A People's History

 

Beauty and the Beast

Xerxes opines that he never liked history back in high school or university, because it was “primarily a record of an endless succession of wars.” 

“History books say next to nothing about what life was like for the peasants who served as cannon fodder -- collateral damage -- in those wars, or how they survived when they weren’t at war.”

My take on history is the opposite. I always loved history in the traditional sense, the accounts of wars and how they were lost or won, of how government policies succeeded or failed. The recent fad of documenting the lives of ordinary people instead―including “black history” and “women’s history”—misses the point. I find it useless except as a sort of gossip, with the same appeal to some of our worst instincts.

Why do we study history? To learn the lessons of the past: Don’t pay Danegeld. Don’t debase the coinage. Don’t leave defence in the hands of foreign mercenaries. Don’t appoint two leaders with identical authority. We learn these things from the experience of leaders with important responsibilities, a high public profile, dealing with major matters of public consequence in most cases, for the obvious reason that this is where we have clear documentation of what was done and what resulted. We have more detailed records.

We might have even better records for very recent events, but there we do not have the long view, and personal interests—politics—can cause distortions of the record. Cause and effect are not yet clearly visible.

A focus on the ordinary life of the common man or woman is similarly useless. Our documentation of their experiences, their decisions, and their results is always far scantier. This leaves a barn door open to anyone to imagine or falsify. Even if this were not so, it is almost impossible to connect cause and effect.

Not that the experiences of the common man or woman are not of interest. Not that there is no documentation. But this falls in a different realm of discourse: not history, which is concerned ultimately with politics, but literature. For the average man or woman rarely made public policy. From them we learn of fundamental life decisions: whom to marry, how to raise a child. And our sources are folk songs and ballads, folk tales, popular legends.