Show me the money!

For my first installment in this blog, I'll take a look briefly at how we consume History, or History as a product. I'm sure a bunch of you just flinched now and maybe spilled your coffee, and that is a perfectly healthy reaction, but nonetheless the reality is that somebody somewhere has to pay for historical research to get done, and the answer to "Who pays for this stuff?" impacts the end product.

I like to compare History in this sense to art. Think for a minute about art history; if you've ever taken an art history class, you've no doubt spent time looking at the cave art from Lascaux, some Byzantine icons and murals, maybe, for some of the more culturally inclusive classes you spent time looking at Buddhist and Islamic art styles, then of course you hit the Renaissance -- Michelangelo, Bellini, van Eyck, Duerer, etc. -- and then you rapidly moved into modern art. All amazing stuff, with architecture, sculpture, mosaics, etc. all thrown in for good measure. The big hanging question for all these starving artists was, "Who is going to pay me to do this stuff?" A big (and oft-ignored) part of the story behind the changes in art styles and focus has been who commissioned and bought the stuff. I'm not quite sure who "paid" the artists at Lascaux, but medieval European art was primarily financed by churches and wealthy families, while Renaissance art saw growth in the latter category at the expense of the former. As centralized governments -- cities, provinces, national -- became stronger and wealthier, they too began to commission art and hire artists. In our modern age, art is primarily fed by an open market with individuals, governments and a new phenomenon, the art museum, all competing to generate and display art. Is it any wonder then that (Western) art has moved from its medieval, communal and religious-themed origins (when churches were the primary consumers) to a more secular and often narcissistically individualistic theme in our own times, given who is funding the stuff nowadays?

So too goes History. History as a discipline was really born somewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe -- yeah, I know about Herodotus and Procopius, and you can argue about the value of oral histories like Beowulf, but History as an objective, disciplined study of human civilizations is a relatively modern thing -- and it was primarily driven by the Renaissance-era universities. Ah, the universities, where if one could achieve a tenured position, life was relatively safe and comfortable, and one could focus on research, publish the findings when complete, give the occasional public lecture. Life was sweet. Well, no more of that nonsense. Europe's early universities were funded by wealthy aristocratic sponsors, while in the 19th and 20th centuries, governments increasingly took over. In the 21st century, however, certainly in America but increasingly so in Europe and elsewhere as well, universities are becoming businesses who are funded in part by government grants still, true, but as well by wealthy donors (individuals and businesses) and their ability to attract funding is tied directly to their ability to attract top-rate students who in turn prove to be top-rate performers in their chosen academic fields. In this environment, universities have put immense pressure on all their academic arms, History departments included, to turn as much ground-breaking, Earth-shattering (and headline-grabbing) research as possible. Publish! Publish! Publish! professors are told, and they are also pressed into speaking circuits so that every opportunity for them to show their face and show off their expertise is seen as a marketing opportunity for the university.

Now, it may seem like I'm complaining about the current state of affairs but I'm not; I'm merely describing them. They are what they are, but their importance for us here today is that they influence and impact what historical research gets done. In today's market-savvy environment, aside from strictly academic journals and conferences, History is focused towards the lowest common denominator, namely, its ability to compete and sell (almost as a form of entertainment) in an open marketplace. If you visit bookstores in different countries, you'll be struck by what subjects crowd the shelves of popular bookstores. Each country tends to have their own favorites, their own biases. Now, there is historical research done on just about every possible subject, and one could argue that the market has made room for the less popular subjects by provided them an outlet in the form of the internet, where you can find and buy just about anything, but when it comes to your local bookstore, the stuff on the shelf is treated as any selling inventory: what moves the fastest? This is why there will always be more books on military history -- because more men read history than women, and nothing's as testosterone-infused and exciting as warfare -- than books on, say, the 18th and 19th century Shaker communities, or how different grains have shaped civilizations. In a certain sense this is fine because, well, at least some historical research is getting done somewhere and someone's reading it, but it does have the dangerous effect of skewing the popular understanding of History, that our ancestors did nothing but heroically storm enemy beaches and triumphantly plant the flag on mountain tops. We're in danger of developing a historical myopia which, for some, may be a minor issue, but in a world where some nutcases drugged up on a very self-serving vision of History decided to fly passenger airliners into skyscrapers, I would suggest that History really does play a part in how our present world unfolds, our understanding of our past -- however flawed -- often does impact our world.

So what can we do? There are all sorts of arguments to be had about the state of academia today and what should be done about it, but I think the real answer is a more democratic one; namely, that the responsibility for making an effort to truly understand our past lies with each one of us. It means viewing History less as mere entertainment -- all those exciting World War II programs on the History Channel -- and more as a part of who we are today. It means maybe reaching for that book on the Shakers or visiting a local museum or reenactors community instead of watching troops storm Omaha Beach again. There's nothing wrong with military history, of course, and there certainly is a proper time for remembering the heroes who took Normandy in 1944, but when you look at some 10,000 years of human history, World War II is important but only a small part of our larger picture. Making the effort to learn about other aspects of our past, such as how great-grandma in the 19th century dealt with feminine hygiene issues, or how the spread of Scottish textile manufacturing to New England in the 19th century transformed life there and also led to, among other things, child labor laws and the invention of the computer -- these are as much a part of who we are today as what happened at Gettysburg in July, 1863.

Welcome to History as Perspective!

When I was a very young lad, my mother used to occasionally take me to these parks with lots of stones and flowers, with very manicured lawns and high iron fences. The dress code was formal, which precluded me from doing what a three or four year old boy wanted to do, which was run around, kick things and roll in the mud. These were extremely boring visits, usually shoehorned into a day of errands, and as I was too young to ask for the car keys, I had no choice but to go and try to be on my best behavior. Luckily, these visits only happened a few times a year, but when your entire life so far amounts to about 36 months, a few times a year seems like overkill. Anyway, I don't remember how old I was, but somehow my mother was able to impress upon me one day while on one of these visits just what it was we were visiting, and I can remember the revelation as it struck me like a one ton delivery truck: there were people buried beneath those stones, real people! I remember walking along a row of stones, noticing somehow for the first time the names and dates on each stone, realizing that each one represented a lifetime, a whole collection of memories. I thought of all the stories I'd heard about our family, about my grandparents and their parents, a huge treasure-trove of anecdotes about jobs they'd had, pranks they'd pulled -- you definitely don't ever want to turn your back on anyone from my family -- fish they'd caught, horses and cars they'd owned, all these stories that made these ancestors of mine legendary, and I knew that all these people buried beneath these stones must have had similar stories to tell.

Thus began my life-long love affair with History. It's that human element behind the cultural masks we like to hide behind, the huge array of ingenious ways we've invented over the past 10,000 years to fulfill the core basic human needs that intrigues me. I'm not nostalgic; while I'd give anything to get into a time machine and visit the 19th -- or the 9th -- century, I will also want to come back. I'm pretty happy with the 21st century, thank you. It's just that I enjoy trying to understand how those who came before us lived and saw their world -- our world -- and how their lives unfolded. It's also not about glorification or ancestor-worship; the past has had its share of jerks, idiots and bullies as well. Well, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, as they say.

Most folks nowadays experience history primarily through school, which they remember as being boring for having to memorize endless lists of battles, kings, treaties and inventions, or through the wonder of modern cable television, which is more exciting but would give an outsider the impression that the vast majority of human history has been people stabbing or shooting one another. History is more than just lists and pictures of people in funny clothes, however; history is our understanding of the past, of how what they were eventually came to be what we are today. This means that History -- uppercase "H" there -- while not a "hard" science like botany or geology, is still a pretty serious scholarly discipline that, aside from its own research methods, also relies on everything from archaeology to linguistics to modern cultural anthropology to, well, everything. Really. History involves everything from lawn mowers to your pets to bagels to hairstyles to underwear to the Hubble Telescope; everything. The problem is that since we are looking at the past, well, we drag ourselves into the mix a bit. When we look at History, we can't help but look at it from our modern perspective, from our own conceptions of what life is about. We can try to be objective, but quite frankly we're a bit limited in that department. What this all adds up to is that History isn't just a description of the past, it's an exploration of our relationship to the past as well, and that means our relationship to the present to boot. Exploring something about Grandma's life is a de facto exploration of our own lives. Man, aren't we a bunch of narcissistic egotists?

That's what this blog is going to be about, my meditations on History, the past, and how we look at both. I am an amateur historian who is (hopefully) about to be published for the first time, but while I've always loved reading and experiencing History through multiple sources -- and I'll occasionally share some of those insights here as well -- I've also spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the theory behind History, behind how we look at the past and how we apply it today; it is some of those findings and ideas I'll be kicking around here. So please join in to the discussion and share some of your own observations, and feel free to pick a part mine -- although, with my paper-thin skin and fragile egg-shell ego (backed up by a ferocious, man-eating wife), I'll have to insist that all discussion be respectful.