Why is History an important subject?

History is about the past and as the clich tells us you cannot change the past. So why bother with History? Past societies were different from ours and had different values, so how can they teach us anything helpful? Such questions boil down to this: What use is history? Why study it and why teach it? Jane Austen put these words into the mouth of Catherine Morland in her book Northanger Abbey: I can read poetry and plays, things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you? I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome. Tony Blair proclaimed to the American Congress: There has never been a time ...when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day. Such questions and assertions are based on the premise that history is an isolated subject, separate from all the others. The opposite is the truth. The Greek word historia means an investigation or enquiry. For them it was a far cry from the lists of dates, kings and battles that used to be the stable diet of so much school history. Herodotus was famously referred to by Cicero as the father of history. He travelled widely throughout the known world, collating information and throwing light on the folklore, religions, customs, civilisations, interests and conditions of its peoples and on the geography of the lands he visited. Furthermore Michael Grant wrote that the Histories of Herodotus include almost every variety of prose and may be the source of certain literary forms. Thucydides studied the background and reasons for the Peloponnesian War and its conduct and did so with such employment of the critical faculty that he claimed to have used only the plainest evidence and to have reached conclusions which are reasonably accurate when investigating even the more distant past. According to the American Classical historian John Marincola, Thucydides was dissecting with acuity and impartiality the true and underlying causes of human actions. In this way these first two great historians established not only the task of the historian but also the breadth of history itself. In the words of the Roman historian Livy: in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see. It follows that history is best placed of all the humanities for an inter-disciplinary approach. E.M. Forsters dictum of only connect should be instilled into the mind of every budding historian. Years ago I was talking to a fellow tutor on a revision course. He was a geographer and told me he was teaching the Unification of Italy. I immediately retorted but thats my subject. He soon demonstrated to me its relevance to geography. History is about human beings, human societies, human failures and human achievements. So much to do with the human past has some relevance to history. History links up with geography, archaeology, philosophy, theology, politics, economics and sociology, just to name some of the more obvious examples.

Let us take the example of Christian Theology. Biblical Criticism has asserted that the Scriptures must be viewed through their historical and cultural contexts. Secondly, Scripture must be tested by those disciplines which lie beyond its revealed purpose: history, archaeology, geology, palaeontology, astronomy, physics, etc., provided that they in turn remain answerable to evidence and verifiability. The historicity of the Scriptural record must therefore be subject to the same criteria as any other text that has been handed down, copied, translated and interpreted. It is after all not a single book. Even Protestants acknowledge sixty-six books written over several centuries, possibly more than a millennium. Almost two further millennia have now passed since the writing of the New Testament. As Newman rightly affirmed: Christianity has been long enough in the world to justify us in dealing with it as a fact in the worlds history History is not simply the study of the past, indeed, as Simon Schama has pointed out, from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present. When he was running for the American Presidency, John F. Kennedy was asked what he considered his most important asset. He replied his sense of history This from the man who was to highlight the fact that with him leadership had passed to a new generation born in twentieth century. Kennedy asserted that the influence of America was only to be understood through an historical perspective, which also enabled him to discern what the historical forces are that are moving in our own day. He read Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August about the onset of the First World War and was determined that he would pursue all possible means to keep the peace over the Cuban Missile Crisis, so that no historian would need to write a similar book on The Missiles of October. President Mitterrand chose to visit Sarajevo, as the Bosnian crisis escalated, on 28th July 1992, in the hope that the anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand might underline the gravity of sparking off a conflict in the Balkans. Unfortunately the events leading to the Great War were by then too distant in time for the worlds media to grasp its significance. Human memory is so short that historians are needed for the longer view. A Polish colleague with Jewish ancestry, who had grown up there during the war, was recently in conversation with a young German student. The German exclaimed: but Germany was neutral in the Second World War. A student from Stalins home state of Georgia proudly announced to me: Stalin was a good man, just a little brutal. We may laugh at such misconceptions but they can have consequences. There are many in Russia today who yearn for another Stalin and the country is already returning to authoritarianism. History places our present in context and in perspective. In doing so it helps us to understand that present. In global politics, it can alone help us to understand and resolve conflicts which are invariably rooted in it. For example the historical perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict takes us back not only to the creation of Israel, the Holocaust, the British mandate and the Balfour declaration in the last century, but to the Ottoman Empire, the Crusades, the spread of Islam, the Roman occupation and the Jewish Diaspora. In an article I wrote entitled The Policies of a World Power: British Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century, I concluded rather controversially that todays world leaders might reflect on Salisburys caution about going to war in an age of modern technology, Castlereaghs insistence on non-intervention in

the internal affairs of other nations and Gladstones pleas for a common humanity and the equal rights of nations. Yet at its heart British foreign policy was concerned with national interests then as it is now and with our relations with our continental neighbours. In her famously Eurosceptic Bruges Speech, Margaret Thatcher still affirmed: We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history. The hugely influential German Philosopher of History, Georg Hegel, came to this depressing conclusion: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Many centuries earlier, Livy had set out to discover the history of Romes rise to greatness and hegemony and what he viewed as its cataclysmic moral decline. He asserted that in that historical record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." History is more than Gibbons register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Circumstances change, power shifts, different ages face different challenges and yet history demonstrates that human nature does not change and therefore we can learn lessons from the past. One should nevertheless take seriously John Toshs recent caveat: the idea that history teaches precise and prescriptive lessons is untenable. It can however serve to warn us, to guide us and give us examples to either follow or avoid. It can point us to the future and tell us what not to do. If Hitler had learned his lesson from Napoleons invasion of Russia instead of pursuing his ideological war then he too would not have lost so many invaluable troops. Without those two invasions the history of Europe just might have turned out very differently. Hitlers great adversary, Sir Winston Churchill, knew the value of history to the politician. He wrote it and mobilised it into the fray. As an old man, he gave this advice to his eight-year old grandson and namesake: Learn all you can about the history of the past, for how else can one ever make a guess at what is going to happen in the future. Much criticism was levelled at the skills which formed the most radical innovations in the transition from O Levels to GCSEs twenty years ago. This was especially true of the somewhat bizarre examples that were employed to encourage empathy. One rather unreliable A Level student informed me that in 1988 he had been asked to imagine himself as a badger in Auschwitz. My immediate reaction was to answer that he should dig a hole at full speed and get out before he was eaten. Empathy was soon dropped but still the most fundamental criticisms remained. It was claimed that GCSE History tried to instil historical methodology and skills before the pupils had learned any real history. Indeed it can be argued that those skills only really come into their own with the historiographical perspective of A2. Another criticism was and is that the categories used are over simplistic, especially over the neat division between primary and secondary sources and between short and long term causes. Many of these criticisms have some validity. Nevertheless the fact remains that these skills are the tools of the historian. They also enable history to be used to much wider benefit. The question of causation is more than merely one of cause and effect. It can provide a valuable tool to the economist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the military strategist and

the politician; if only they would learn from history. Continuity and change are even broader in their application, as are similarity and difference. This takes us straight to the issue of sources, and thus to what the famous Cambridge historian, George Macaulay Trevelyan, referred to as the sifting of evidence. My generation grew up with a clear distinction between pre-history and history. The Sumerians from Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, are generally believed to have invented writing. Thus we enter into history. History was concerned with written sources and therefore pre-history concerned the comparatively vast period of human existence for which no written sources existed. Archaeology without written verification is insufficient for the study of history. Yet archaeology is undeniably an important tool for the historian. So much of what we know of ancient civilisations comes to us through the medium of archaeology. The period of Western European history that followed the fall of the Roman Empire used to be called the Dark Ages because it was supposed to have been one when the former Roman Empire was devastated by barbarian hordes. Archaeology has demonstrated that many of those barbarians left us artefacts and displayed signs of cultural heritage. Yet they remain dark for another reason: the paucity of written sources. Thus the student of ancient history may need to grapple with hieroglyphs, ideographic writing and evolving alphabets, with archaeological artefacts and data, with fragmentary evidence and the victors versions, coinage and artistic depictions. The student of contemporary history has by contrast an ever-increasing diversity and variety of evidence, through the evolution of the printed, photographic, cinematic, phonographic and electronic media. Indubitably this accounts for the unfortunate concentration on the twentieth century at GCSE. Historians work with those records of the past that have survived. We cannot do otherwise. Some books from ancient authors refer to works that are no longer extant, so that all we have are the fragmentary extracts that they included. History is therefore primarily that which has been recorded in writing. Oral tradition, before the invention of sound recording and excepting those few examples that remain of the bardic tradition, has only come down to us through written sources. Homer, writing around the ninth century B.C., collated oral traditions that dated back four centuries to the Trojan War of the mid-thirteenth century. Herodotus collated both oral traditions and information from sources that have long since disappeared. As we get closer to the present day so the variety of sources grows considerably. Increasing specialisation has put our disciplines in their little boxes. Nearly every discipline has been subdivided. Attempts at fusion often do little to move their students into alien territory. The biochemist is still a scientist. We need the panoramic breadth of vision of the ancient humanities. As I have attempted to show history can provide the basis for the interconnectedness canvassed by the great German historian Leopold Ranke. Because of its essential focus on the entirety of the human experience of the past it can draw together the insights of other disciplines and give back to them the long view that is so often lacking. One contributor to the Dictionary of Ideas observed that the house of history has many mansions and each has an almost infinite number of windows. The philosopher Karl Popper wrote:

"There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. Herbert Butterfield affirmed in his influential attack on the Whig Interpretation of History: the truth of history is no simple matter, all packed and parcelled ready for handling in the market-place. The proper study of history is a broadening experience that opens up all the insights of the past on to a contemporary world view that is increasingly being torn from that past and leaves human beings without a sense of belonging and devoid of the nourishment of their roots. It is not surprising that in such a vacuum the interest in family history is mushrooming. People need to know not just who they are but where they come from. The same is true of all human communities and societies as the pace of change becomes faster and faster. We live in an age that seems threatened not only by terrorism but by portents of environmental catastrophe and the anonymity of an ever-increasing globalisation. People need to know whether we have felt similar threats before and what light can the experiences of our forebears shed on our predicament. This is only part of the contribution that the history of our human past can make to our fleeting present, as we allow it to cast its illumination over the choices we must make for our children and the future of our planet.