The Frame Matters
How we organize history courses shapes how students understand the world
Is Napoleon important? How about Winston Churchill, Julius Caesar, or Genghis Khan? The degree to which individual actors — as opposed to broad, impersonal trends — shape history has been one of the longest debates in the historical profession.
The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle came down firmly on the side of the “Great Man Theory,” arguing in 1840 that
For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.
But in the years since Carlyle, opinions on the Great Man Theory have split.
Academic historians tend to prefer approaches that look at the social, economic, and political trends that allowed important people to influence…
