(no subject)

[randomness]

It does catch me up short when people who I consider well-educated show both a lack of knowledge of and a concern for history.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

As Regis would say, wait till they find themselves re-enacting the Battle of Hastings over breakfast!

[muffyjo]

As someone with a miserable head for details, I can certainly find wiggle room for the under-informed aspects, but a lack of concern for history, a belief that it has no bearing...that is as close to a sin in my world as I think you can get.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

My best friend in high school was very fond of the saying that history is doomed to repeat itself because you didn't listen the first time.

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

If you treat history as one big soap opera, it makes it easier.

Really. Forget about the dates, and concentrate on the relationships.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Good advice! I get inspired to learn more about the real history of a period when I read a really relationship-focused book on that period. This is why I know a ton about WWI from the Canadian perspective, and only just recently found out waht the Dunkirk evacuation was in WWII-- just hadn't run across literature that referenced it yet.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

Ian McEwan's wrenching but beautiful novel Atonement has a section that takes place during the Dunkirk evacuation. It's one of my favorite parts of the book.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia told me that in the process of writing these comments, yes! Now I want to read it. I read Blackout last weekend and that got me all excited about Dunkirk.

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

Do you have resources you'd recommend for those of us who had a woefully inadequate history education? I'm not bad on US history, and pretty decent on the history of England (I actually own and have read Churchill's 4-volume history), but the rest of the world, not so much. I'd have liked to have taken more in college, but my degree program always stuck me with the world's oddest schedule and conflicted with everything, and studying on one's own, it's hard to know what sources are both interesting and reliable.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

This is a question I've been thinking about since you asked it, and I'm hoping some of my other friends can weigh in, because it seems to me there's a bootstrapping problem: it's hard to evaluate the reliability of a source unless you have some background against to evaluate it against, and how do you get the background if you don't have an idea of how reliable a source something is? I have met people who spout off on subjects that they clearly have learned about from a couple of unrepresentative books--Second World War buffs are some of the prime offenders, here--who have decided the two books they've read are the final word on the subject and Won't Shut Up.

*ahem* Sorry, pet peeve.

Anyway, yes, this is a very good question and worth asking because everyone who writes has an opinion, and that opinion is conveyed in their writing.

I would also echo bedfull_o_books comment above. History is stories. (I just looked in Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source, while we're discussing sources, and they say this: "The word entered the English language in 1390 with the meaning of "relation of incidents, story". In Middle English, the meaning was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "record of past events" arises in the late 15th century. In German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages, the same word is still used to mean both "history" and "story". "

I end up approaching finance that way too --"Look at the things people have gotten up to now! How wacky! What a story!"--which is why I have gotten so wrapped up in it. (At some point I should write a post about why exactly I got so sucked into finance.)

I think it's a sad commentary on the teaching of history that people learn to think of it as an annoying list of facts, figures, and dates memorized out of context.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

The way around the bootstrapping problem that I recommend to people starting to research a new topic is to make sure you're reading enough variety of sources to find out what different schools of thought exist-- if you can't tell me there's a group of people who believe that X but there's a group of people who believe that Y, you haven't read enough yet.

Finding that _and_ sources that present the drama of a particular incident in history is another matter altogether, and a much more difficult one. I get likely candidates out of Wikipedia, but then I may check them in Amazon to find out which ones have a rep for being the most engaging. I can't guarantee this will work really well... but it's the method I would try first.

[stone-and-star.livejournal.com]

I wish someone would assemble a list like this. I've also realized recently that I enjoy learning history if it's presented in an engaging way.

This (website of the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me) has a few suggestions I might look into, but it's mostly about books for teachers on *how* to teach history: http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/content.php?file=teachertips.html

[jab2.livejournal.com]

one of my new favorite books, in terms of teaching how to think yourself into the time period and really care *why* thousands and tens of thousands of people thought whacky things were totally normal, is _Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds_ Ok, so I teach medieval history, so I'm biased, but this is one of the few accessible books that really teaches how not to reject other cultures or eras as *weird* and instead work out why the stories mattered and why they happened.