Member-only story
Understanding Human History
When I was in school, history was one of my least favorite subjects: It just seemed like a bunch of arbitrary names and dates and events that I had to memorize.
In hindsight, I realize now, the problem I had with the subject was that it had been “storified.” That is, rather than trying to educate us on grand themes, everything had been turned into a story: certain people did certain things, in a certain sequence, and interacted with other people in certain ways, and ended up with some conclusion.
Part of the problem with teaching history in this manner is that you don’t end up with very satisfying stories. As Shakespeare had MacBeth say, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
(No wonder, then, that I ended up majoring in English, studying Shakespeare and Faulkner. At least there I could come to appreciate the stories and the storytellers on their own terms, without being forced to carry the burden of “teaching history” as part of our shared experience.)
The bigger problem with this storified approach to history, though, is that it inevitably forces historians to pick heroes and villains, and to coerce their narratives into familiar patterns that then highlight these characters in customary ways. No wonder, then, that we have to rewrite our history books every decade or so, as…
