People who decide what becomes history
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I’d like to say that maybe I got this article wrong, but isn’t what this article talks about more political science than history? The fall or the Roman Empire is a part of history, but how it’s used in political discourse has nothing to do with history, until decades from now anyway. People with an agenda has always used texts and history to further it, but isn’t it those people who are far more in control of what becomes history than the people who wrote the works?
This exact example shows how interwoven they are. Which "fall" are you referring to? The end of the western Roman empire, or the end of Byzantium hundreds of years later? Or do you mean the replacement of the republic by the empire proper, and later the decline and division? What you consider the empire and its fall, if you choose to consider it one, isn't just semantics, it's a meme that defines a history based on a political need: for the Holy Roman empire of Germanic Nation, Rome was the mantle of legitimacy from an older time, for the various post renaissance empires the fall and the subsequent "dark ages" was some darkness to push back with their own order and light, for Nazi Germany and various connaisseurs of "degeneration theory" the fall always serves as a reason why they must impose strict social and moral control...history is inevitably tied to the time and politics it is born from (acting as a lens) and the goals it served (possibly subconsciously)
If we cannot judge a work without knowing anything about the author, then how are we supposed to judge works like the Iliad and the Odyssey?
Sometimes knowing the bias of an author can impact how our present biases color our own views. For example, most people these days who read Thucydides' Melian Dialogue would assume the correct conclusion is to side with Melos, and it's often a shock that Thucydides himself sided with the Athenians. However, this does not change the quality of the work itself, but merely how we perceive it.
I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history. To me, that is trying to dismiss a work by attacking the character of the person who wrote it.
But some will reduce it to:
vote(-isProblematic(wokePerceptualHash(“separate art from artist”)));
This.
The example that’s used in the article seems extreme and the author of the article is not elaborating on how this connection is made. Could be true could be not.
Also, I can add from personal experience that you don’t need to know the author to judge an artwork but knowing the author helps you connect to the art on a whole different level. As another example, first listen to Beethoven’s symphony No. 5 and then read about his personality traits and struggles in life, etc. it is fantastic. This is art of course and history might be another matter in which the artist’s credibility is in question.
As for your comments about Gibbon, I don't recall this review mentioning his sex life, unless you mean him getting reject for marriage? The main idea was that he was short, fat, and unappealing, what with his enlarged scrotum and such. As for why this might impact his history, it is said in this review:
"And what about the poor fellow’s body and its sad infirmities? Cohen thinks (as Woolf did) that his unattractiveness provided Gibbon with an impenetrable cloak of irony. He learned to keep his emotional expectations in check, and this made him a cool analyst of religious zeal."
And regarding the comment about how he kept emotions in check, are there other reasons he might have done so? David Hume also wrote a famous history book, how did the author compare Gibbon to Hume? And did Hume have similar sex issues?
I don't want to know the answers to those questions, I am simply saying that I think the author of the book is allowing personal opinion to get in the way. Which is rather ironic, considering the topic at hand.
Can you please elaborate what you mean by this? Thucydides, being a native Athenian, obvious fought on the side of the Delian League/Athenian Empire; that isn't so much a choice as a natural course of action, the allegiance to your family/polis being a central part of the identity of the Hellenes. His history of the war was written after he went into exile, and written in a largely neutral way. In fact Thucydides went out of his way to paint certain Athenians, such as Cleon in a very negative light, and was very positive on certain Spartan generals such as Brasidas.
The placing of the Melian Dialogue is particularly interesting not just because it's the only dialogue in the whole work, but because it was immediately before the end of the book, and the following book deals exclusively with the disastrous Sicilian expedition of Athens. Readers going through the work in order would read about the arrogance of the Athenian delegates in the dialogue, directly before reading the absolute misery of the Athenians sent on the Sicilian expedition where they were eventually completely destroyed. It's easy to get the impression that the Athenians have been hoisted by their own petard, and it seems reasonable that is precisely what Thucydides the historian want us to take away from it. Not that the expedition was depicted without sympathy to the Athenian soldiers, the two battles of the Great Harbour of Syracuse contains some of the most gut wrenching scenes of battle ever written in a history, and it's painful to read even now because of the masterful way Thucydides records the despair that have taken over the Athenians by the end of the second battle when their fate was sealed.
Given this larger context, I don't think it is reasonable to say Thucydides "sides with the Athenians" in the Melian Dialogue. It is true he did not record his own moral judgement on the events in the work, but the structure of the history suggests that he certainly did not support what Athens did to Melos.
First, regarding Cleon. I think it's important to ask why Thycydides didn't like Cleon. I would argue that it had nothing to do with regret of Athenian Empire, and more to do with the fact that he wasn't Pericles. It is clear to me that Thucydides believes that if Pericles had still been alive, Athens would have won the war. I believe he viewed Cleon as sub-par and undeserving.
Regarding Brasidas, one argument is that he spoke more highly of him because he had more information about him, seeing as he (Thucydides) was exiled to Sparta. I'll be honest, it's been a few years since I read the book and I don't fully remember his accounting of Brasidas, so maybe I need to revisit it.
One important thing you don't mention is his treatment of Alcibiades. He is very harsh on him, treats him as a bit of a rich kid playboy, who uses his charisma and ego to bully the Athenians into the Sicilian expedition in the first place. I would argue that Thucydides blamed the failure of the expedition, and thus the downfall of the Athenian empire, on Alcibiades. This is especially clear to me if you look at how Thucydides treats Nicias, who in many ways was Alcibiades' counterpoint.
For these reasons, I would actually argue that Thucydides viewed the Athenian empire as great, the Melians as indignant peons, and was very sad to see the collapse of the empire.
The animosity towards Cleon is definitely related to the stark contrast with Pericles, and there's no doubt Thucydides mourned Pericles' death. On the other hand the capture of the Spartans on Sphacteria was due to Cleon, whether it was up to luck or not, and although his attempt on Amphipolis was unsuccessful he paid with his life. These two events largely ended the first phase of the war on grounds more or less favourable to the Athenians, so I would say Cleon doesn't deserve the extra ire directed at him by Thucydides, Athens certainly had worse generals.
Speaking of which, the portrayal of Alcibiades is indeed also very negative (and in my opinion well deserved). Whether or not the presence of Alcibiades himself in the expedition would have changed the outcome is an open question, but his removal was due to political intrigue (democratic politics is always messy) and hardly his own fault. Anyway he carries the family curse so can't be too harsh on him :).
The point of your original post was that historians biases colour our own views. I think the fact that we spent all this effort here trying to guess what Thucydides might or might not have felt about certain things is in itself a testament of the neutrality of his work. It is very difficult to paint him as a partisan purely from the text in his own works, so in this case I believe Thucydides is actually a counterexample to the original argument.
Also, the point of my original post was that a bias might color our views, but that's different from doing a character assassination like I believe the article did on Gibbon.
BTW, happy to discuss this more via email, nobody reads Thucydides anymore :/
This is basically why I visit HN.
I remain convinced that Thucydides remained siding with the Athenians, even after his exile. I have a few reasons.
First, the question of why he even wrote the history in the first place. He starts the book by saying that he started writing it when the war broke out (not after, as you said before), because he believed it would be greater than any war before it. Not because he thought the Athenian empire had gone too far, and not because the Spartans (or the colonies) deserved better treatment. Now much ink has been spilled about why the war (specifically Corcyra) happened, and whether it could have been prevented, but even if he were asking that question, that's again different from saying the Athenians went too far.
Second, while it is true that the Melian Dialogue is the only dialogue, it is not the only place where grand speeches are made. In fact, you could consider the Corcyra drama (between Athens, Sparta, and Cocrya) a dialogue of sorts, it's just not presented that way. So while it is true that he changed the format of delivery for the Dialogue, I don't think it's reasonable to assume he offered it more importance, and thus sided with Melos.
Third, the work is not only unfinished, but it ends mid-sentence. To carry through until the actual end of the war (404 BC), you need to pick up Xenophon. We have no way of knowing if there would be another dialogue, or if Thucydides would come out explicitly taking a side one way or another.
Finally, if you want to argue that he'd say the Athenian empire was dangerous, I'd need a good reason as to why. Consider how it came into being, as a result of the Persian war. Most of the colonies were quite happy with Athens protecting them from Xerxes, and it wasn't until Athens moved the treasury away from Delos that things got bad. And consider all the great things that came out of Athens: greek theatre, philosophy, mathematics, etc. Sparta offered none of this. In fact, most of the things we know about Sparta come from Athenian sources.
Therefore, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Thucydides generally sided with Athens, and if anything, his issues were not with the empire, but with people like Cleon and Alcibiades, who (I imagine) he'd argue were not deserving of their titles, and dragged the wonderful empire into ruin.
However, I have not read the piece by P.J. Rhodes, so I will check that out.
> Finally, if you want to argue that he'd say the Athenian empire was dangerous, I'd need a good reason as to why. Consider how it came into being, as a result of the Persian war.
Thucydides himself would have been very close to the halls of power in the conflict against Persia, if sources are correct that he is related to Miltiades, the Athenian general whom was one of 10 strategoi at Marathon. (how he is related is uncertain; wikipedia seems to suggest his father Olorus also had a daughter (so Thucydides had a sister) who married Miltiades, making Miltiades his brother in law. But this is uncertain; it could very well be that Thucydides father and great grandfather, or uncle etc were named "Olorus". Nonetheless the sources about Thucydides being from a well to do family with interests in mines and being from Thrace are agreed upon)
Thucydides, like many of our learned in the past few thousand years, attempts to present himself as a "just the facts" narrator (a counterpoint to his crazy other, Herodotus, who unabashedly presents the will of the gods, oracular prophecies, dreams, etc all intertwined in a tale seemingly spun by your drunk grandfather). As to your question why he thought the Athenian empire was dangerous... Leo Strauss, who in City+Man noticed that Thucydides has a habit of detailing the aftermath of the Sicilian Expedition in terms of all the "natural destruction" (floods, earthquakes, famines etc) that befell Athens after the Expedition, thought that the timing was not incidental.
You see how that goes.
When I write, I strive to deliver a complete package with zero dependencies.
I agree that there are limits though (what the author had for breakfast on his/her third birthday is probably uninteresting wrt to the text). Drawing the line is necessarily hard.
yo HOW is this not "put themselves above their subjects" right here?? You drop it as just granted and accepted by all that these works (which works, even?) are inferior.
You've got a lot of work to do if this line is to be taken seriously.
It's probably the main reason that people spend so much time attacking news outlets rather than the specific stories coming out of them (ie, Fox/CNN) to call out a specific bias.
It just means that if you actually want the entire picture, you're going to have to go look for it and then look up citations yourself. In theory, something like Wikipedia should be the ideal way to handle this but even then you end up with "edit wars" as people actively work to remove details with valid citations.
As a reader of a subject where you don't already deeply know the information, you have no way of knowing what's missing. This allows people to selectively include facts while leaving out others. All the "facts" may well be accurate, but the author has opted to skew the context.
I call it the Bob and Tim rule.
"Tim punched Bob."
"Bob punched Tim."
"Tim and Bob shook hands and made up."
If you only report "Bob punched Tim", you've shared a fact but entirely skewed the context and that's why knowing an author's bias matters. It can give you an idea of how much harder you need to look for what's missing.
The simple rule I've adopted when reading any headline or history that includes something bad that a person or country did is to ask, "What caused them to do that? Why?" Cause and effect works with history too. Read history with a lens where you assume people are good by default and ask "Why" when people do something that seems bad/evil. It will often point you in the direction where you need to be digging a lot more to get the complete picture.
I think of this essay by Bret Devereaux a lot, where he talks about the propaganda behind Roman histories. If you read Tacitus's Germania without any context, you might never know that's just a bad, second- or third-hand description of the Germanic peoples, and that he very likely never traveled there.
https://acoup.blog/2020/02/07/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
> It’s that bias in history-making is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it.
I imagine that anyone who majored in history in the USA over the last 20 years is familiar with this idea.
I'm not trying to make a value judgment. Just noting that it's a very widespread idea among academically trained historians.
Hence George Orwell: "Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future."
For example, if you ardently believe in investment capitalism as the best economic system in history, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of Wall Street's close ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, such as the IBM story:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-yea...
Alternatively, if you ardently believe Marx-inspired socialism is the optimal solution, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine:
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on...
Historians who are merely trying to promote their own particular ideology, or to justify the past actions of their own particular nation-state, are best viewed as propaganda peddlers.
When you come across, for example, a widely known primary document that contradicts or undermines a view common to historians for many years, how do you explain that? The answer isn't in the facts of the documents, it's in the social construction of "history."
I think there's a really common implicit assumption that historians are just people who know a lot of things about history. But once you get away from that and into the understanding of it as a skill- and research-based social practice, you start to need something to explain why we know what we know, or think we do. This ends up being a fairly useful one!
All individual people have rich lives and have been around for, what, 200,000 years? But only like 2.5% of that is covered by any written history at all (some inheriting from older storytelling tradition no doubt).
What entire cultural trends and phenomena have we totally forgotten? What were we even doing the other 97% of the time -- just trying to find enough food and not die?
Japan had agricultural residents since the 4th century BCE. To go 800 years without writing, despite depending on long-term planning and trading to survive, is incomprehensible to me.
Even now compared to 30 years ago or so is weird. Prior to the internet, largely speaking if your immediate group didn't know the answer to something, you just largely didn't know it ... ever. I mean you could find out if you really wanted to, probably. But there were things we just didn't have the answer to.
"Remember that episode of Three's Company that had that one guy in it? What was his name?"
Guess what - we never found out that answer! The lyric of that song? Never found out before the Internet. Even today I still find myself remembering things I wanted to know growing up but the knowledge was inaccessible back then, but now I can find out in seconds.
Such a weird time we live in if you think about it. We have this weird mono culture, in a way, but within that mono culture we're getting all these tiny nano-cultures embedded in it. My son (13) loves some of the most obscure things and is able to find people also excited about it (Not just SCP, but SCP maps and mods done in Garry's Mod, for instance - there's like 100 people in the world that like that combination).
Now I'm just rambling, but yes, the vast majority of our existence we were isolated (globally speaking) and ignorant in profound ways. And now we are just the opposite.
Kind of like a MOO but for the Warehouse 13/Friday the Thirteenth the TV Series universes, and hosted in a wiki. Spawned a series of spinoff media including a bunch of games. Very popular although I hadn't realized the fanbase was similar to me reading Goosebumps novels growing up -- huh.
My favorite small communities in the 90s was the 2 or 3 servers that hosted active games of the Quake 2 mod 'Gloom', which never took off and I think had maybe tens of players; and various MUDs which had maybe hundreds of thousands of players and are now down to maybe tens.
The medium is the message, and Wiki is History.
History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon
Napoleon BonaparteFriedrich Nietzsche
> --Albert Einstein
> And that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet?
> Cohen thinks that it should matter, that we cannot read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” properly unless we know the person who wrote it, scrotal affliction and all.
History, as a science, is a mixed bag of debates and consensus.
History school books are bound to national political ideologies.
Edit: s/confounded/conflated/
> History, as a science, is a mixed bag of debates and consensus.
Science doesn't work via debates and consensus. It works by hypothesis and experimentation.
History is part of myth making which exists to form or preserve a tribe, institution, nation, etc.
They were right eventually, but they were very controversial and their ideas started very strong debates.
They weren't right eventually. They were always right. Are you claiming copernicus was wrong and the sun was circling the earth? They were right because of the evidence, not because of the debate and consensus. Heliocentrism didn't end because there was a debate and a vote. It ended because of the evidence.
Arts/humanities work via debate/consensus/etc. Science works by tests/experimentation/evidence/empiricism.
So anyone in that timeframe were looking at the state of science with their best mind and rightfully questioned "who's right? Geocentrism or heliocentrism?". And there were debates.
To know what eventually came out of it is just a privilege of our time.
Future times will have the privilege of looking down to 2022 and look at our controversies with the confidence of those that know.
This is why I'm convinced that science moves forward with debates and consensus.
Just as general relativity made consensus year after year, if you want a modern example.
That's because the telescope hadn't even been invented yet. And no scientific evidence could be gathered, no hypothesis could be tested, etc. The discovery of the telescope and the ability to find other planets and track their orbits is what ultimately undid heliocentrism. Not consensus.
> So anyone in that timeframe were looking at the state of science with their best mind and rightfully questioned "who's right? Geocentrism or heliocentrism?". And there were debates.
Yes. But what separates humanities from science is the debate gets settled by empirical evidence. Otherwise we'd debate forever and it'll be a matter of consensus.
> Just as general relativity made consensus year after year, if you want a modern example.
Because of the observed evidence. Not consensus.
There seems to be a confusion here. In humanities, the consensus makes the theory. In science, the evidence makes the consensus.
A group of nazi historians will say the US was the bad guys and germany was the good guys. A group of US historians will say the US was the good guy and germany was the bad guy. The narrative/"truth"/history entirely depends on consensus. Who is voting. That's not how science works. The experiment/data is what's important and the consensus follows from it. Doesn't matter who is voting.
Since you believe history is science, then historians are scientists?
Strong disagree on this one, especially on the _always_ part. Many times it is, in state propaganda especially. But history is the study of things that have happened and there are many facets and things in the past worth knowing and thinking about. It need not be the only about the things thaught in schools. It is much more, much richer than that.
Sure, but the point being made is that often you don’t have documentation of reality and so, that history is completely erased.
“History is written by the victors”
Imagine if there is a war between the US and Mexico and we lose and mexico takes over. The history of the alamo, mexican-american war, annexation of texas, etc will be quite different even though we beat mexico in the 1800s. Imagine if the south does rise again and the south takes over. The history of the civil war will be remarkably different even those the north won the civil war.
Doesn't really matter who the victors were back then. What's important is who the victors are today.
Even if you can remove bias/agenda from man, the fact of the matter is only a tiny fraction of "histories" are recorded and of those only a tiny fraction of it survives.
I like history and think we need it to form societies, nations, institutions, etc, but it most definitely isn't truth in any real sense of the word.
History is not what is teached in school but how a society sees itself.
German society at large has accepted the Holocaust, because it was useful, but hasn't accepted the history E.g. of the Deutschritterorden or the genocide of the Herero and Nama - it hasn't been useful to do so. There is no monument to the genocide of the Herero in Germany. History is a tool how society sees itself.
Hell, Chicago hockey is still the Blackhawks, but since it’s “tasteful” people aren’t complaining loudly enough to get it to change.
Sounds closer to a definition of culture. And culture is never monolithic. Plenty of people are horrified by past atrocities committed on their behalf. And plenty of people don’t care.
But you don’t measure a society’s collective perspective by counting monuments. Monuments signify what was important to the people who made them. Not the people who see them.
For my money you’d do better to look at modern media of all kinds. What are the stories being told today, in news, in movies, in textbooks and in social media? They aren’t the same stories our forebears were telling.
How else do you portray an intentional and centuries long systematic genocide of an entire continent of nations? How do you portray the greatest genocide in human history?
> But definitely it was mentioned that 90% of Indians were killed by European diseases, sometimes intentionally delivered like the trail of tears, and additionally whenever gold was rumored to be on a site the indians would be pushed out.
Nothing you listed indicate an actual genocide. You didn't read about actual hunting and raping and exterminating of natives that happened all across the country? You didn't read about actual statehood laws ( majority white ) which encouraged settlers to kill off the natives. You didn't read about the US government working with railroad tycoons to kill off the natives to build railroads?
As I said, if the natives were in charge, how do you think the history will be written? We'd be portrayed as monsters far worse than nazis. That was my point. History is written by the victors. Which you proved with your comment but yet deny.
Yes
> .Always was, always will be.History is always the tool to justify the status quo.
No and yes. We have various sources to determine what happened. To create a specific kind of narrative using that data is a choice that many can make. But historical data is still there, and different narratives might still arise.
Liberal democracies and the freedom of speech create the fertile ground required for historians to look at past records and explain what happened.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell.