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.