taken the “basic studies in history”, i.e. a short minor, 25 ECTS. One 5-ECTS course was solely about historiography and ethics of history profession. Of course, it is one university’s idea of the structure of a history minor, but I think the Finnish degree structures are rather uniform on a general level.
This accords with my UK-based experience, but I suppose Bret is talking about the USA, where, instead of studying one or at most two subjects, undergraduates are encouraged to sample a whole smorgasbord of disciplines (and, consequently, most of what a British history BA would cover gets pushed back into postgrad studies for want of time). UK secondary schools also specialise earlier, I believe, and I’m not sure they teach historiography while history is still compulsory; in my own experience, although we covered source analysis and detecting bias at GCSE level, we barely scratched the surface of learning about actual named historians and schools of thought even at A-level (which is arguably the rough equivalent of a US college minor). So I think a lot of the specific transatlantic comparison here is simply a product of the two educational systems’ different priorities of breadth vs depth.
On a separate point, I imagine one reason why science education teaches about ‘hero scientists’ is to help students relate to otherwise abstract concepts by giving them a human face. History education isn’t pressured to do the same thing with historians, because it already has an abundance of historical figures to serve as those individual entry points into theoretical ideas. I think the article makes a good case for why this is risky, but there is also a countervailing danger that a more historiographical approach will make the discipline feel more, rather than less, abstract, and as such possibly less appealing to the novice student i.e. someone who is likely to think “I want to learn about Caesar, not about a bunch of academics who disagreed over him centuries later.”
Nitpick: the A-Level is really not the same as an American college minor. The math A-Level at A2 level takes the student about as far as second-semester calculus at an American university. At AS level, make it first-semester calculus. The linear algebra it covers is a fraction of a first-semester university course, and the rest isn’t really relevant to a university curriculum.
History, same thing. The AS and A2 curriculum includes source analysis, but the depth of analysis is closer to a survey university course than to a proper minor.
Fair enough. I’m not wedded to this specific comparison; the broad point was simply that, in terms of hours racked up learning a specific subject, British students will tend to reach the level of US early postgrad studies while still at undergrad, and of certain US undergrad papers while still in sixth form. Thus, the fact that they cover certain topics earlier does not automatically mean that those topics are being given higher prioririty.
Thanks for that, I’ve always been aware that US education was broader and less specialised for a long time (not just compared to the UK but also, eg, the French Baccalaureate), but never quite figured out the “conversion rate”, so to speak.
Re,
I don’t have the history training to comment on the first part (I only got a minor), but I do have the math training, and it is unfortunately incorrect. In fact, the math curriculum at Cambridge (Parts I and II) leaves graduates with a B.A. knowing less advanced math than their counterparts at elite American universities.
Elite American universities’ math curricula encourage advanced students to accelerate, to the point that in my first-year grad classes at Columbia there were some third-year undergrads. Harvard accelerates students to the point that many graduate picking up theories I never managed to learn in grad school. The most ambitious (and insane) Harvard undergrads are encouraged to take a course called Math 55, which takes one year to teach a non-elite research university’s four-year undergrad curriculum.
In contrast, Cambridge encourages advanced students to pick up broad rather than deep undergrad math. The way class ranks are calculated is based on a single exam with many questions covering all fields of pure and applied math and theoretical physics. A minimum number of questions is required to pass, and one can get a first-class degree while only answering questions from the normal number of courses one took. But there is prestige given to students who answer more questions beyond that minimum (the term to Google is “senior wrangler”). This breadth isn’t terribly relevant for research – those numerical methods and quantum mechanics exercises are irrelevant to research in number theory and vice versa.
Yes, I was taught a bit about histography in my high school history classes, including my teacher at one point discussing a book on Charles I that had been published just the previous year.
I think you must be younger than me, holdthebreach!
At the point when I did my age-16 exams (in Scotland), I appear to have briefly known quite a lot about the Corn Laws. The one thing I still retain is that there were six causes of unrest in the period immediately following the napoleonic wars. Not five, not seven, but _six_, and I knew _all_ of them (ooooh!). I knew them, because they were in the book. I don’t recall the word ‘source’ being used at any point, nor the idea that those ‘causes of unrest’ might be in any way debatable. Perhaps post-16 history was different (I did not attempt to find out).
I know I knew about the Corn Laws, because when I was clearing out my parents’ house I found some school notebooks at the back of a cupboard. I was startled by how much I had known, and had then completely erased from my head, perhaps subconsciously classing it as being contextless knowledge, and thus useless.
On Pedagogy: this happened to be at the time when the national curriculum was being rejigged, subject by subject. I did ‘traditional’ history (could you tell?), ‘traditional’ french, and ‘alternative’ german. I quite enjoyed german and could manage simple conversation, but was surprised when I later discovered that the french language was intended as a mechanism for communication.
I thrived adequately with the ‘traditional’ exams: I read what I was supposed to read, and wrote largely what I was required to write in the exam – I was a bored swot – but it did and does all seem a bit pointless.
Education in the USA is extremely idiosyncratic and fractured, compared to many countries. At the time that universal childhood education was implemented, there was a unique need to accommodate widespread early/early marriage habits and to assuage a defeated but restive decentralizationist movement, in addition to the globally more common concerns about keeping children in the workforce. There are local school systems that decide significant parts of their methods themselves, guided by varied state regulations and some federal rules; lines between these districts can reflect housing patterns created by racist redlining or even from earlier segregation, and decisions made when miscegenation was a go-to-prison crime are still being unwound.
With that background, history education is especially tendentious. If you were to pick a random suburban US high school, you really have no way of predicting how they will teach, for example, the decline of Black political power after the 1870s: it will probably be either ‘the Army stopped protecting Black citizens’ or ‘Black people weren’t ready to govern and made too many mistakes.’ Other big national identity/national outlook questions will also be taught in contradictory ways too.
Additionally, at the federal level at least, the groups of people who must study American history or government and the groups of people who may vote, these are mutually exclusive. History education just doesn’t function to create American identity in the way you would expect it to in a functioning nation-state.
> In my own experience the exceptions to this were almost invariably stories about the knowledge-making achievements of other disciplines – archaeology and linguistics, mostly – rather than narratives of historical investigation.
> The Greeks would arrive, in that textbook, in Greece at the end of the bronze age, as ‘Dorian invaders,’ when we know they had already been in Greece for centuries at that point and did not displace the Mycenaeans because they were the Mycenaeans
Unfortunately for your argument though, that particular major chunk of new knowledge is the product of archaeology and linguistics
It appears you have missed the multiple posts on here where our author notes that the professional historians are expected to understand – and be involved in – both, alongside the other things.
https://acoup.blog/2025/03/07/collections-what-do-historians-do/
I believe alanl was just highlighting the irony.
> And it means letting ourselves have narratives of ‘hero historians’ to match the ‘hero scientists,’ even if like Newton, we might caution that the historical vision of those ‘hero historians’ are not above further discovery and revision.
Ooh, and leave us hanging without putting any candidates out there? Maybe something to get into in upcoming firesides? I guess Braudel and/or Ladurie would be reasonably obvious initial picks. Geoffrey Parker? Or from my more parochial perspective in the field I grew up and did my PhD in, E P Thompson
Surely you have to start with Herodotus? He is both huge fun and gloriously wrong on a great many things, as well as being a good centre for an initial discussion on ‘what is history?’
I think a big part with these kinds of discussions about scholars in general and historians in particular is the kind of “Yes, Mommsen was *wrong* in a lot of ways, but he was still an incredibly important and skilled historian.”
It’s hard to explain to someone not in the loop why a historian is both A) Very important and even very good at being a historian and B) outdated, and in substantial ways *wrong* at the same time.
While the urgency and alarm is well-warranted, it’s something of a misrepresentation to say Assyriology teaching in the US was reliant on Chicago — Yale, Harvard, UPenn and my own university, JHU, all feature Assyriology PhD programmes, and I think there’s other joint programs that include cuneiform studies as well. For now, at least.
What surprises me is that 100-200 years ago, when the cuneiform was deciphered, surely the number of Assyriologists and the funding was much lower than the current one, even with all the cuts.
So how can it happen that now there is a risk that “those cuts will make it nearly impossible to study cuneiform … anywhere in the United States”?
I’m not in favour of the cuts and I totally get it that the cuts would slow the progress. However, either the statement above is an exaggeration or something has happened to the way humanities are working.
Looking at the wikipedia. article on cuneiform the deciphering of cuneiform was performed by Europeans, so it is not example of study of cuneiform in the United States despite low funding during that time period.
A huge chunk of early archaeology on the Ancient Middle East originated in Europe, and specifically the germanophone sphere (in part because the German Empire maintained a close relationship to the Ottomans who were at the time the colonial overlords of most of what once was ancient Mesopotamia and what is now modern day Iraq, Turkey and Syria).
iirc some of the early standard textbooks on ancient Akkadian and Assyrian were originally written in German, and even some technical terms like the Hakenwinkel (a specific technique ancient scribes used their stylus on clay) originate from German, and
It’s true that, when we teach science subjects, we often include a bit of history, as you describe: ‘Einstein said…’, ‘Galileo invented…’, and so on. This is partly to promptly inculcate in The Young the idea that science is always changing, and that it is comfortable changing its collective mind, but also because it can sometimes be easier to explain a new idea if you also explain why a wrong (but possibly intuitive) old idea is wrong.
But (_but_, **but**) science is _amazingly_ whiggish about its history. For scientists teaching, the ‘history of science’ (and we need those scare-quotes) is of interest because it demonstrates how the errors of the past led to the truths of the present. It’s generally not of interest just why people of the past thought what they did, what else they may have thought, or what other context, social, political or personal, might have influenced them.
The history often isn’t even particularly accurate. If I tell a class ‘Galileo said…’ it’s a coin-toss whether he actually said that or not, or if he said it, whether he was the first to do so or not (despite the intensity of priority-squabbles, people in the following generations tend not to care nearly as much as the protagonists expect, who historically came first). The ‘history’ has an important didactic function in creating a narrative; accuracy or subtlety is not important to that function, and so is cheerfully (and often knowingly) dropped.
My favourite example is the mention of the ‘Ives–Stilwell experiment’ routinely cited as one of the important early corroborations of Special Relativity, partly responsible for causing ‘everyone’ to adopt SR’s conclusions remarkably promptly. The problem is that Ives designed the experiment specifically to demonstrate that SR was wrong, and he continued to assert that it had been successful in doing so, at dogged length, until the day he died; there was a small group of other hold-outs who hung on for much longer than I had thought. A little digging there (I actually read a few of his articles – I read some actual primary sources!) reveals that the story illustrates lots of interesting things about Ives’s motivations, about rival scientific styles, about politics, about being a crank and not being a crank (Ives was not), and what counts as corroboration… all of which ended up in a brief rather whimsical footnote, for the keen student.
This therefore only partially disagrees with your claim. The ‘history’ here _is_ important for exactly the reason you suggest – it has a pedagogical function, reinforcing early on in students’ education the idea that science changes and happily contradicts itself. It would surely be equally valuable if everyone learning about history were from the outset aware of the contingency and impermanence of interpretations. But (block your ears) they might even learn that historiographical lesson more securely if they’re told simple and immediately intelligible myths, rather than confusing historical texture.
Good for the whigs!
Change in science always has opposition and takes time.
When I was in elementary school in the early ’50’s, continental movement was talked about as crank science. By the time that I was in graduate school in the late ’60’s it was considered an established fact.
Re: great scientist view of history, it might be a good political/PR move, but I’m not sure it’s a good truth move. Which is always the problem in introductory courses/persuasion/rhetoric: you can’t get into the full story.
I remember in 8th grade biology (California), we were presented with the Darwin-Mendel synthesis. Darwin was presented as superior to Lamarck, in that Lamarck was wrong and Darwin was right, and Mendel’s experiments proved Darwin.
Down the line, in an introductory university history of science class, Lamarck was presented as a predecessor to Darwin. Ideas of changes of species were ‘in the air,’ and Darwin hit on a synthesis that happened to be correct. Furthermore, Darwin’s ideas were not accepted in his time: he had no explanation for how traits were transmitted across generations. It was only in the early 1900s, when Mendel’s experiments were rediscovered, did the Darwin-Mendel synthesis start to become accepted.
Haven’t sorted through all of my thoughts yet, but that’s a gut response: that presenting heroes and the history of science might emphasize human agency and contingency of science, but runs into all the problems of heroic narratives that you’ve mentioned. Whether that’s a worthwhile trade, I’m not one to judge.
(And there’s the whole postmodern critique of science and truth, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open.)
I think part of the reason we shit on Lamarck is because of Lysenko, and I think that’s understandable
Fully agree that history, along with every other discipline, should adopt an approach to pedagogy that emphasizes how knowledge is discovered, and not just what knowledge there is.
But I don’t think the way to do that is to emulate the science approach of teaching about “hero scientists”. In part, because that approach is the currently the subject of heated debate within the communities teaching and promoting science. Basically, a lot of people worry that teaching about hero scientists distorts students’ (and the public’s) understanding of how science actually works, which is particularly worrisome given how many current issues facing the public (climate change, long-lasting environmental chemicals, vaccines, genetic engineering, funding for space research) are stories of large groups of people over long periods of time with few heroes in sight.
In twist this around like a meta-pretzel, a lot of the proponents of continuing the hero scientist approach in science education are arguing that teaching this way makes scientific concepts easier to understand and inculcates students with the right attitudes for scientific research. In other words, they argue that the point of teaching history in science classes is to promote the right messages about science, which I find an uncomfortable echo of how the current US administration, and authoritarian regimes all over the world, view the point of teaching history in general.
I would say the “few heroes” part might speak more to one’s (contemporary) media consumption rather than those fields being intrinsically different to whatever the more “heroic” fields are supposed to be in this narrative. Just to rattle off a handful examples for each:
* Climate change: Eunice Newton Foote (the author of possibly the first paper to identify water vapour’s and carbon dioxide’s heat-trapping role), Svante Arrhenius (who laid down the groundwork for estimating greenhouse effect, including the now-universal modelling practice of using doublings of CO2 for climate sensitivity), Charles David Keeling (the Keeling Curve), Michael Mann (the Hockey stick), Syukuro Manabe (one of the greatest contributors to climate modelling).
* Long-lasting environmental chemicals: (A bit vague, but I understand the idea). Arguably, this episode is more about “villains” than heroes, since the “heroism” of those who discovered the adverse effects from said chemicals would surely have to be considered secondary to those who invented them in the first place – and moreover, the most practical solutions are less scientific and more socio-political in nature. (Find a way to not produce those, even if an acceptable replacement may never be invented.) Nevertheless, the subject had already received a Hollywood movie (Dark Waters, even if that was largely focused on lawyers), so it is hardly u”npublicizable”.
* Vaccines: Off the top of my head, Louis Pasteur (hopefully needs no introduction here) and Jonas Salk (creator of the Salk polio vaccine). In recent years, Katalin Karikó had some spotlight as one of the names most closely associated with the mRNA vaccines, although it is probably too early for this to be included in typical curricula – particularly when compared to a number of vaccines in much longer use (including the frequently overlooked livestock vaccines) whose creators could also be spotlighted. (There is also the unfortunate politicization – and not just on the part of antivaxxers, but also the way mRNA technology had become part of the propaganda war during the Biden term, with more pundits than you could count blowing the comparatively modest improvements it offers over the preceding technologies out of all proportion.)
* Genetic engineering: Surely Watson, Crick and Franklin have to be atop the list? Then there are the first cloners (most would name Dolly here, who is apparently associated with Keith Campbell and Ian Wilmut – though the timeline seems to go all the way back to 1958 with John Gurdon’s African clawed frogs) and the inventors of CRISPR (according to Wikipedia, Yoshizumi Ishino, Francisco Mojica and Dick van Soolingen appear to have led the teams which independently made the initial breakthroughs).
* Space research: People with basic education just about anywhere definitely know “the first men” in space.** I suspect education in the Anglosphere might somewhat deemphasize the scientists who made those space flights possible because unlike, say, the Wright Brothers, relatively few of them were associated with the US or the UK. In Russia, people are definitely taught about Tsiolkovsky and Korolev at a rather early age – and von Braun is pretty well-known too. (Who might have been integral to the US space program, but this fact appears to get downplayed there – for the fairly obvious reasons of him getting his rocketry experience via commanding camp labour to build V-2s which then got launched at the British cities.) Ironically, the unmanned space utilization, where the American contributions are actually enormous, is taken for granted with little attention to anyone in particular (besides, well, Elon.) If there is any inherent barrier to making heroes out of the creators of GPS and Landsat, I would think it would be the military secrecy which shrouded the early years of these programs, rather than any fundamental difference with the better-publicized science.
As my own aside, I think I might also split away the latter one or two from the rest. While satellites have massive utility, meaningful space travel (in the context of activities like colonization or mining) may not ever be viable due to the sheer hostility of the only celestial bodies in out vicinity and the almost unimaginable enormity of distances to anything else. Genetic engineering holds great promise, but may also have sharper limitations than is usually appreciated – i.e. I recall the research from Francis Crick Institute (yes, that Francis Crick) which suggested it might be impossible to use the aforementioned CRISPR on humans without the unacceptably high cancer risk. In this case, these issues could perhaps be allowed to recede further into the background compared to the others mentioned.
**Way fewer outside of post-Soviet states are going to name the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova – and her final legacy-defining act didn’t help (as the most renowned of all sitting MPs in Russia, she got the task of formally introducing the bill of the 2020 constitution – the one which “nullified” Putin’s past presidential terms and so removed the legal barriers to his continued rule).
There’s always Goddard to mention if you want to get a bit of US influence in… I knew about him for a long time, definitely in high school, but then again I grew up in Massachusetts
Indeed! The one who has a NASA center named after him,
who has had 131 patents awarded to him after his death (and 83 while he was still alive, to a total of 214) and whose autobiography was taken to the Moon by Buzz Aldrin!
https://archive.md/lZ6HW
And yet, for all of the above, his only depiction in fiction (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) appears to have been in a single episode of a Canadian Sherlock Holmes’-equivalent show – and even is basically alt-history, having little to do with his real contributions. Maybe Nolan should have had tackled him after Oppenheimer, instead of doing yet another Odyssey (which will probably have all the same shortcomings as the other recent cinematic attempts to tackle Greek myth/Greco-Roman period.)
The people you mention are all brilliant, obviously, but I still think that the claim “science is made incrementally, by innumerable people working to fit together small pieces of the puzzle, not by great geniuses” is more true than not.
Svante Arrhenius is actually a good example here, i think- people talk about “Arrhenius models” of temperature dependency all the time, but when they do they’re often talking about models that are much more complex than what he originally came up with. He has the honor of having them named after him, because he pioneered the concept, but thinking about how reaction rates depend on temperature certainly didn’t stop with him.
For sure; my point was simply to question if the more contemporary fields of science really do have a lack of “heroes” whose biographies would be inspiring to others. I am certainly not in disagreement with the incremental advancement of the bulk of science.
He has the honor of having them named after him, because he pioneered the concept, but thinking about how reaction rates depend on temperature certainly didn’t stop with him.
Indeed! The below provides a helpful overview of those who followed him, including Homer Kissinger (1957), Jan Norwitz and Michael Ryan (1970s) and more.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8658926/
Thanks for drawing that paper to my attention. I do some work on temperature response curves (of plant enzymes), among other things, so it’s of some work related interest to me.
There’s a lot more stuff on the topic more recent than the 1970s, for what it’s worth, this really seems to be kind of a blank space on the map that hasn’t been fleshed out as much as you might expect (which is maybe why people continue referring to “Arrhenius models” over 100 years later). To the extent that a completely new model of these processes was proposed less than 10 years ago. (I think there are some problems with it, and it makes some predictions that a literature search would show are….wrong, but still, the fact that something so novel could get published is illustrative of how much we don’t understand about this stuff).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.biochem.5b01094
I was talking to a former coworker a while ago who did some groundbreaking work on temperature response curves, and asked why more people weren’t doing similar studies, and she said “because as you and I both know, they’re extremely labor intensive”).
Physical science instruction in the universities is incredibly dogmatic, at least for the first two years or so. There is absolutely no sense of contingency or evolution. Yet students are already primed to know that there is something live and evolving beyond the dogma they must master.
The problem, I think, is not so much at the university level, but rather in something earlier and more basal. High school history–or grade school history–should teach the fate of the Dunning school, simply as a core element of American history. But politics forbids, in a way that does not apply to natural science. Teaching the historical contingency of received history is a dangerous thing. After all, the young might start to apply this message to their own society. Much safer to be Whiggy.
Another difference between how science and history is taught, both in school and to undergrads, is that we start teaching students early and often how science is done. We have students do simple science experiments, starting some times in elementary school, and continue to do so through out undergrad. In my physics undergrad we did many of the experiments that established key results in the field. We also teach the (idealized) scientific method to students in school. On the other hand, I remember rarely engaging with primary sources in history either in school or in the history class I took in first year.
Then again, while we can construct a simple physics experiment for a high-school student to execute in an hour, it seems to me that even the simplest bit of actual historiography would be a “term paper”, that is, it would be a substantial fraction of the work the student would do for a class in a term. In my high-school, the goal for teaching history was considerably lower, simply to get the students to know *anything* about history. Not to engage with primary sources about what went on in the Roman Empire, but to have rudimentary knowledge about what the Roman Empire was, where it was, and when it was.
Bret’s “A Trip Through” posts are basically such short-term historian’s experiments, of looking at a primary text and taking out themes and questions, and I could see something like this being possible in the classroom. Being confronted with some *actual primary sources* during history class is a good step that seems to me to be missing from almost all curricula.
When I was a child I was given a set of reproductions of source documents about the war of the Spanish Succession, which I found tremendously interesting. This was in a package which I remmember being called a ‘Jackdaw’. That is more than sixty years ago and I can’t find a reference, so I might have the name wrong. Anyway, the point is that there have been good attempts to introduce children to primary sources. I don’t know whether anything similar still exists, but that package looked good and helped stimulated my lifelong interest in history.
“On the other hand, I remember rarely engaging with primary sources in history either in school or in the history class I took in first year.”
This is extraordinary. I dropped history at age 14 but we had still got to the stage of engaging with primary sources by that point – I remember an individual research project on Operation Market-Garden which involved me spending a lot of time in the library reading the memoirs of participants and noting inconsistencies.
Marc Bloch works well as a hero-historian, because in addition to being a central figure of twentieth century historiography, he lived as a hero and was murdered for it.
I’m also always fond that in his Rois Thaumaturges, he never translates the Greek or Latin because his readers simply wouldn’t be reading him if they didn’t know it, hardly ever does the German unless dealing with a particularly arduous phrase and always translates the English as a lot fewer of said readers would speak it.
“For Roman Italy, modestly lower, so we ought to assume similar levels of penetration (and the horror and atrocity that comes with that).” Is there any data about how this changed over time? The late Republic conquered a LOT of territory, gains slowed down a lot after that (oversimplifying obviously). Did the percentage of enslaved people change over time as a result. Did the price of slaves? An awful question, but the answer would have real effects on the society if we have enough information to answer it.
For instance you have made it clear in previous writings that being sent to the mines was basically a death sentence. Did mine owners try to keep their workforce alive longer when entire tribes weren’t being conquered and enslaved yearly? If they didn’t did it affect production?
Yes. The major work here is a pair of articles by Walter Scheidel, “Human Mobility in Roman Italy” I and II in the Journal of Roman Studies, 94 and 95, (2004 and 2005). For the enslaved population, you are mostly interested in the second article. It walks through the evidence and the basis for estimates.
One dilemma is that historians are good at history, so when we figured out that the scientist as hero is bad history in the postwar era, we got it out of our teaching. Meanwhile physicists and engineers can teach Carl Sagan or nineteenth-century polemics as THE TRUTH because they are historiographicaly naive. In the same way, bad psychology gets a lot of cultural space in the USA because bad psychologists say things people want to hear and often don’t know that their methods can not establish what they want to know.
Statistician Andrew Gelman talks about this rhetorical strategy at https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/07/09/the-scientist-as-hero-narrative/ There is also a paper on the natural selection of bad science.
The scientist as hero is deeply embedded in physical and chemical nomenclature. The “Hamiltonian” lionizes William Rowan Hamilton; the “fermion” Enrico Fermi; the “Wittig reaction” Georg Wittig.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_phenomena_named_after_people
For context, I pasted the above into a blank Word document, it ended up at 38 pages, returning a word count of 6540 words! Moreover, that is not even the only page like that on there. Apparently, there are also pages titled “Scientific laws named after people”, “Scientific constants named after people”, “List of waves named after people”, “List of fluid flows named after people” and even “List of hydrodynamic instabilities named after people”! Even allowing for some overlap between these pages, that should still give some idea of how differently this field rewards its achievers.
There’s also Stigler’s Law*: ‘no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer’, which everyone knows, without necessarily knowing the name for it. The attached surnames are just labels: I’ve got to have _some_ name for ‘the equation that Yard keeps banging on about, paper after paper’, so when I refer to it, I’ll call it ‘Yard’s equation’, and the relevant readers will know which one I mean. It doesn’t really imply that ‘Yard’ made it up, or that they are particularly heroic.
The practice is largely ahistorical. Hamiltonian mechanics is (mostly) taken to be included within ‘newtonian physics’ (multiple footnotes available here on demand), but was developed a couple of hundred years after Newton was dead. It was developed in some (temporal and intellectual) relation to lagrangian mechanics, presumably named after Lagrange, who was… french? I know perhaps one or two further trivial factoids about those three figures (Hamilton graffitied a bridge, once; I’m _fairly_ sure which century they each mostly lived in), but that’s the extent of my biography of these ‘heroes’.
In contrast, the intellectual and mathematical relationships between (inter much alia) lagrangian, hamiltonian and Newton’s version of newtonian mechanics are intricate, profound, and radiate contingency – there are many productive ways in which you can approach this problem, which illuminate each other.
This seems the _opposite_ of ‘hero scientist’. I may be misunderstanding what the term refers to.
To tie this back to the original point in Bret’s post, yes, talking about ‘history’ to physics (and other STEM) UGs, as well as historiography to history ones, makes useful pedagogical points about sequencing, alternatives, and contingency, but as far as the nascent physicists are concerned, the important points are made adequately by retelling myths, which means we don’t have to deploy full-fat no-scare-quotes History.
(This is not to deny that there is lots that it is instructive for all of us to learn about the actual history of science, and this is important both intellectually and within wider society, but the full-fat History arguably doesn’t pay its way within the UG STEM curriculum, while myth does)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
To me, “we got it out of our teaching” suggests that while historians are good at history, they are crap at teaching. Which is the point Bret makes, that pre-university science teaching is more successful, measured by public support for and government funding of those subjects at university level.
That doesn’t mean physical scientists are lying to students. “All models are wrong, some are useful”. Teaching pre-university students about “heroes” works for the same reason that sports / athletics rely on “heroes” for inspiration. Youngsters need motivation, and if you as a coach want people to do the hundreds or thousands of hours of work, then holding up an individual as inspiration is a proven and effective way to get them to do so, even though most young people won’t end up as legendary sports stars.
I read the article by Gelman, and the two he links to, as being “don’t worship individual scientists as heroes” NOT “don’t study individual scientists”. So applied to history, yes high school courses should be teaching people about, say, Marc Bloch. And Edward Gibbon. And Frederick Turner …
There is also other pedagogical aspects. Not just the amount of hard work, but how to do the work, why to do it, the ethics of it.
I see it as a great weakness to counter-theories that oppose “great men” or “hero” theories. Materialistic conditions or social forces are uninspiring, because the theory appears to predict that your individual actions and decisions will hardly matter at all beyond your immediate vicinity. But all the mass behavior is nothing but a sum of all individual behavior. If all individuals learn that individual actions does not matter, what comes of the mass behavior? Compared to counterfactual where they were taught differently?
Socialists of old were great proponents of materialism, but also understood the need to present heroes.
One could say that purpose of all education is to teach how and encourage to do something. “how to read and write”, “do remember this vital context while reading Polybius”. To encourage anything difficult that is not of immediate benefit to the pupil, it can be a successful motivation to present story how someone did the desired action and what good happened because of it. It matters on local scale that individual engineers, scientists, historians and others conduct their daily work as well as possible. Without any stories of heroism both small and great, won’t there be less it?
I agree worship (lionizing everything a hero scientist did, misrepresenting history to make the hero look more heroic is) inaccurate and likely ultimately counterproductive.
Heroes breed apathy. Heroes suggest that we, as a collective, don’t need to do anything to improve a social phenomenon because at some point, a hero will arrive and fix everything for us without us needing to do anything but to follow that hero.
It is a narrative of how our social world works that lends itself extremely well to authoritarian and hierarchic politics.
In short, there is a social cost to teaching hero narratives that a lot of people, including most STEM educated ones, are either ignorant of or can’t or won’t acknowledge.
In Canada history and Greek and Roman Studies departments have lots of students (so are profit centres, although almost all universities in Canada are public services like public transit). If we pretended we gave people superpowers, like psychologists, or taught narratives that support the powers that be like some economists, we might have even more. But you can’t teach good historical thinking by using bad historical thinking.
My science of history is more like botany than physics in that there have not been a series of paradigm shifts with universal methods, but incremental discoveries of what works best in specific contexts, and painstaking work to enlarge the data set. I actually published a history of the specialty I have the most training in (Achaemenid Studies) with a chronological narrative focused on ten or twenty major writers before all the specialists. But the problem we have is that many people’s understanding of the Achaemenids is stuck two paradigm-shifts ago, sometime before the 1980s.
^Gelman, in the exact article you linked. This appears to be exactly what our host is calling for, so I doubt Gelman would be disagreeing here. In fact, he ends that article with a call to profile more people instead of focusing on a single “hero” at a time, which is again very different. (I am sure that this would be the preferred option of The Pedant too, but both of you have to know how stupidly condensed history curricula are as it is – and the readers who are unsure should check out posts on the Gracchi from the start of the year, which talk about this.) In fact, that entire Gelman post appears to have been prompted by the pandemic-era controversy around John Ioannidis’ epidemiological stance (which I was was vaguely aware of at the time, but turns out to have been worse than I supposed – i.e. I didn’t know his pandemic work was funded by an airline company!), and the resultant disillusionment of many researchers with him.
Others cited by Gelman noted that the “hero” narrative often crosses over into the “iconoclast” narrative, which is where it gets really problematic, and here, I agree. I.e. coverage of climate science is particularly prone to this – nowadays you get little more than basics of the consensus positions, and after that, the kind of a story most readers are likely to see are a form of “Scientist X finds out that things are worse than we [i.e. others in the field] thought” – and which generally both almost axiomatically assumes the “iconoclast” to be right, and is vague about what, specifically, “we” thought. (Usually in such cases, most of it was already known in the earlier-accepted findings, but happens to be new to the journalist. Furthermore, studies which say “things are better” almost never get any coverage – and the compound effect is such that the conspiracy belief “scientists are hiding how bad things are” is now not as uncommon as one would have liked.)
Perhaps the apotheosis of this genre occurred nearly two years ago, when a paper by the former NASA’s Goddard Institute director James Hansen about the rate of warming and ultimate warming was covered almost entirely as a case of disagreement between him (best known for his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change) and Michael Mann (best-known as the creator of the Hockey Stick) – rather than as a disagreement between Hansen and nearly the entirety of climate scientists worldwide! Nevertheless, I am unsure if any of this can be traced to flaws in curricula design.
https://apnews.com/article/global-warming-climate-change-accelerating-worse-92facd6145ab9ab32281ff5d641517f0
For sure but the thing is, can we really say that the cultural space occupied by bad history that is also “saying things people want to hear” is any smaller; let alone that getting individual historian heroes “out of our teaching” had contributed to that? As I already pointed out during the previous Fireside, currently the most popular “Substacker” writing on history is a Nazi apologist, which seems like some considerable evidence against that premise. There’s a number of less-egregious but still-notable examples too (the late careers of Victor Davis Hanson and Timothy Snyder come to mind.) I suppose it’s possible to argue it could have been even worse, but I am not sure if there’s any way to prove that.
We can totally say that “that the cultural space occupied by bad history by experts that is also ‘saying things people want to hear’ is any smaller.” Almost all bad history, archaeology, and philology is by people without any formal training in the subject. One reason why VDH has such a big profile is that he is willing to say things about his academic area of expertise that cannot be academically defended. That is rare in history.
In contrast, quantitative social science is full of academic publications where the statistics don’t work, the data was mangled in Excel, or the data is self-reported and we know people lie about that topic (and has a significant number of papers with made-up data). And the academics who publish them get articles in Psychology Today and TED talks and trade books by Big Five publishers to spread their false or unproven claims about their areas of expertise.
It seems like you are describing structural issues with quality control in both that particular field and in the realms of journalism and book publishing – but then go on to suggest following our host’s suggestion in terms of celebrating specific historians is somehow going to introduce the same issues to history? I am afraid the connection does not seem obvious to me.
It really seems like the most important issue here is the rot in journalistic sphere. It is their inability and/or intentional unwillingness to distinguish good from bad which compounds all these issues we have been dealing with. To give an example of the latter – was it really the belief in “hero scientists” which made The New Republic excerpt The Bell Curve across its pages, or was it something else? Did editors of The Atlantic, in many ways the premier mouthpiece of the American elite*, repeatedly move to blatantly whitewash war crimes because they somehow developed a belief in hero historians even without ever being formally taught it, or was it again something else?
https://archive.md/PJfvn
And in the 1980s, did the same magazine publish Wilson and Kelling arguing that good neighbourhoods depend on the police ignoring the law to rough up “not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed” because its editors believed in Wilson and Kelling as heroes – or because this (which is what became the “broken windows” policing) is what they and their readers wanted to hear all along? For that matter, did Wilson and Kelling advance this argument in the first place because they were taught about “heroic scientists” as they were entering the field – or because of rather different reasons? (Granted, Wilson and Kelling’s argument did cite a notorious “fallen hero” of social science Philip Zimbardo – but given that they themselves lied even about his (already manipulated) findings, it’s doubtful his hypothetical absence would have had stopped them.)
There are so many more examples if one cares to look, that at this point, I am seriously getting to think it’s going to be worth it for the academics in general to develop a much more adversarial relationship with the media, to be far more combative whenever they go contrary to valid scholarship. I.e. our host has already complained repeatedly that the cuts to humanities in the USA are spurred on by RFK Jr’s decision-making – and he attributes that appointment to a communications failure by the medical researchers. Of course, the latter’s task would have been much easier had the media functioned differently: most of “MAHA” beliefs can be traced to cover stories in traditional media well before they percolated down to, i.e. “Raw Egg Nationalist”.
If anything, one could well argue that the reason most academics do the easy thing and keep quiet every time they might come across misstatements instead of raising ruckus about it is because of the belief in inherent progress, of the good “naturally” pushing out the bad over time. In that case, the study of history which emphasizes the effort required to uncover it might well serve as an inoculant to that.
* According to Wikipedia: “From In 2016, the periodical was named Magazine of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors.[15] In 2022, its writers won Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and, in 2022, 2023, and 2024 The Atlantic won the award for general excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2024, it was reported that the magazine had crossed one million subscribers[13] and become profitable, three years after losing $20 million in a single year and laying off 17% of its staff.”
For a brief period (2011-2019), French high school seniors would learn as part of the history curriculum about the historiography of the Vichy period, specifically how Robert Paxton destroyed the post-war myth of “resistant France” and showed that there was enthusiastic collaboration with the nazis at all levels of society.
So it’s possible to teach about historiography in high school! And to have students learn about the process of discovering history. Sadly this curriculum was one of the casualties of the 2019 high school reform and is no more.
So, it appears that this “brief period” only really lasted during Hollande’s term (though introduced in the final year of Sarkozy), and then got rolled back soon after Macron consolidated power? I suppose this is no surprise, considering everything else known about him – although, it is interesting how it’s apparently taken him 5 more years following that point to openly say that he wants schools to promote “conservative values”.
https://www.france24.com/en/video/20240117-macron-promotes-conservative-values-through-public-school-reform
I wonder if a specific reason Macron wanted to backpedal towards the myth of “resistant France” (in addition to the effectively universal desire of every nation to whitewash their past) happens to be the awkward parallel between his own self-styled centrist politics and that period. After all (and forgive me if I’m mangling this) my impression is that to be a “centrist” in Armistice-era France would have effectively meant being…a “moderate” Petain supporter – one who may or may not have nodded in agreement to the Marshall’s radio speeches celebrating the disastrous British landing at Dieppe because (in his telling) from Jeanne d’Arc to present, England was always France’s true enemy and the real tragedy of WWI was that France joined the Entente in the first place instead of maintaining good relations with Germany, but would have otherwise claimed he is just making the least worst choices possible. One who might have thought changing “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to “Work, Family and Fatherland” wasn’t such a bad idea, and, in any case, was far preferable to risking life and limb alongside some Communists – particularly when in daily life, one only needed to interact with the familiar faces in the ordinary French police, who might have had (eventually) handed over a Jewish neighbour or two to the SS when asked to, but otherwise clearly weren’t those ugly fanatics who signed up to fight in Russia as soon as the Wehrmacht crossed the border* or who joined the Milice and were outright taking orders from the SS.
The thing which stuck out to me about that period was that in general, the estimated numbers of French Resistance fighters and those of the Milice were very similar, at ~30k each. Perhaps there were several thousand more in the resistance, but their numbers did not truly swell until around D-Day, when the outcome began to look obvious. Up until then, it really seems like both would have looked like ideological fringes to much of the French society. In fact, another remarkable aspect is that when Paris was liberated, Patton felt the need to accede to a request made by General Leclerc (the head of the Free French tank forces**) to delay their advance by a couple of days in order to hold a parade with their tanks through the French streets. It was widely understood that the point of the parade was not so much to celebrate their achievements as it was to intimidate the Parisian Resistance – whose leaders were avowed Communists (like Henri Rol-Tanguy who co-signed the surrender of the German garrison alongside Leclerc), along with much of the rank-and-file, and whose demands for power-sharing with De Gaulle were considered extremely dangerous by the Western Allies – hence the show of force. (For his part, Rol-Tanguy anticipated that exact outcome when he ordered the uprising, saying “Paris is worth 200,000 dead, so long as the city frees itself before the Free French armies arrive”.)
*Some 10,000 ultimately volunteered for the “Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism” – although around half of those were considered unfit for service, there were enough to hold their first parade in August 1941. It entered fighting in December, where it was largely crushed, with the remnants doing little more than pillaging villages of suspected partisans up until Operation Bagration threw all the Nazis out of Belarus.
**Of course, the only tanks he was commanding were the American-made M4s and some M3s – better known by their British-assigned names, Shermans and Stuarts. (The latter in reference to a Confederate Cavalry General who got shot about halfway through the war.) This isn’t surprising, of course, when considering that nearly all the prewar French tanks were handed over to the Wehrmacht after the surrender. (Some did become available after the surrender of Vichy in North Africa – but those weren’t great even in 1940, and were basically garbage by 1944.) Nevertheless, it’s somewhat ironic the only French tank currently in service is named after a General whose successes were with foreign-made material.
I think your analysis of Macron is a bit far-reaching (understandable if you’re not French and don’t have much context), but not necessarily wrong.
First off, I’m surprised by the France 24 English title of the video you linked, because none of the French press coverage from that time mentions something about him calling it conservative values. He did announce a move to mandatory uniforms, which is indeed very conservative, although that’s mostly dead after experiments proved too costly and unpopular.
On a deeper level, Macron’s view of education is mostly “things were better when students were made to respect their betters”. This goes in line with the SNU, the parody of a military service (not involving the actual army which wants nothing to do with this buffoonery) he put in place as soon as he was elected and tried to generalise, but after the 2024 budget cuts (that’s a whole other story) and hardcore Macronists more and more a minority, it had to go. The traditional right is also a big fan of “law and order” and disciplining the youth, but they didn’t like the SNU for various reasons.
Beyond that, though, I don’t think he cares much about the content of education because what he says on the subject has changed constantly with the wind. However, for his entire first term, the minister for Education was Jean-Michel Blanquer, who has a strong conservative ideology regarding what schools should teach. He was also very close to Brigitte Macron, the president’s wife, obviously unelected but for some reason taking part in the public debate, and she also leans far to the right. While neither Blanquer nor Brigitte Macron wrote themselves the new curriculum, it’s likely they did influence them.
HOWEVER, I must stress that the “resistance France” myth isn’t taught anymore : I was in high school in the 2000s, so I didn’t learn about Robert Paxton, but we certainly learned modern historiography, which does as you mention show that most of France was collaborating, some of them very enthusiastically (joining the militia and everything), most others simply by going with the flow.
——
On the subject of Rol-Tanguy, I live a stone’s throw from the museum of the Liberation of Paris, which is situated in Rol Tanguy’s historic headquarters, and that quote isn’t mentioned there. The insurrection before the troops arrive is presented as a move to pin the Germans in a few places, making it easier for the allied forces to enter Paris, and not purely symbolic. And I’d always thought that Leclerc entering Paris with the 2nd armor division (through the avenue that now bears his name) was a mostly symbolic gesture conceded to de Gaulle to appease him after French forces (outside of the Kieffer battalion) had been kept out of the D-day landing.
I agree handling the communists was a priority of de Gaulle, which informed his decisions to leave many Vichy high-level civil servants in place, both when the French colonies were conquered by the Allies and during the liberation of France. However, while Rol-Tanguy was a communist, the resistance as a whole was a big ideological mix. Jean Moulin, who by summer 1944 had been tortured to death by the Gestapo, but remained the dominating figure of the resistance, was a social-democrat. Several key figures were also close to the social-democrat party, with Henri Frenay among them being vigorously anti-communist. Jean Moulin’s secretary, Daniel Cordier, was a far-right militant before the war. So a win by the Paris resistance was not an unambiguous win for the communists.
I’ll add to all of this that in 2017 Macron apologized for France’s having collaborated with the Nazis, and it was Jean-Luc Mélenchon who expressed outrage at this and said that Vichy wasn’t Real France and Real France resisted.
Very interesting, and thank you for sharing all of this!
The only thing I would like to add (besides the discussion of what Tanguy might or might not have said, or his motives, which is in a separate comment), is that I’m somewhat surprised to hear school uniforms described as “very conservative” – they have certainly been what I had been used to in Australia, and according to the below, it’s actually the norm nearly everywhere besides continental Europe and the US + Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_uniforms_by_country
The resistance as a whole being a weird melange is absolutely true: I ended up (this is a really weird coincidence) learning about a woman in a totally different context whose brother (?) ended up killed during a resistance operation who had pre-war been part of one of those highly conservative fascist-adjacent groups pre-war.
“Paris is worth 200,000 dead, so long as the city frees itself before the Free French armies arrive”
Rol-Tanguy deservedly failed and is deservedly forgotten, in that case. What an appalling thing to say about your own city!
“whose demands for power-sharing with De Gaulle were considered extremely dangerous by the Western Allies”
Subsequent events would go on to show that the Allies were entirely correct in this. Agreeing to share power with Communists was not good for your health in postwar Europe – look at what happened to Jan Masaryk. France was probably better off with de Gaulle in the Elysee rather than falling mysteriously out of it.
“Paris is worth 200,000 dead, so long as the city frees itself before the Free French armies arrive”
It was worth 200,000 Parisians being killed, not to liberate it, but to prevent it being liberated by the wrong Frenchman? I have to agree with ajay.
The comment may be typical of the Communists, but it hardly makes them look good.
Not to belabour an obvious point, but if making anyone “look good” was ever my intention, I would have simply not included that quote, which apparently dates back to a 1965 book, Is Paris Burning?. (Tanguy is also said to deny the claim he thought that, but then again, most people would have done the same regardless; those like Molotov, who remained undeterred about his calculus decades later, are the exception.) Some more context below. (I haven’t encountered that source before, but its author does appear to have written for publications like Jane’s Information Group.)
https://achillestheheel.com/2023/05/15/paris-1944-1-uprising/
In fairness to Tanguy, Camus and others, I think it’s worth removing our hindsight goggles for a second and considering that back in August 1944, it was very much not obvious that soon, Western Europe would see >80 years of sustained peace. After all, it was a full year before the world at large learned of the power of atomic weapons; with no knowledge that such a thing as a nuclear deterrent could even exist, a contemporary “realist” would have had probably projected the recent history forwards and anticipated that a third World War would have been due to break out circa 1970s – unless one found a way to break the cycle, and from the perspective of Rol-Tanguy and others, taking that chance would have certainly made more sense than seemingly going back to the same system which delivered them into the hands of the occupiers four years earlier.
Finally, we must not forget the fact that the uniformed forces liberating France had themselves ended up killing nearly 70,000 French civilians with misaimed bombing in the process. In fact, that is what we know now, to the best of our statistical ability – given the fog of war, it’s very likely the French resistance members, going off of scattered accounts from the terrified survivors of these raids, would have believed in much higher numbers than that. Human psychology suggests these circumstances had also helped create a permission structure for them to indulge in such arguments.
@YARD,
I think Rol-Tanguy was right, personally.
@ad9,
I don’t know your particular political flavor, but at the risk of making some assumptions here, I’m going to guess that Henri Rol-Tanguy was not intending to “look good” to you, or to liberals and capitalists in western countries more generally. You don’t have to agree with him, and if you’re not broadly “on the left” then I wouldn’t think you would agree with him, but it shouldn’t be difficult to see where he’s coming from.
The question of “who gets to be in charge of France after the war”, from his perspective, wasn’t a matter of trading off one politician against a mostly interchangeable politician who wasn’t that different in the last analysis. It was one arena in a much bigger conflict between capitalism and communism, affecting issues as fundamental as who gets to control the means of production, the processes and terms on which goods are produced and exchanged, and the distribution of the fruits of production and social goods in general. This is just about as titanic an ideological conflict as you can get, and especially from his perspective in the 1940s, I’m sure he thought it was a conflict for the future of human civilization for the foreseeable future. He might not have put it this way, but some people would- think of it as a struggle of good and evil, as important as people in Western Europe in the 17th c saw the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism. When the stakes are that high, then yea, I would absolutely agree with him that the deaths of 200k Parisians are a rounding error. Particularly since we are not talking here about deaths through execution or anything that might be otherwise morally controversial. Rising up against the Nazi occupation is *good*, even if doing it right then might be unproductive, premature, or possibly suicidal.
If you introspect a bit then I’m sure you’ll find that there are issues you really care about, where you would also say, “yea, 200k French deaths is worth it” as well.
“You don’t have to agree with him, and if you’re not broadly “on the left” then I wouldn’t think you would agree with him,”
FYI I personally am on the left and I think that what he suggested was obscenely immoral. But that’s communists for you.
“I don’t know your particular political flavor, but at the risk of making some assumptions here, I’m going to guess that Henri Rol-Tanguy was not intending to “look good” to you, or to liberals and capitalists in western countries more generally. You don’t have to agree with him, and if you’re not broadly “on the left” then I wouldn’t think you would agree with him, but it shouldn’t be difficult to see where he’s coming from.”
It’s extremely easy to see where he was coming from: He was happy to get hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen killed so that the right kind of left wing government could rule France. I’m sure he would have been prepared to kill hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen after coming to power in France as well.
It is just that, being one of those contemptible centrist/ liberals, I tend to think it a bad sign when a politician is telling me how acceptable it would be to get hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen killed so that his side can take power.
@ad9 @ajay; following this logic, do you also condemn Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, Antoni Chruściel and the other leaders of the Warsaw Uprising in similar terms? After all, they had the exact same strategic aim as Henri Rol-Tanguy (establishing political control over a capital from inside before this can be done by an impending arrival of a notionally allied army), and their decisions did in fact lead to ~200,000 Polish deaths in Warsaw.
Yet, as we both know, popular history (in the West) generally prefers to assign all the blame to the Soviet troops for failing to rescue the uprising – never mind that the plan of Bór-Komorowski et al. certainly did not expect for them to have any involvement (except as a force to be repelled once they managed to take control of Warsaw). Else, they would not have acted without giving the USSR any forewarning – so in effect, this narrative expects the Soviet armies to suddenly overwrite their entire operational schedule and expose countless soldiers to avoidable casualties – all in order to rescue the ideological successors of the same government which had invaded Belarus 25 years earlier, and preserve them as a political force.
The above also assumes the hypothetical rescue operation would have been easy if only it was tried – no matter that the attempts to encircle Warsaw continued throughout the entire August – and the fighting over the eastern suburb of Praga was ongoing until the Germans have finally abandoned it on 14th September, blowing up the bridges across Vistula in the process. In fact, the army which had stopped at the outskirts of Warsaw in late July did so when it got counterattacked by five fresh tank divisions – while that same army had just completed what amounted to a “Blitzkrieg” of their own, storming across Belarus (crushing so many Axis formations that by late June, there were enough of just those POWs who have survived the trek to camps and were fit enough to march to hold a 57k “Parade of the Vanquished” in Moscow) and covering nearly 500 km in two months. That advance far exceeded the original expectations they would “only” cover 300 in that time, so their supply lines were stretched, and the formations were depleted of both men and materiel. Right as the Uprising began, a whole tank corps ended up surrounded and largely annihilated.
Lastly, I think it’s worth bringing up the events in one more European capital during that fateful year – one which strongly suggests the fundamental assumptions of both Rol-Tanguy and Bór-Komorowski were fatally flawed. I’m talking about Athens, which for a while did become de facto controlled by the local Communists – only for the British forces to clear them after month-long street fighting, as the USSR offered no support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekemvriana
After all, the pre-Yalta negotiations have already made Greece staying in the western sphere the price of nations like Romania and Bulgaria entering the Soviet sphere of influence, and similar considerations would have applied to both France and Poland – and to their capitals. While we might reasonably assume Rol-Tanguy delivering Paris into the Soviet column would have been too much of a prize to give up, compared to Athens, we might also assume the Western Allies would have much rather split France, leaving the uprising with little more than a rump Communist state centered on Île-de-France.
@YARD: Given that the Soviets had knifed Poland in the back in a way that the Western Allies had not done to France, I don’t find the situations to be at all comparable.
@60guilders: The point is that in both cases, you had underground resistance leaders who wanted to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands in the capital for the sake of a faint chance at political power, which they would have been highly unlikely to obtain otherwise. If we are to consider the preceding years, I’ll admit that the USSR did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Poland in 1932, which it violated in 1939. Though, would you say that if USSR cancelled the Pact and therefore gave Poland advance warning of its intentions, then it would not have been “a stab in the back”? If not, and you consider that an insignificant formality next to deciding to invade in the first place, then one would also have to conclude that Poland itself “knifed Czechoslovakia in the back” when it sent about 36k troops to reclaim a Polish-majority region from it in 1938, at the exact same time as Germany was taking Sudetenland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Operational_Group_Silesia
In fact, the USSR had warned Poland that it might withdraw from the Non-Aggression Pact if they took part in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia. The “Sanation” junta ruling Poland* chose to treat this warning as a toothless threat, and the rest is well, history. If we are to go back further, then the Polish attempt to tear away the entirety of Belarus from the fledgling USSR could also be described as knifing the country going through a civil war in the back. Granted, that conflict formally began with Poland expelling Soviet troops from Vilnius, but nothing obligated them to march onto Minsk and beyond after that – same as nothing obligated the Red Army to unsuccessfully march onto Warsaw after expelling the Polish troops from then-Belarus, to be fair.
*I hope you had no silly notions 1930s Poland was a true democracy or anything, considering their own, successful “January 6” in May 1926 – one which engendered enough opposition that by 1934, they chose to establish Bereza Kartuska concentration camp which held ~3,000 political prisoners. Ironically, those people became at least temporarily free(r) when Poland got invaded by the USSR, since their prison guards fled in advance of the Soviet forces.**
**Admittedly, when a similar thing was about to happen in 1941 as the Wehrmacht approached a major political prison in Oryol, Stalin ordered to execute the most important prisoners in it. Ironically, the Reich would have most likely killed those same people once they got their hands on them, on account of (nearly) all them being Old Bolsheviks/Revolutionary Socialists/Comintern members/Jews, but for Stalin the risk of any of those (i.e. Trotsky’s sister and the wife of another one of Stalin’s most important rivals for ultimate power, Kamenev) managing to melt into the countryside was clearly too great – so 157 people stopped “being a problem” and “became a statistic”, to use two of Stalin’s quotes.
If we are to go back further, then the Polish attempt to tear away the entirety of Belarus from the fledgling USSR could also be described as knifing the country going through a civil war in the back.
@YARD,
I don’t think the Poles had much moral right to try to absorb Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, but then, I don’t think Russia had much right to absorb them either. Those territories should have been ruled by Belarussians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians, as they are today.
As a person with both a science degree and a minor in history, I think that one other thing that helps the sciences is the existence of “citizen science” initiatives (e.g. Backyard Bird Count, protein folding). I don’t think I’ve ever casually heard of a “citizen historian” initiative, and I wonder if those could be of help in making people both more aware of how history research works and how important it is.
There are a number of citizen science projects in history eg. BOhisto, a project to crowdsource transcriptions of manuscripts in Bolzen, South Tirol (computers help but needed extensive human guidance and verification when I was involved), a project to interview ageing WW II in my hometown, or Manuscript Miniatures. Archaeology has projects like the Portable Antiquities Scheme. More projects and more promotion would be good!
I’ve heard of a few, and the Zooniverse (the largest platform for such citizen science projects) currently has 17 projects under the “history” category. Some of them, certainly, are tied to the sciences (typically projects along the lines of deciphering and transcribing handwritten scientific observations from centuries past), but there are others I’ve seen simply looking at collections of personal letters or other documents. (For instance, one recently-completed project has the title and description:
THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF WILLS: ENGLAND 1540-1790
Help us transcribe wills from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and reveal how ownership of, and attitudes towards, objects changed in a period of economic transformation)
I’m a mathematics professor and as part of our capstone course we wander into some philosophy of math. One of the big questions I pose to the students is why we teach math to everyone, with both topics and methods under consideration. I’ll bury the lead: the primary purpose of math education is to teach people how to follow directions. We can pretend it’s all about critical thinking but it’s not. As part of this discussion, to help the students figure it all out, we point at other subjects and ask the same questions of them. For science my students almost always land on some variation of “to understand that there are rules and the world makes sense in light of them.” While for history the answer we tend to land on is “to build community and comradery.” Under that goal, it is unsurprising that the “how” of history is ignored. Community is built around powerful narratives of shared struggle and victory.
Just FYI, stating the main summary up front instead of hiding it after a bunch of verbiage of secondary importance is the opposite of burying the lede. 🙂
Your footnote about textbooks synthesizes well with the issue of how departments treat adjuncts. When you say,
what it makes me think of is how American and Canadian math departments sometimes prefer to design their own calculus textbooks instead of using the same doorstopper as everyone else. If you’re long-term faculty at the university, this makes perfect sense. There are few economies of scale to textbooks and many diseconomies of scale. The regular faculty know the curriculum and often have debated at length what to include and what not to. Newer faculty members (including postdocs) can ask advice and will get it, and at the larger unis, like UBC, there are so many sections of the same course teaching the same material that a director of calculus or a person in a similar position will be there to manage them. In this environment, this approach is superior to paying Cengage or Pearson $200 per student per semester for a textbook with mandatory webwork licenses.
But all of this assumes that the faculty either are permanent, or are the sort of temporary instructors who the permanent faculty cares about, i.e. postdocs and grad students. Adjuncts are never getting this kind of help from permanent faculty about how they’ve taught the class before, and are not usually staying at one institution for long enough to accumulate the internal knowledge of how it prefers to teach a specific course. So in that environment, any variation from the national boilerplate makes it considerably harder to teach, as you’re noting.
There are many ways to show that history is being discovered. Not just heroes.
The story of Schlieman is worth telling and quite interesting to children. He did find Troy, but he also destroyed parts of it with dynamite. And Priams treasure is a lot older than the Troy of the Iliad.
I love Percy for his disdain.
OK, different approach. What were the top 3-5 discoveries in history, when were they made and by whom? (These discoveries do not have to be currently accepted theory, just historically important).
As a scientist who didn’t particularly enjoy studying history (beyond learning some HEMA fencing, and a few very niche topics that connected to books and other media I enjoyed) until… I’d say somewhere past undergrad, it was really striking to read your comparison of how science and history are taught at the very early levels. I realized that other than a couple of ancient Greek and Roman writers, who may or may not actually count as historians, the only historians I can actually name are ones I’ve read about – and obviously, from – on this blog. I rather strongly agree that early presentation of history as a process of discovery and refinement of understanding, rather than simply lists of facts, would make an important, necessary difference in how the field is valued.
Thanks for your insights, and I hope the semester spin-up goes as well as it can.
The historicans has mostly convinced the general public that everything is known. Maps with no blank spaces, detailed account for every year AD. Now they have brought up a generation of ex-school students that don’t see the downside of getting rid of unneeded future research.
Am I the only one who hadn’t heard of “Redi and Spallanzani” and was surprised they made it to the list of “historical scientists we all learned about” instead of Pasteur?
No, you are not. I’d never heard their names before I read this article, and I studied biology at university! (I had heard of Pasteur and his swan-neck flask.)
I urge some caution here. It’s not always good to say “some people think history is X, when history really is Y.” I suggest that “history as scripture” vs “history as what professionals practice” are two meanings to the same word. If we insist too much on “this is what history really is,” we’ll encounter resistance, and we’ll come across as pedantic scolds.
And something is to be said for “history as scripture.” Certain narratives or fictions about the past can be useful, even fulfilling and nurturing, while not being really what historians do.
That doesn’t mean I think history should always be scripture, or that there’s an equivalence to the effect of “both views of what history is are equally good and it’s just a matter of personal preference.” I believe that history as the way professionals practice it is better. have a PHD in history, and despite all the disillusionment which comes from all those years in grad school, I still think there’s a lot to be said for that version of history. I also think it would help to try to introduce students to it early on, even in high school or earlier. The continual dialogue that professional history, at its best, represents is an inclusive, invigorating process and invites intellectual inquiry, even in a way that makes (some limited) room for the “history as scripture” viewpoint. I
What I’m trying to get away from is suggesting that just because we have a different view of what history is, doesn’t by itself discredit the history as scripture viewpoint. And even if our view is better, simply saying “this is what history really is” is not going to win many converts.
To be clear, I’m not saying Bret makes the type of mistake I think some historians make. I don’t think he’s making that mistake in his blog post. He’s defending history and he’s doing it by pointing out what professional historians do. And he’s doing a good job, both in this post and in this blog in general.
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It seems to me that if you are teaching, for example, Newtons Laws of Motion, you are almost certainly going to have to mention Newton at some point, and will quite probably mention that he discovered them, if the students don’t themselves work that out from the fact that they are called Newton’s Laws of Motion.
OTOH, if you are teaching, for example, the American War of Independence, you are almost certainly not going to be telling the students who discovered it. No one did. Not every body of knowledge is well fitted to produce stories of the Great Discoverer. For that, you need clearly defined Discoveries that might be attributed to some Discoverer.
History as a discipline strikes me as being ill-suited to this.
Deducing from the name that they were discovered by Newton would be based on an incorrect premise. Stigler’s law of eponymy states that scientific principles are rarely named after the person who discovered them (and it is itself no exception, being attributed to Merton)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy
That seems like something you redress by substituting “person who discovered it” for “person who recorded it”.
Although specifically for that particular time period. We do have other circumstances in which detailed information is only known because people engaged with the subject managed to find the historical accounts buried amidst archives and libraries and undertook to ensure more copies of them existed and were distributed.
Who first recorded the existence of the American War of Independence? Was it an impressive and difficult discovery on his part?
If I was dedicated to knowledge of the subject, I could probably name some names. And given that there was a war going on, I’d say a bit of contemporary recording is pretty impressive.
I don’t understand why you’d respond to somebody suggesting that “discovery” is the wrong term by doubling down on it.
I’m sorry, I may have misunderstood what you meant by “record”. But a guy who writes down that there is a war going on about American Independence is not going to become a famous historian because a) he is acting as a chronicler rather than a historian, b) he is doing nothing terribly impressive in doing so, c) we have lots of other sources telling us about the war and he does not stand out (a fatal impediment to becoming famous).
if you are teaching, for example, the American War of Independence, you are almost certainly not going to be telling the students who discovered it. No one did.
Nonsense. Ben Franklin was sitting under an apple tree one day and a Stamp Act fell on his head, and then he leapt out of his unwashed petri dish and ran down the street tied to a kite shouting “Wow!” That’s the way I learned it at school, anyway.
In my opinion, history does not lend itself to being represented as a story of discovery because it is not a scientific discipline. New historical research more often than not produces new interpretations of the same historical facts, not new knowledge of the past. Unlike in science, these interpretations do not supersede each other, no more than Epicureanism overturns Stoicism. The fact that contemporary historians hew to one interpretation rather than another reflects mostly currents in modern society-at-large (see for example stronger emphasis on so-called “ordinary people’s history” in recent historiography or functional vs intentional view of the Holocaust or Fisher’s German-guilt-for-WW1 thesis vs Clark’s structural-guilt-for-WW1 thesis).
Of course, in principle, history as a discipline can unearth new facts. Suppose, in the 18th century some historian wrote based on a mistranslation that the Romans used swords made of lead, and since then archeology had conclusively unearthed only iron swords and no lead swords, well then the discipline of history made progress. But note that in this case (establishing firm facts about the past) the 18th-century historian turns out to be completely wrong. He’s not wrong in the sense that Newton is wrong (in some cases and for some conditions). He was just completely mistaken about the past and his theory of lead swords can be thrown out tout court. In this case there’s no point in teaching budding historians about his “discovery” except maybe as a cautionary tale.
Historical research does turn up new information, which leads to new and better explanation. ‘Ordinary people’s history’ for instance, sheds light not just on the ordinary people but on elite perceptions and decisions, and on the effectiveness or otherwise of policies. Archaeology modifies our views – the more so as it covers more area and uses new techniques. More recently, the enormous amount of written material generated from the 17th century – reaching a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – means their are a lot of assumptions still to be tested. And example is Adam Tooze’s work on the Nazi economy, which delved into the records of the major industrial firms. Sometimes this refutes earlier work, sometimes refines judgements, sometimes confirms in more depth current judgements.
Whether this makes it ‘scientific’ is another matter.
We only remember the names of the people who discover the Big Impressive Things. But in history the Big Impressive Things are pretty obvious and don’t have a specific discoverer. No one will ever remember the Heroic Researcher Who Discovered The Roman Empire, because there wasn’t one. And few will ever remember the Heroic Researcher Who Discovered A Detail About The Roman Empire, because no one becomes a hero by discovering a detail.
It’s a bit like Lepidoptery. No one is going to remember the person who discovered butterflies, because there wasn’t one. And no one is going to remember any of the hundreds of people who discovered species of Butterfly, precisely because there are hundreds of them. It doesn’t follow that Lepidoptery is not “scientific”, just that it is not going to make anyone famous for a discovery.
We remember Petrarch as the guy who rediscovered Cicero’s letters, one of the most important first hand sources in history.
Interesting. I didn’t know that. And I feel confident in saying that most people haven’t heard of Cicero, much less the rediscovery of his letters, or the identity of the person who made that rediscovery.
As a wise man said: https://xkcd.com/2501/
Most people haven’t heard of most things, I think the threshold has to be higher than that.
Whereas familiarity with Cicero is pretty basic as far as ancient Rome goes. Plenty of amateurs have that as a low bar, and ancient Rome gets a lot of amateurs.
Mind, that’s this generation. Go a couple of generations back where Latin was an essential part of a decent education in the English speaking world at least, and plenty of people knew Cicero.
Isator, in the nature of fame, no one is going to become famous for making a discovery about a thing or person that most people have never heard of.
To further my original analogy: Which lepidopterists are famous among laymen?
This applies also to physics. Newton, Maxwell and Einstein were giants who did so much work that in distant future, many historians will dismiss them as fictional cultural heroes. No one will believe that Einstein discovered both simple
On the other hand, there are fields of physics that don’t have such figures. Thermodynamics, for instance, was slowly discovered and no single person is overwhelmingly important. Pre-Maxwell electromagnetic is a long history of people whom we know mainly from units named after them. Similarly, quantum mechanics is, when its history is discussed, usually used as an example of physics as collaboration and gradual progress, as in Kragh’s “Quantum Generations”. And frankly, it is also more inspiring for a prospective scientist: a realistic grad student can’t aspire to being an Einstein-like superman, but being a great man like Dirac or Fermi seems still possible.
Yes, to that.
It might be that Newton and Einstein (and a very few others) are bad examples to quote here. If there do exist ‘hero scientists’, then they are pretty clearly in that category; but to quote them too often makes it easy to forget how very extreme, or how very atypical, they are. Newton and Einstein, and probably Mendel, _completely_ change how to think about a subject, in a few written paragraphs –so there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and you can point to the _page_ where the world changed (it may be that Aristotle is in this category, though without the brevity). I’m even excluding people like Maxwell and Darwin from this category, on the grounds that their work could be argued to be only towering, magnificent (re)synthesis. And by ‘Einstein’ I mean ‘Einstein-and-the-1905-relativity-paper’, ignoring the two other startling papers of that year.
If we exclude those folk as ‘exceptions’, then we are deciding that it’s not useful to analyse the subject in terms of individual heroes, other than to add a bit of rhetorical colour, to humanise the subject, or to make a joke about flamboyant beards; everyone else is to at least some extent interchangeable, and it’s their communal endeavour, and the personal bickerings that lead to eventual consensus, that is the story to tell.
In physics there are some wrong interpretations. E.g. “luminous ether” or “N-rays” from physics.
However, when disproved via experiment, they are discarded. This may take some time for some of them, but eventually they are. The differing interpretations then become something that you can find out about, but they’re not taught in class because they’re not useful and class time is limited.
This does require that you can actually disprove the interpretation conclusively via experiment. This requires differing predictions, i.e. *numbers*, for the interpretations, and an experiment to produce those numbers. When the numbers match one interpretation and not the others, you can discard the ones that don’t match.
Of course there’s errors, but we can use error bars an multiple experiments to effectively rule them out.
History doesn’t seem to work like that, mostly because you usually can’t do an experiment with it. So you have differing interpretations, with evidence for and against them, but it’s rarely as effectively conclusive.
Newtonian mechanics is still taught because, while it’s not as accurate as Einsteinian, it’s accurate enough for many uses and it’s *much* simpler.
Aristotlean mechanics, as far as I know, didn’t produce numbers. If they did, the numbers are likely different enough from reality in everyday situations that they wouldn’t be useful. Result: Aristotle is not mentioned in physics except possibly in passing.
We’re having problems figuring out post-Einsteinian physics because generally we can’t do experiments to produce those numbers. Instead we have to look at what nature produces off in the cosmos and try to figure out what happened and what the differing theories predict on that basis. This does not lend itself well to repeatability, rather like with history.
I wonder if the flaw Dr. Deveraux identifies here is a transatlantic difference, because in my History BA (at Royal Holloway, University of London, for the curious, class of 2017) we had a /compulsory/ historiography module that ran from Herodotus and Thucydides through medieval chroniclers, renaissance historians like Machiavelli, Gibbon and other enlightenment scholars, von Ranke, into Marx, the Annales school, the Cultural and Linguistic turns, Foucault, Gender history, and a general overview of the state of the field in the early 21st century.
This was a compulsory course for first-year undergrads, with attached seminars and coursework, which was then paired with a practical-skills course dealing with primary source analysis, how to find and cite books and journal articles, essay and argumentation skills, and the rest of the practical skills of the historian (although I do feel there wasn’t as much as there should have been on navigating and using archives).
Of course, in the UK model you study a much more narrow slice of topics – I did my entire degree in the History department, which I understand would be impossible in the US Major-Minor model. But it’s interesting to read our host propose a model of university education that I remember going through.
I’d like to see a deeper dive into what’s going on at U. of Chicago, etc. I remember circa 1975 my father (professor at a small liberal arts college) griping about the transition of larger colleges from the model “the professors teach undergraduates” to universities with the model “the professors teach graduate students who teach undergraduates”. And that the motivation was to rapidly increase the number of undergraduates taught without rapidly increasing the number of professors (and hence allowing the professors to be paid more).
But it seems U. of Chicago is move back toward the older model, which doesn’t seem like it would yield *any* economic benefit, since it would reduce the number of tuition-paying undergraduates that could be taught.
The only path toward a profit that I can see is if recruiting *enough* graduate students is getting to be difficult (or at least, getting difficult without subsidizing them more than can be afforded), and the goal is to reduce the number of tenure-track faculty below the number needed to maintain a competitive graduate program. Then one could replace the graduate student teachers with adjuncts. I suppose the ultimate point is something like the nineteenth-century university model where there was one professor with tenure — the chair of the department, often titled “the professor of X” — and a small flock of very contingent instructors.
I don’t know what the actual dynamic is of what is going on at U. of Chicago et al. But we give ancient peasants credit for not being irrational in how they manage their household economies. We should expect that what U. of Chicago is doing is rational in the context of the situation they are in.
My suspicion is that if what they’re doing isn’t rational in light of the explanations they’re giving, then there are salient facts that they’re not talking about. But whatever problems they are having, it’s not unique to them, they must be present in many universities, so academic scuttlebutt must have access to all the relevant facts.
Also, I was just noticing the phrase “a massive pause – perhaps permanent – to a wide range of humanities programs there” is not entirely accurate; undergraduate teaching will continue. What is being “paused” are humanities *graduate* programs, only a part — and actually the smaller part — of the humanities programs at universities.
Referencing peasants here seems like a complete non-sequitur, and I would think that graduate programmes being smaller does not make the impact of cutting them proportionately so if they’re the ones producing the majority of contributions to the field.
Ancient peasants were following a tradition that worked for many generations (with subtle improvements, differences etc), letting them sustain themselves, their families and community. A university administrator has become a prominent position in the last decades, doesn’t particularly benefit from not letting that uni fall to ruin and is perfectly capable of moving to greener pastures when convenient. Once you examine motivations, things start to make sense, yes – but in very different ways.
Thinking about this some more, if the triggering event is the Trump administration’s cutting of NIH grants, the likely dynamic is that the university has been cross-subsidizing humanities graduate programs using the indirect costs assessed on science grants. The indirect cost funds are down, so they’ve got to cut what they’ve been paying for.
(And don’t tell me that universities don’t do that sort of thing. They have an enormous incentive to so do. And my alma mater (MIT) once got dinged for $250 million in a federal audit for excessively creative accounting of indirect costs.)
Which would explain why the cutback on humanities graduate student recruitment is described as a “pause”, nobody knows how long the funding interruption will last. Likely it won’t go much beyond the Trump administration, and possibly not even that far given that it’s been getting public pushback from Congress, even by Republicans. So everyone is holding out that it isn’t a permanent change in the university.
Checking Wikipedia suggests that one U. of Chicago’s deeper problems is that their endowment-per-student is “small”, only $1/2 million per student. Compare with $2M/student for MIT and $2.5M/student for Harvard. So Chicago’s finances have less of a buffer if the profits creamed from research grants decline.
This post presents history as a science, but is this even a predominant view? It sounds rather German. Others view history more as a branch of literature, hence books like “In Defence of History” by Richard J. Evans.
Literature may entail research for the sake of adding verisimilitude, but I don’t think it entails the same process of consultation of bodies of collated data, observation of materials, and analysis of the details derived from those things according to theoretical frameworks concerned with drawing conclusions backed by evidence.
History is scientific in the extent to which it depends on those things.
Evans also gave us this rather wonderful summary of David Irving:
“It may seem an absurd semantic dispute to deny the appellation of ‘historian’ to someone who has written two dozen books or more about historical subjects. But if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.”
https://www.hdot.org/evans/#
That (the https://www.hdot.org/evans/ link) is a very interesting document, not least for paragraph 1.5.13, which makes explicit a variety of ways that historians can be dishonest, and by implication the nature of the trust that historians generally have in each others’ work, when presuming as a matter of practice that their colleagues exhibit (or perform?) honesty in quite specific ways.
A _very_ similar statement could be made about the ways that scientists can be dishonest, and the implied trust of their colleagues. The famous Royal Society slogan ‘nullius in verba’ – ‘take nobody’s word for it’ – implies both that you should not believe something simply on the basis of the speaker’s authority, but also by mild extension, that if, when someone says ‘if you do X, then you will see Y’, you _can_ pretty much take their word that they have both done X and seen Y. You _could_ replicate their experiment, and see Y for yourself, but you don’t have to if it’s not core to your own concerns. You might disagree with the interpretation of Y, but the ‘if… then…’ becomes in principle the link between you and the reality under discussion, from which the speaker has disintermediated themself.
Those two features (and especially that disintermediation) seem, to me, to be core to the idea of the ‘scientific method’ as a practice rather than as a philosophical logic. Much more so than discovering things, per se, or doing things on a lab bench. This is obviously quite an expansive definition, of course, but while it would include some of the humanities, it would exclude others (so it’s not an empty definition).
A historian’s analogue seems to be ‘if you were to examine source X, then you would see it says Y’. If the speaking historian is presumed honest, then there is a sense in which it might not be a priority to read source X for yourself, but instead simply use the knowledge Y, and to that extent the reporting historian has disintermediated themself, in a way analogous to the scientist. From this point of view, it does seem natural to talk of ‘scientific’ history. I suppose it depends on what you think you’re uncovering ‘scientia’ about.
Science publication has at least the nominal check of peer review.
But even peer review takes on trust that the author has in fact done X and seen Y. It is not intended to, and generally does not, catch laboratory fraud. It’s intended to check the logic of the paper, assess it for novelty, check for fit with other similar papers, and give the method a general plausibility check.
So if the paper is: “I did X and saw Y. My conclusion is that all instances of Y are caused by X” then peer review isn’t going to catch that I lied about doing X and seeing Y. What it will catch is:
a) this conclusion doesn’t follow; there could be many causes of Y other than X
b) this isn’t novel; Marmaduke et al (2013) already reported the link between X and Y
c) this doesn’t take into account Clutterwick and Shuttleforth (1884) which reported that Y often happens spontaneously
d) he says he did X fifteen thousand times, that’s unlikely because each instance of X costs about half a million dollars
I suspect some of the reason we lack the narratives of ‘historians’ that you pick up in science is that historian means the journalism or studying the classics or the past, and so you end up with a rather confusing mix of people, some of whom are in a wildly different field from modern historians. Science at least has the benefit that whilst early scientists and philosophers were so interchangeable that early scientists and philosophers were often the same person, the actual names of the fields split up significantly earlier, and didn’t just morph due to linguistic drift over time. It’s one of the reasons why a lot of people probably have the ‘history is not a research field’ view of historians, because some historians did not ‘research the past’ but instead ‘read older literature’ which isn’t quite the same thing, and the fact that all of that is definitely not true of the modern academic field of history has done nothing to stop the same word being used to refer to both.
This is specifically in English, so this might be a significantly less notable problem in other languages that don’t refer to ancient Roman journalists as historians sometimes, and don’t refer to the study of their writings by simply pluralising the word history. Which is just confusing to someone who’s not familiar, especially if their first language isn’t English anyway – it’s like if the word ‘apples’ was taught as the plural of apple, as histories is if you look it up, but actually just meant a singular orange instead.
I’ve been thinking more about what you’re saying about how history is taught vs. how science is taught. I want to caution that, while the way math is taught does include some history insets about famous mathematicians and their discoveries, it’s included in undergraduate textbooks purely for flavor, and doesn’t really help illuminate how math research works.
The issue is that the insets never get to what the hard step was in proving some named theorem – they just give sketch biographies of Newton, Euler, Gauss, and other famous mathematicians. It showcases that new theorems are proven, but doesn’t show how, and on net, what students pick up from this is that it takes a genius to prove a theorem whereas mere mortals just apply the formulas they are taught.
In contrast, an example of something more concrete and useful came in my last year of undergrad. In complex analysis class, after the professor went over the maximum modulus principle, he cautioned that this is a common topic for exams because it’s easy to set exam questions on it, but is not really relevant for research. He contrasted it with analytic continuations of functions, which are important in research but impossible to set undergrad-level questions on.
And even in grad school, the sort of historiography you say you wish were taught better in history undergrad is not really taught in math. The algebraic geometry curriculum treats the theory as a given, and doesn’t try to teach it historically, going over the limitations of the Italian school and the reasons for the switch to the much more abstract language of schemes. (There are a few paragraphs to that end in Hartshorne, but they weren’t lectured on and instead the coursework began with schemes as its foundation). By then, even the heroic mathematician insets are gone – nobody has time to go over Grothendieck’s biography, students are expected to find that on their own.
I wanted to write something very similar on physics undergraduate courses. I agree that undergrad courses are very different from high school classes or articles for general audiences, which will focus on the discovery aspect and shy away from the math. I want to add that – at least in physics – students are taught a skill set of mathematical methods that is a prerequisite for the scientific research. For example, in a course on electrodynamics, students will spent most of their time applying Maxwell’s equations to various problems. The history behind these equations will be mentioned but that is not the challenging part of the course.
I think teaching physics in this way is not bad. A single undergrad course can not be expected to turn you in a complete researcher, but the methods you learn will come in handy later on.
This makes me wonder if, instead of trying to follow a hero-historian approach, undergrad courses should focus on the basic skills of historians. I would be curious to know what this would look like for history and to which degree this is already the case.
Well, it is an extremely interesting subjet so I am going to had my (french) experience to the debate.
Firstly, I took history of mathematics in university, and the professor was really annoyed at this perception of the history of science, because often it is the people that came AFTER the “great scientist” that presented the theory as we know it today, Descartes did not write “Chartesian equation” and most of Newton formula was written in their current form by Laplace. I can understand him, but it still make for great propaganda.
Secondly, their was one time in my high school history cursus where historiography was in question, and it was in a very important subject for France, the occupation and the resistance. It is mandatory to explain how historian after the war presented history to show France as being entirely resistant, what we called the “Résistancialisme”, and it serve as our introduction of how much history is a political battlefield. It was also the only time in high-school where we actually learned the name of historian. So in a way, what you are advocating for can exist.
So we clearly know more about ancient history today than we did in the recent past. But we probably can’t say that we know more about any ancient society than the people living in this we societies did. So where’s the cutoff? Have we reached the point where we know more about, say, Julius Caesar’s Rome than the Romans of 300 AD did?
I think that’s a fundamentally incorrect way to look at this question.
The issue isn’t knowing more–ie, accumulating more facts. Obviously someone living in a culture is going to have more facts about that culture at their disposal. The issue is understanding better. And that’s notoriously difficult to measure (see the field of pedagogy).
Take food prices. It’s trivially obvious that a Roman citizen is going to be more knowledgeable about food prices than a 21st century historian. They’re going to know who has the best prices, who’s willing to make a deal, who’s using the bad stuff to adulterate the bread, that sort of thing. But a historian will UNDERSTAND food prices better. Because the historian has the advantage of seeing things like the trade networks, the impacts of various price control schemes, the way climate impacts food, etc., the historian is going to understand food prices the way no Roman citizen could. Further, we have a few thousand years of advancements in various economic theories that we can bring to bear, meaning that we understand these things in ways that were simply unavailable to any Roman. The Roman knows more; the historian understands more.
Interesting. It seems history is taught somewhat differently in the US than what I’m used to. IIRC, our very first history class (in 6th grade) was about Quellenkritik, i.e. Source Criticism. While I don’t think there was much teaching focused on history-as-a-science, the idea that sources are unreliable and require careful analysis was a hot thread throughout school.
I was schooled in the British system, and I definitely remember being taught — at least by GCSE level (equivalent to freshman/sophomore years of high school) — about the distinction between primary and secondary sources. So yeah, I was also wondering whether or not that’s something that gets taught in American schools.
On defending history and US humanities in particular, econ blogger Noah Smith has one of his brief items about this which link to a couple of other papers. TL;DR while humanities students who study Philosophy are doing well in the job market, the papers say it’s not so great for the others. Suggestion is to make history as hard as Philosophy.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/172653305/american-colleges-are-in-trouble
Worth noting that our host is decidedly not a fan of Noah Smith! In fact, I think the only other pundit who had ever ended up receiving a post on here specifically to rebut one of his arguments was Sohrab Ahmari.
You can search for that post on here quite easily, so instead, I’ll use my one link per comment (assuming that it’ll let me post it – I think that particular link format might trigger the filter) to demonstrate how Noah Smith can’t help himself but be deceptive even in the post you linked! That is, compare the CO2 chart he included in the post, claiming it demonstrates “an example that almost no other countries followed” with the one below.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?time=2002..latest&country=GBR~FRA~DEU~BRA~AUS~BEL~CHL~MAR~COL~AUT~PER~PRT~SWE~IRL~FIN~SVK~HRV~URY~ISL~USA
OK, the link (from the exact same database Smith used) works – you just have to copy all of it, rather than click it. With that settled, I suppose I might as well just link to our host’s opinion from three years ago.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/29/new-acquisitions-on-the-wisdom-of-noah-smith
Well, speak of the…!
https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3lyjuuzz53c2m
My high school American History course was framed around historiography. It was introduced specifically, and I remember learning about early historical approaches the American Revolution as fiercely radical and later approaches emphasizing continuity. It was similar for later periods, particularly in the various historical approaches to the still unsettled issues of the Civil War. It was a very interesting course and presented a lot of familiar and new material in new ways.
Granted, this was at Stuyvesant High School in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That’s an elite exam school in NYC, so it isn’t clear the course could be adopted for high school students in general, though there’s no reason it couldn’t be an AP level course. Granted, there would be parental protest. Mr. Irgang, whom we called The Irganglion because he was extremely intense, taught the course and another course on Economics. He was color blind but produced complex presentations on the blackboards in varied colors of chalk. He died young, in the 1990s, I think.
I was fortunate enough that my first course at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, focused on Johann Gustav Droysen, and with him, on historiography, but even in the intro courses on Medieval and Ancient history, there was heavy emphasis on hermeneutics and “how do we know what we think we know”, with significant emphasis placed on the limitations of the available sources.
I think this is a difference in teaching philosophy; my professors were fairly blunt that they did NOT much care if we remembered anything about the nominal topic, as long as we understood the historical method properly.
The teaching philosophy basically reflects whether the professor thinks to himself “I am training the historians of the future” or “my job is to educate citizens about important events of the past”.
If I’m teaching a class on “introduction to automotive engineering” it will look very different if my thought is “this will help prepare these kids to become car designers” vs “this will mean that they know how to replace a spark plug”.
I started thinking about heroes and villains in history studies wnen I accidentally learned that one of the most famous researchers in the history of Russian law and state not only made up some of the research but also agreed to a burning of his people for the crime of leaving the faith.
There’s an interesting tightwalk which ethical experts need to walk when presenting their expertise, between overselling their reliability (which leads laypeople to overly trust *what they think you said*, and to blame you for lying or overpromising if they find any sign of a contradiction) and underselling it (which leads to people dismissing them, often in favor of people who are good at selling themselves as experts but range from fallible to inept or malicious. I suspect part of why historians tend less towards presenting “heroic researcher” narratives is because history is harder to convincingly prove right than science (a science teacher can in many cases run the same experiments in the classroom that the heroes used to overturn previous models) so it’s less trouble not to bring up the question of epistemology at all.