What Is History? Letting the Market Decide

Randall Stephens

How do we determine what is worth our attention when it comes to the past?  What events, people, and movements matter most?  What should we pay attention to?

"Caesar Crossing the Rubicon," attributed to Jean Fouquet, ca. 1475

When it comes to questions like these I always think back to E. H. Carr's classic What Is History?. It's a slim book, ideal for an intro to historical methods.  It's Carr's G. M. Trevelyan lectures from 1961 at Cambridge University.  At the outset he quotes C. P. Scott (1846-1932) the famous British journalist, publisher, and politician.  "Facts are sacred, opinion is free," said Scott.  Yet, writes Carr, despite Scott's confident motto:

every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact is like a sack—it won't stand up till you've put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all (9).

The Last Confederate General to Lay Down His Arms

Heather Cox Richardson

It is a pet peeve of mine that most people think the Civil War ended at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General U. S. Grant.

It didn’t.

Brigadier General Stand Waite

General Lee surrendered only his own Army of Northern Virginia that day. There were still more than a hundred thousand Confederate soldiers in the field. True, everyone knew that Lee’s surrender marked the beginning of the end. But the last major Confederate army did not quit until May 26, when General Kirby Smith surrendered his Army of the Trans-Mississippi to Major General Edward Canby in Louisiana.

But here’s another little-known fact related to the end of the war that seems to me should be as widely known as the events at Appomattox: The last Confederate general in the field to surrender was Brigadier General Stand Watie, who did not lay down his weapons until June 23, 1865.

Why is this significant? Because Stand Watie was a member of the Cherokee Nation. He commanded the First Indian Brigade of the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi.

It’s a stretch to say that Indians were at the heart of the American Civil War, but it’s not at all a stretch to say that the West was. Eastern Americans from the North and the South fought to control the economic system the nation would impose on the West. Easterners had lived with slavery in their midst since the very beginnings of European settlement on the Atlantic coast; it was only when the slave system threatened to spread across the lands of the old Louisiana Purchase that the inhabitants of the two eastern regions came to blows.

In Defense of Facts and Memorization

Randall Stephens

I recently had a student in a large survey class who did not appear to be prepared for an exam. That's not unusual. But this student answered the essay question on the test in a very unusual way. She/he wrote a poem describing how much she/he hated "history." (I was glad to be spared from his/her wrath, at least in the poem.)

This got me thinking about why students say they despise history. It certainly could be related to how history is presented to them: dry-as-dust fashion, or one-damn-thing-after-another mode. Perhaps such students think of lectures, textbooks, and history classes in general as producing storms of useless facts, unconnected to reality. Some non-majors complain that they did not come to college to learn about the past or irrelevant dead people.

Some students might not have an aptitude for history, plain and simple. That's fine.

But how much of the undergraduate complaint against history has to do with an unwillingness to learn content? Surely one needs to know real details about the past in order to understand it.

It strikes me that historians can be a little too defensive about teaching too many of the facts, the details of history. To be sure history is not a collection of pointless facts, as I tell my students. Among other things history helps us undertsand who we are by examining who we were. I like how Peter Stearns puts it in "Why Study History" on the AHA site: "The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier."

A student will need to know what actually happened in the past before he or she can go on to write history, tell a story, formulate arguments, and do the interesting work of interpretation.

That's not unique to history. Content and some basic memorization are a the heart of most disciplines. Biologists have to learn anatomy and classifications. Others in the hard sciences must memorize formulas and need to have a grasp of mathematics. Language requires plenty of memorization. And on and on.

History professors, though, blush a bit when they ask students to memorize a list of names, ideas, dates, and the like. A student of Antebellum America should know the difference between John Calhoun and John Brown. A student in a course on the Early Republic should be able to distinguish a Federalist from an Anti-Federalist. A student in a colonial history course will need to know that the French and Indian War came before the American Revolutionary War.

OK, I may be overstating the case, or grossly oversimplifying things . . . But, I'd like to say nothing more than this . . . facts matter, memorization has its place, and history does require exposure to and understanding of real content.

Oh . . . and George Washington never drove a Dodge Challenger.