English history: why we need to understand 1066 and all that

[many a good man]

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 September 2011 21.00 BST


Which "bits" of English history do we need to know? Should they be Simon Schama's peasants' revolt, Indian empire and opium wars, or David Starkey's rules of chivalry? Or is the Cambridge professor Richard Evans right to dismiss "rote learning of the national patriotic narrative" out of hand, in favour of studying "other cultures separated from us by time and space"?

The answer is none of them as such. All seem static moments torn out of the context of history to suit a particular outlook on the world. Evans is the most wrong of all. His disparaging use of words such as rote and patriotic implies that facts about one's own country are in some way irrelevant, even shameful. All history must start from the reader's own standpoint in place and time. Otherwise it is just a blur.

The reason for learning history is not to hear stories but to follow themes that might help us understand the world about us. Without history, politics is fumbling in the dark. When Margaret Thatcher imposed a poll tax on the Scots in 1989, she seemed blind to the history of such taxes – disastrously so. When the British tried to rule southern Iraq in 2003 and to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2006, they also ignored history.

The story of the nation in which we live is not a stage set crowded with isolated tableaux: the Norman conquest followed by Henry VIII, Charles I, the Industrial Revolution and finally leaping to Hitler. Sturdy tales of slavery, gender oppression and the defeat of Germany yield anecdotes that may raise the reader's blood pressure. But they are history neutered of argument, uncreative, essentially dumb. They may make us angry, but not wise. History must be continuous, building from cause to effect and reaching a crescendo in the present day.

England's narrative flow should be exhilarating and empowering. No country has such an eventful past, from the time when Germanic Angles and Saxons first pushed westwards across ancient Britain after the Romans withdrew in the fifth century. The English were, on any showing, a remarkable people, asserting their power and spreading their culture first across the British Isles and then round the world. They showed a confidence, sometimes an arrogance, which in the 19th and early-20th centuries led them briefly to bestride the globe, with an imperial countenance they still cannot shed.

more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/01/history-dates-english

[izquierdista]

1. English history is quite full

Full of themselves.

[enlightenment]

2. As is every national history.

Name one that is self-effacing.

[izquierdista]

3. Some more than others

Janteloven is not an English word. Too bad that it didn't quite make it across the North Sea to their soggy island.

[Uncle Joe]

4. This is a good column promoting the value of history in its' entirety.

Thanks for the thread, many a good man.

[MineralMan]

5. Yup. History is not a series of single events. It is the flow of

all of those events over time. Sadly, that's not the way it's generally taught.

[saras]

6. The stories have value, but not for our understanding directly

Which stories guided groups of people to particular behavior is a very important part of history. We don't have to believe the English narrative of white superiority to understand how it affect the behavior of the British empire, and how that was different than, say, the Dutch or French narratives.

"History must be continuous, building from cause to effect and reaching a crescendo in the present day."
This is utter nonsense. It is - precisely - an example of imposing a drastically malignant narrative on a series of events, with easily predictable bad consequences. This isn't a way of UNDERSTANDING history, it's a way of creating a population that can be driven by narratives such as manifest destiny and the master race.

[many a good man]

7. Are you saying chronological historians are like Nazi propagandists???!!!

:spray:
You had me till the last sentence.

Democracy and liberty must always be part of the narrative, even if only as bygone relics of the past. The arc of history shows us how it must always be fought for and the consequences of losing it.

[saras]

8. No, I'm saying that I profoundly mistrust narrative as a way of approaching history

Each major interest group in a historical conflict has a narrative, perhaps more than one. "Minor" groups often have completely different narratives of the "same" situation. And on an individual level, of course, nearly everyone has their own individual narrative.

To me history is the telling of who created what narrative, who believed it, and how it made them act. It is most emphatically NOT selling us, in the present, a single, overriding "story" (with plot, protagonist and antagonist, and neat conflict resolution) about who we are and why. THIS version of "history" terrifies me, and I don't think that nice liberal versions of it fix anything, any more than nice liberal versions of fundamentalism fix anything.

"There's two sides to every story." - That's a story too, usually told by someone who profits from the third side not being made visible. Knowing the two sides does NOT mean you know the story, it means you know what this third guy wants you to think.

If I were more traditionally religious I might define God as that one single perspective from which a single narrative could encompass the entirety of existence.

[swilton]

9. Totally agree with him - Great article

Humanities are absolutely undervalued in today's curricula - when facts are taken un critically they are easily abused and propagandized....I want to get his book!