History at its best, or not

the late, great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Something’s going on among historians that nicely parallels what’s going on among journalists.

In Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, she worries about the extent to which “amateur” historians, let’s call them citizen journalists who look back, distort or control our understanding of history.  Kindly, she then confides that even the very best do this to some extent.  Here’s the intro to a great review of the book and the issue by H. W. Brands:

“EVERYONE IS entitled to his own opinion,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “but not to his own facts.” Samuel Butler, the nineteenth-century English author, wrote that “though God cannot alter the past, historians can.”

Part of what gives this particular author such heft is the fact that her great-grandfather, then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George, was one of the key crafters of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, an event that re-shaped the world and affects policy and political psyches to this day:

MARGARET MACMILLAN understands the imperatives of the historian’s craft. A Canadian currently at Oxford University, MacMillan wrote a widely applauded account of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (at which her great-grandfather, then–Prime Minister David Lloyd George, represented Britain). Her new book, first published last year in Canada, originated as a series of lectures at the University of Western Ontario. Her eight chapters echo their origin; self-contained but connected, they raise and then attempt to answer several questions involving the deployment of history in contemporary debates.

The rest is no longer history, the rest is what we are currently re-evaluating and positioning in a newer larger light.  I’m not talking about revisionism.  I’m talking about widening the lens on what goes on as history is being made, its complexities, its nuances, the extent to which it involves gossip and intrigue and biogotry and all those juicy components that would make almost anybody read actual history, or cause what MacMillan aptly calls the current “history craze”:

MacMillan commences by describing a “history craze,” an enthusiasm for all things historical that is apparently more evident—to her, at any rate—in Britain, France and Canada than it is in the United States. She attributes this enthusiasm to the end of the cold war, which broke the superpower duopoly and allowed the histories of less powerful peoples and states to resume their former importance. “My own book on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where so much of the foundation of the modern world was laid, could not find a publisher in the 1980s,” she confides. “As one publisher said, no one wanted to read about a bunch of dead white men sitting around talking about long-forgotten peace settlements. By the 1990s, the subject had come to seem a lot more relevant.”

No it doesn’t have to be Roots by Alex Haley to create a paradigm shift in how we view African American history, or Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan novels on how we view Asian history, or even Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell on, well, anything he likes, to make us understand that how we behaved affects what we have.  But it is nice to think of history as a battleground itself, rather than a place that merely describes battlegrounds of the past.

So how is journalism like history?  In both excruciatingly important fields, who gets to tell us our story is in question, and the level of expertise, quality, and cronyism in their reporting/chronicling has never been more completely in everyone’s hands for the re-defining.

via The National Interest.