So Just What is History?

Before we go any further into the realm of history, we need to know what defines it.

One way to define history, and it is taught in this manner, is as a collection of facts. Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. William the Conqueror wrested England from Harold II in 1066. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. These are all facts. Boring, indisputable facts. Some facts are debatable. Was Wallenberg assassinated by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s? Was Oswald Kennedy’s killer? In these cases, the outcome is largely known, but there are still questions to answer, such as when, how, or why something happened. Still, this is not quite the history we are seeking.

A second way to define history is as an interpretation. Think of history as a story told by certain groups that have different ideas about their world. This would be primary source history. We can read the letters of officers and enlisted soldiers in the American Civil War and discern a difference between the two groups: what their fears and hopes were, how they viewed the world around them, what they thought of events they acted in. History as an interpretation is more than this though. The story passes through two more filters. The first is time. Someone reading the letters of General Lee today will no doubt feel different about it compared to the person the letter was intended for. The second filter is our own interpretation of history. Collectively this is known as historiography, and historiography changes through time. The interpretation of the American Revolution has changed several times since the survivors of the war and creators of the Republic looked back upon their deeds, moving from Heroic to Nationalist to Imperial and Progressive and a sort of synthesis between the final two. This shapes our basic outlook on the events and people, thus giving historians of two different historiographies two different interpretations.

This, ultimately, is the interesting, the fascinating history. Not the collection of facts, but how those facts are interpreted, assembled into stories to be told. Historians are storytellers, but history has not always been told with an objective purpose in mind.

Examine the Heimskringla Saga written by Icelander Snorri Sturluson. He writes the history of Norway with a very certain agenda and readily omits, changes, or simply creates facts and events to drive home his points. Another prime example of history written to satisfy an agenda is the Bible (it could be argued that most, if not all religious texts that tell a history fall into this category). A more modern example is the first "biography" of America's first president George Washington. Washington, as far as historians can tell, never chopped down a cherry tree and told his father "I cannot tell a lie". Still, we celebrate his birthday by consuming cherry cobbler in school cafeterias across the U.S. A more objective interpretation tries to keep its "facts" inline. Creating facts is a great way to become discredited as a modern historian.

The stories told in the following blogs will try to avoid this subjective skullduggery while still telling a relevant story. No blog will simply be a list of facts, but an exploration of what those facts mean, how they are coherent, and so forth. And with that, we begin.