What is History?

My Textbook's Cover

In my history class we had to select a couple of definitions from a list, one that best represented our view of what history is all about and another that is the antithesis of that view.  Here is what I turned in ...

The quotation from the list that most closely corresponds with my own idea of what history is is the one from E. H. Carr (#12), who said that "The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present."  This very neatly expresses my own point of view and, at the same time, describes my chief reason for taking this course—and the whole string of courses that lead to a military history degree.

To become a military concepts and doctrine writer [what I do for a living], it was essential that I have an extensive military background.  When I started I felt sure that twenty-three years, four months and three days was more than sufficient; but, the more I experience the present, whether in meetings, or in conversation, in research, in reading concept papers or emerging doctrinal publications, or in studying current events, the more insufficient I find my experience to be.  So, in the words of our text, I have become a “relentless questioner,”(1) and a voracious reader.

Besides that particular motivation, which really only serves the ends of my day job, I am interested in history, as a man, a father, and as a citizen, for the very same reason.  Reading history illuminates much of the present, it makes things make sense.  It satisfies my curiosity about the present and, at the same time, creates a thirst to know more.  Perhaps that is the sentiment that suggested to someone that the only thing men learn from history is that men never learn from history.  Quite the contrary, I think that men do learn from history.  It is just that they don’t learn enough.

As to the alternative, the definition that captures the opposite of what I believe, I saw agreement between the William L. Burton quote (#13) "If you do not like the past, change it,” and the one by Fredrick Jackson Turner (#24) "Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." These two represent something reprehensible.  They proclaim dishonesty as if it were a virtue.  This is where it starts in some, the propensity to alter history, to revise it, to re-write it, to re-craft it in such a way that it subtly changes and tells a story about something that did not happen.

History is the record of what happened.  A study of that record can reveal why what happened happened.  The record of history sheds light on the true characters of men and women.  It is a gold mine of wisdom showing the ways to peace and to war, to success and to failure, to victory and defeat, to liberty and destruction.  Changing that record reveals much more than present dishonesty.  It shows a contempt for truth and a motivation to justify continued dishonesty.

(1) Richard Marius and Melvin E. Page, A Short Guide to Writing About History (Pearson Education, Inc., New York, NY) 2.