If you want to learn from history, look under its hood.
That history has something to teach us seems obvious. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is just one phrasing, this time by George Santayana, of what has since become a cliché. When I taught AP European History, my students loved what seemed to be the most significant lesson for future wagers of war: You don’t want to find yourself invading Russia in the winter.
But does history teach us through its stories? Are we to use history as the collective repository of human experiences, successes, best practices, unwarranted hubris, failures, and good intentions that paved the road to hell?
Well, maybe. Depending on your own philosophy of history, you might believe that history repeats in cycles. Perhaps it does not repeat directly — it can “rhyme”, as Mark Twain said. A more radical position would be that history never repeats because there are just too many variables at play here. Regardless of your position on this issue, history has many lessons under its hood. Behind the stories that historians tell are intricate processes of interpretation, myriad controversies, and (sometimes) contentious debates between scholars. In 2020, the lessons we can derive from following these processes are more valuable than ever.
You might remember from high school history that scholars rely on primary and secondary sources to produce new histories. Simplistically speaking, primary sources are the raw materials left us by the people we research. Secondary sources, on the contrary, are processed. They are perceived to be far from being first hand; they are often interpretations of the former.
For many historians, primary sources are documents stored in an archive. But what kind of documents are these? Think about your own records. Most of the things you do or think remain undocumented. In the 21st-century, we leave more paper-trails (or the digital equivalent) than before: We tell friends about our crushes as they develop into relationships or collapse into unrequited loves; our eating habits can be mined from the databases of UberEats or Walmart. If you get access to my text messages, you can easily infer who my favorite people are just by calculating the average amount of messages sent per recipient per day or see whom do I write “good morning” when I wake up.
These records will likely not survive and they do not exist for earlier periods. When I delete an email, it is (I hope) gone forever. Where will we keep all my Amazon purchases for economic and social historians writing their dissertations about us in the year 2200? In the U.S., the Federal Records Act of 1950 and the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 dictate what kind of records must be preserved by the archive. This is limited to federal records. Other materials end up there at the mercy of various regulations, space left in the depository, and the material conditions that help or prevent them from surviving in the long term.
Historians, then, write history based on very partial records. Once we have the documents that remain — often complemented by contemporary fiction and films as well as by visual and oral sources wherever possible — the next step is interpretation.
For generations of scholars of the Ottoman Empire and the public, the empire declined essentially continuously since the sixteenth century. Bernard Lewis, the most eloquent proponent of this thesis, articulated many signs of decline in the second chapter of his book The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961). For Lewis, the Ottoman decline was total: it ranged from the “government to economic and social life, and to moral, cultural, and intellectual change” (or the lack thereof).
A year later, Lewis showed that the Ottomans themselves wrote about their own decline. His article, “Ottoman Observers of Ottoman Decline,” seemed to be the perfect proof. What could be better for a historian than a literal statement backing up his interpretation?
But holes were quickly poked. Douglas Howard, another historian of the empire, suggested that Ottomans writing about decline might have not meant that literally. Instead of a reflection of “popular political sentiments”, he shows how Ottoman wrote “Decline treatise[s]” that were shaped by the interests of their writers and the concrete audience who were supposed to read them — and thus they were not just scribes of factual reality onto paper that we were able to conserve.
This was a game-changer. A part of what makes history so complicated to interpret is that documents we read in the archive are almost never written to us as their intended audience — and when they are, it raises even more suspicions. Working with primary sources and learning the way historians have interpreted them reminds us that the information we get in our contemporary world is, too, shaped by constraints of genre, interests of individual authors, the way these authors imagine what their audience wants to hear or can bear to hear. In other words, they make us sensitive and critical to fake news and helps us navigate a deluge of information.
Another type of holes peaked in the decline thesis is exemplified by Linda Darling’s book Revenue Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660. Working with what seems to most people an incredibly dull collection of tax records, Darling showed that financial decline never occurred. Instead, she suggested that the empire adapted itself to new conditions. In other words, she used new sources to reinterpret the entire paradigm. This is a strong lesson in how the big pictures we have in mind can be overturned by an attentive study of the details.
The controversy around the decline thesis is only one of many, many others. The decline of the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the failure of a communist revolution in Germany, the rise of Hitler, the actual grip of Stalin over the personal life of his citizens, the reasons for widespread rebellions in multiple parts of the world around the middle of the nineteenth century — these are just a few of very large controversies still debated by historians.
What these debates teach us is how to navigate a world of partial information. They encourage us to limit the scope of our knowledge, to acknowledge the limitations of our sources, to identify the weaknesses and blind spots of our own position in trying to make sense of an incoherent world.
The spread of CoVid-2019 drove us all back to history. When in doubt, we seek solace or amplify our worries by looking back as far as the Black Plague of the 14th century or as recently as the Spanish flu. But now, not in 1348 or 1918, we experience a big crisis in our knowledge. Many fellow historians promote, with much justice, the fruits of their own research about past plagues. They teach us quite a bit and provide us with a source of entertainment and fascination as we sit in isolation.
We can debate to what extent they teach us about what we see now, but with false news, half-truths, floods of new data coming each day — it is historiography, or the science of writing history, that teaches us how to process this information, how to work with this uncertainty, how to be modest in our evaluations. Teaching the way we got to the stories we tell and the way we constructed these interpretations of the past can help us become better consumers and producers of knowledge in the present.
It is entirely possible that the next winter military odyssey on Russian territory will end successfully for the next invader unburdened by history. This lesson, after all, is a tentative story. Historiography, however, is the set of skills and literacy that we need now that all of us participate in this massive exchange of interpretations, not least through Twitter, in a world where raw data and the technological skills and tools to analyze it become rapidly accessible.
History is a very dynamic field. Historians now take into account not only human agency in shaping their own lives but also the role of the environment and climate. Historians look at how people imagined their possibilities and how they acted upon them. Historians debate the role of bigger structures of thought and society as opposed to the opportunity for revolutionary change we endow in each particular person. Following their debates, then, is beyond learning how to work with information and partial sources. Following their debates is broadening your own analytical capabilities when trying to understand what seems to be an incoherent world full of contingencies and explanations.
Learning history makes us cultured, informed, and exposes us to our heritage and its entangled cases of severe injustice. Historiography makes us smarter and hones the analytical blaze in our heads. This is not just me saying: A recent article on Medium tries to offer yet another view on how historical thinking can push forward our understanding of the present.
Next time you explain a historical phenomenon to your friend, then, look online for second (and third and fourth, etc.) opinions. I might be biased as this is my profession, but I assure you that the arguments and controversies behind this phenomenon are likely just as interesting as the story itself.
