History?

[chickenfeet]

This is a post that has been kicking around in my head for a while but has been dragged kicking and screaming to the surface by this post from the lovely and thoughtful frumiousb. My reaction to the post was that it was curiously detached. It could have been written about the Peloponnesian War. I couldn't write with that kind of detachment about the Somme or Ypres. It's too close. My grandfather was there. The chapel at school was filled with tablets commemorating the Old Boys who died there.

So, my broader question is "when does history start (or end, if you prefer)?". Is it a matter of time or more to do with some sense of personal connection? There's certainly a sense in which, for me, the Vietnam War is "further away" than WW1 So what says the blogosphere?

Comments

[violetsaunders.livejournal.com]

My quick off-the-cuff response is that History doesn't start or end anywhere - but when things pass out of your own experience and you begin to rely on the testimony of others (as Thucydides would have it) they begin to become historical. So WW1 for us is definitely becoming historical - even though we both talked to people who were there. Whether you then choose to write about that history with detachment or not is a purely 'artificial' decision.

love :-)

VS

Hm...

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

...when the media have abandoned the event in question for the Next Big Headline Grabber?

[gillo]

An interesting link. We always take our Year 10 pupils (4th year, old-style - aged ~15) to both the Somme and Ypres at the start of the summer holiday - my younger daughter will be going this year. At Thiepval we have a short non-religious ceremony in which teh names of the 35-odd old boys of the school who dies in the war are read out and someone usually says a poem - the kids find it very moving. There are always two or three who have relatives buried somewhere on our route, so we plan in the time to leave one of those small crosses at the grave. We also visit the Canadian lines and memorial at Vimy, a big French memorial, a cemetery for "Empire" soldiers, with Punjabi, Arabic and Chinese inscriptions, and a German cemetery, so that it's not just seen as a British war - the kids get a good sense of the history and the scale. In October there's going to be a staff trip on much the same route.

Back when the *spit* National Curriculum was being devised, Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State for Education, insisted that history finishes at least 30 years ago. Some A level syllabuses go up to the end of the First Gulf War. I'd be wary of teaching to teenagers as "History" anything within their own lifetimes. The curriculum here is far too full of Hitler and Stalin for my taste - it's compulsory to do both before History becomes an option, and GCSE tends to be 20th century, as do many A/L courses - so some poor kids get Hitler from the summer of Year 9 to when they leave school! Universities have complained, but every pundit is outraged at the idea that kids might grow up not knowing about Hitler in particular, so it's likely to stay that way.

I find that I have to teach any eighteenth or nineteenth century background my older classes need for set texts from those periods. It irritates me somewhat, when they are studying stuff I'm old enough to remember as "current affairs" in History, but I suppose one answer is that History ends a second in the past. I think Asimov once wrote a short story along those lines.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Sadly enough I remember the Asimov story - it was in "Earth is Room Enough" and posited that a machine to look into the past was also a terrible invasion of present privacy.

I'm finding events within my lifetime are very much becoming part of history - the Miner's Strike, say, or Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" speech, not to mention the Falklands War.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

not to mention the Falklands War

and the Labour Party

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

There is something deeply worth exploring here. After all, I wished the current Labour Party into existence in the early '90s, and I'm still glad that I did - the alternative was just too horrible to contemplate.

Like Itchy, posting elsewhere, I think the Labour party of the 80's had the potential to do great things, but could never have reached a position where they could implement those things.

The Labour government as it stands will never achieve greatness, but they have delivered on a lot of things that mean a lot to me - a Scottish Parliament, a mininum wage, a society where the mention of the concept of Homosexuality is not illegal.

I respect the despair of many labour supporters in the face of the Iraq debacle, and in the failure of the labour government to reach higher, but regard the alternative, another decade and a half of Tory rule, to be much, much worse.

It's possible that you had to be living in urban Britain in the 80's to understand the real despair and madness that society had descended to - maybe you had to be in central Glasgow, for all I know, but it was a bad, bad time, and we had been led there deliberately. I hope we never have to go back.

[gillo]

We're both sad together, then. *g*

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Great, there's nothing worse than being a lone saddo :-)

[violetsaunders.livejournal.com]

And being 'sad' and 'grumpy' is kind of fun too - isn't it? I used to be so shy and I really don't care what people think any more.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I see your point. I did the Europe 1917-45 thing for 'O' level so I can relate. I think the 'A' level crowd got the Tudors. Two years of Geoffrey Elton is a fate no teenager deserves.

It's so much easier here because there is so little history to teach.

[gillo]

That Tudor option included a lot of wonderful culture and society stuff, though, which is fascinating. And Elton wasn't the last word even in the days of our youth. (His nephew's Ben, which explains quite a lot about Blackadder I think.)

I did 1815-1955 at O/L, though I was a bit sketchy on anything before Corn Law Repeal because I arrived at the school a term late. It's a broad sweep, but really useful to have covered so much.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I find that as I age parts of history seem to come closer. I'm beginning to understand 19th-century mindsets in a way that I didn't - it was frozen in an antediluvian past with Cro-Magnon and Ancient Egypt. I was brought up by relatively old parents (second marriage for my father) so that WWII, which affected both, was always closer than, say, the Algerian War, which took place before my time, but after theirs, so to speak. The Russian Revolution is similarly close, because of my Russian grandmother. But reading about the Crimean or the Napoleonic Wars, and especially the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, I now find I can more or less enter into the mindsets which led to them. I find Arnold Bennett, Chekhov, Turgenev or Trollope nearly contemporary and very modern (but not Dickens, who wrote nearly at the same time as Trollope but was rooted in a different England; I always think of the gibbets on the beach at the beginning of Great Expectations, and contrast them with Phineas Finn's shooting week-ends in Scotland.) Balzac's France is more in the past, but instantly recognisable.

Incidentally, I forget who wrote that one can't know what a century was like until some great novels are written about it, but - so incredibly true. Although the novels aren't necessarily what the critics would have us believe; I think there's a great deal more of late 20th-century America in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash than in anything by John Updike, for instance. And while I admire what Tom Wolfe has been trying to do for the last 25 years, it find it so... laboured.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

and especially the Franco-Prussian War of 1871

I don't know. Going to war over the succession to the Spanish throne seems like a very remote past. In the same class as, for example, installing one's brother as emperor of Mexico.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Well, the Succession d'Espagne was under Louis XIV, and I don't claim to understand him. (Really, when I read classical adaptations of Greek plays by Racine or Corneille, I find the originals much closer to motivations I comprehend.) But installing your brother as Emperor of Mexico? Don't tell me you didn't see a number of versions of that plot during your stint in the Big Corporations Universe...

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that 1871 also turned on Spanish dynastic issues, specifically the offer of the Spanish throne to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

(Oh, and you might be interested by something I posted in the comments of my "halogen hob = 1, saucepan = 0" post. I've been wondering whether I ought to do a separate post about it; you'll tell me what you think.)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I think it's worth a separate post. It's a good job there weren't too many actual Frenchmen in 2DB or they'd have stopped for lunch so many times they would never have made it to Paris.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

You realise many of the restaurants quoted in the 1939 Michelin had been reduced to rubble by the time the Allies landed, right? For instance, the Malherbe at Caen (Spécialité: Tripes à la Mode) had completely vanished.

And me Dad wasn't with the 2ème DB but with Patton & the Big Red One.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

My knowledge of which restaurants had stars in the 1939 Michelin is very limited. After all, I rarely say to myself "Oh my God I'm stuck in Caen for the night in 1939, where shall I go for dinner?" Big Red One should have been safe from the lures of Michelin. I don't imagine it covered many hot dog stands.

Oddly enough I think I've only eaten in Michelin starred restaurants in two cities; Geneva and Preston.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

History begins with writing (varies, obviously, from locality to locality) and ends the day before I was born. After that it became Current Affairs.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

'It all depends....'

As an archivist, I'd say approx 30 years ago, because you seldom come across anyone asking for anything that's much more recent for historical projects (I feel that some such intuitive sense was behind the now discarded '30 Year Rule' on public records).

As an individual, it changes over the lifespan, perhaps: as a child, before I was born was history, but now the early parts of my life are 'history' ('Gee, tell us again about ration books and free codliver oil and orange juice!').

The personal factor that you mention is important too: the connections one feels to the past beyond one's own appearance on the scene. This may be one of the better rationales for doing family history.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of with violetsaunders and sollersuk on this. In fact, it's one of the things that I find difficult in teaching modern, is that, if it happened after I was born, it's current events, but my students are often (gulp) 25 or more years younger than I am (I have dual-enrolled 16-year-olds, thanks -- most are about 23 or 24 years younger!).

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I didn't really expect an answer. It's an interesting discussion.

[frumiousb.livejournal.com]

Coming late to this discussion- just had it linked back to me, which is part of the marvelous circularity of the Internet.

For me, got to be a personal thing. I had one great-uncle in the conflict. He was on the "wrong" side (a German fighting on the Russian front) and I never knew him. He's a faded picture on a postcard posted in 1914.

World War II comes a lot closer, because it was very close to the heart of my mother who was struggling with some issues around the conflict that I can only dimly guess about.

Vietnam would be more personal. My cousin (who has been more like a second Dad to me) fought two tours of duty there. I grew up hearing his stories and he even gave me his jacket when I was a teenager.

But isn't it all history? It's just a question whether it is my history or somebody else's history. I inevitably connect to my history differently than I do to something whose edges I am trying to grasp.

As an American, WWI is dwarfed in the national consciousness by the second World War. During my trip through Belgium, WWI became "real" to me through seeing the towns that had been destroyed-- the monuments to the dead martyrs. I've been reading as much as I can about it lately, but indeed it does not connect to my past in the way that it obviously does to yours.

I might well write about something more personal with detachment, however. That's how I process stuff. But that's an entirely other discussion.

I enjoyed reading the reactions to the post. :)