History (eBook)

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UNDERSTANDING HISTORY

A historian, then, characteristically argues, presenting reasons for adopting a particular version of the past. He is trying to persuade his reader to adopt his own view.1

David Bebbington

One evening, my wife, Leah, and I were enjoying dinner with our friends Keith and Amy. After dinner, Amy referenced how a recent biographical movie misrepresented its subject. She conceded that the film included the disclaimer that it is “based on a true story” rather than a perfectly accurate recounting of the events it depicts. Nevertheless, Amy complained that the movie is grossly inaccurate and suggested that filmmakers should not rewrite history. Of course, I knew exactly what she meant. Who among us has not been frustrated when a film that claims to be historically accurate takes any number of (ahem) “liberties” for the sake of artistry? But, since I was feeling a bit spunky that night, I suggested to Amy that historians rewrite history all the time. What followed was a lively discussion about the relationship between history and the past. Keith, who literally called while I was writing this paragraph, jokes that he and Amy are still having trouble trusting any historians after that conversation. I am not sure if I am an exception to their distrust or not!

HISTORY IS NOT THE PAST

In my experience, most people believe that the words “history” and “the past” are more or less the same thing. In some respects, this is only natural; in everyday language, these two terms are used as synonyms. If you asked the proverbial “man on the street” to define the word history, he would probably say something like “history is what happened in the past.” If this is indeed how we ought to understand history, then it only makes sense that the purpose of the historian is to tell us about what happened in the past, to remind us of the who, when, what, where, and why of bygone days. While there is a legitimate place for such chronicling of the past, to equate the historian with the chronicler introduces a category error that has important consequences for the discipline of history.

Professional historians make a distinction between the past and history. The past includes events that occurred prior to this particular moment in time. It might be many centuries before right now, or it might be yesterday. The past is vast. To be sure, it is possible to relate important aspects of the past to present-day audiences. For example, I can tell my students with relative certainty that Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire as coemperor or sole emperor from AD 161 to 180. However, there are innumerable things about Marcus Aurelius that even the most prodigious historian will never know. Because no one except God was around in the past, he alone has a complete understanding of it. Many history teachers focus almost exclusively on rehearsing the past, forcing students to learn about names, dates, and key events. Lazy engagement with the past is the reason many students do not care much for history; they have never been properly introduced.

For the historian, history is not the same thing as the past, but rather, history is the discipline of reconstructing and interpreting the past. Historians believe that history includes more than simply repeating facts about the past. John Lewis Gaddis suggests that the past is something we can never have exactly as it was when it happened. He claims, “We cannot relive, retrieve, or rerun it as we might some laboratory experiment or computer simulation.” Gaddis suggests that, at best, we can only “represent” the past.2 This is the unique task of the historian, and it is a task that necessarily involves interpretation because of our distance from the past events themselves.

History has always involved interpretation, even before the birth of the modern academic discipline of history in the nineteenth century. Tacitus (c. AD 56–117), the famous senator and historian of the Roman Empire, wrote during a period of decline. He offered a declension narrative, a story of falling away from an earlier ideal, which moralized against the ethical and political corruptions that he believed led to Rome’s decline. In a completely different vein, Eusebius of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340), the most important early historian of Christianity, offered a triumphalistic interpretation where all of human history culminated in the conversion of Constantine and his consolidation of imperial power in the Roman Empire. Historical objectivity has always been an elusive goal for the historian, though many professional historians have tried hard to chase after that impossible dream.3

It is fairly common to hear people complain about “revisionist” historians who are reinventing the past. Historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of received, popular, or prominent understandings of history; others can view revisionism either positively or negatively. In contemporary America, complaints about historical revisionism frequently seem to be motivated by political concerns. For example, many of those on the political right believe that theologically conservative evangelicals played a central role in America’s founding.4 For these folks, the most vocal of whom are often more interested in activism than history, America was intended to be a Christian nation. Any deviation from our Christian heritage is a sign of declension. By contrast, for many on the political left, America is a nation of oppressors where those with the power suppressed the rights of minorities, immigrants, the poor, women, and homosexuals. For these folks, again, often concerned mostly with activism, America is moving in the right direction, especially since the 1960s.5 Most historians agree that these two popular understandings of the past fail to accurately reconstruct American history.

The past can be a powerful tool in advancing a contemporary agenda. Those with a vested interest in preserving a particular understanding of the past are sometimes distraught when a historian upsets the apple cart by challenging their interpretation. William Katerberg suggests these tensions “often seem to come down to a battle between academic history and public memory.”6 Sweeping complaints about historical revisionism misunderstand the nature of history. As John Fea rightly argues, all historians are revisionists because all historians are doing their best to interpret some aspect of the past with the best source material available to them.7 The problem is not with historical revisionism per se, but with revisionism that is clearly driven by a presentist agenda and/or that claims to offer the definitive interpretation of the past. (I discuss the dangers of presentism in the next section.) Any good historian understands that history is always a provisional discipline. Christian historians might add that we see through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12) and that the secret things belong to God alone (Deut. 29:29). As new evidence comes to light, new interpretations will arise that complement, challenge, and, at times, correct older interpretations. The past may have already passed, but history will always be a work in progress.

A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY . . .

Ever since the original Star Wars movie opened in theaters in 1977, the words mentioned above have been a part of American popular culture. Each of the live-action movies in the Star Wars franchise that have been released thus far begin with these words set against a black screen. Cue the famous theme song by composer John Williams. Once the music begins, a short summary of the backstory leading up to the film scrolls upward across the screen. Once the prologue is completed, the movie begins. I get chill bumps every time I sit in a theater and the opening words appear on the screen; even my disappointment in the moribund second trilogy of movies could not take away this feeling of anticipation. With a new trilogy of Star Wars films set to be released beginning in 2015, I hope each movie begins in the same way. (Are you listening, Disney?)

In a helpful article on historical thinking, Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke suggest that the opening sequence in the Star Wars films reminds us of the importance of historical context.8 I believe it also offers another important reminder to historians. The past, while often open to scholarly study, took place a long time ago in a faraway place (if not another galaxy). Many historians emphasize this point by citing the famous opening line to L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”9 This is true even of the recent past. For this reason, historians must take into account matters of historical context when studying the past. You might think of historical context as everything that was in the atmosphere at the time of the subject you are studying. According to one introductory textbook, historical context “might be seen as the setting of the period” and includes “the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological milieu of the day.”10 Christian historians (really, any good historian) would point out historical context also includes the religious and other worldview assumptions from the period under consideration.

A keen sense of historical context helps protect historians from the temptation of presentism, which is any attempt to read present...