Introductory Lecture in History

An explanatory note: This is the template on which I am basing my introductory lectures at the beginning of the academic year. The wording is different depending on the age of the pupils but the essence is the same. The language in this particular version does not seem to me serious enough now, when I am reading it once again before making it public; still, it is probably better to leave it as it is. If not doing anything else, this short text gives an exact impression of what is my understanding of history as a science and of what should be the foundations of its teaching at high school.

Boris Shopov

AS/A LEVEL & GCSE
History
Introductory Lecture
History as a Science

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is a very short presentation on the problem of what is history as a science, or – even more exactly – is it a science at all.
1. Why is the study of history necessary?
This opening may seem quite strange, but I am of the opinion that we need to discuss that. There are obviously many explanations since the days of Thucydides and Polybius why studying history is necessary, and we are going to examine these briefly; the most frequently given of them are, as follows:
– it preserves us from repeating the mistakes of the past – nonsense, for human nature is such that said mistakes are repeated over and over, and with a remarkable persistence, both at the personal and what is usually described as ‘political’ level; here any of us can be a witness; examples – the mistake of the statesmen drafting the Versailles treaties who knew of the success of the Congress of Vienna but did not do what guaranteed the stability of the Vienna agreements – namely, the establishment of a permanent system of military security based on a formal engagement, as with the Quadruple Alliance in 1814-1815;
– it allows us to chart the course of future events provided the participants or the conditions are the same – nonsense again, for events never repeat themselves; example – even if you are stuffed with history, like army officers, you may not be able to take the only lesson of history – that nothing is repeated, as shown by the French high command in 1939-1940 – opposing a Germany ill-equipped for fighting a long war, these people had prepared themselves to fight in the terms of the First World War and it was basically this and not any other real or imagined superiority that allowed Germany to win in 1940, as proved by the relatively recent work of a German military historian.
Why then?
The answer to this question is not a straightforward one, and arriving at it will obviously occupy most of our time both in class and outside of it in the course of the academic year. It is now time, before we reach the possible answer to the question of why is the study of history necessary, to see what history is, and what is the scientific element in it.
2. History as a Science
What is history?
It is important to remember that the word is Greek, meaning ‘knowing and learning by inquiry’. Remember that in ancient Athens where from we possess the first works of history preserved in their entirety this meant also ‘inquiry’ in the sense of ‘investigation’, and that therefore we have to remember that history is mostly about discovering the reasons for the events of past. Let us try doing it on the example of an event well-known, described countless times – the murder of Caesar in 44 BC.
More concretely, when we study history, we try to answer the following questions:
WHEN – relatively easy to establish
WHERE – the same
WHO – also
HOW – of no great significance, at least in this particular case
WHY – here things begin to become really difficult.
And here lies the main difference between history and the exact and/or natural sciences.
In Physics, for instance, if I want to prove whether water changes its aggregate states, there is a very simple way of doing it – experiment. This experiment can be conducted everywhere in the world, under all circumstances – and the result will be identical. The same holds true about things like the place of the Sun in the Solar System, the origin of contagious disease, and so on.
Well, in history it is impossible to conduct an experiment, and we must be absolutely clear on this from the start. In other words, events are unique, or individual (literally meaning ‘indivisible’), and they do not repeat themselves. Moreover, here on Earth time flows in a linear fashion, and – as everybody knows from personal experience – it is irreversible, so events, having happened once, cannot be ‘re-played’ by us. Why? Because what we call ‘events’ are in fact ‘deeds’, which means acts committed by individual people who have lived long or not so long ago. After their deaths, we cannot resurrect them nor can we contact them, so we literally remain in the dark about why ABC did what he did in, say, 1235 or in 1787.
Why do we then call history a science? Because it treats only events that have taken place, and is therefore exact in this sense, and tries to describe and analyze said events as fully as possible – which we are going to see just below. We return to our example:
– the murder of Caesar in 44 BC
– it can be described as murder, i.e. a conspiracy, and this is right, but too superficial
– one level up, and it can be described as a political conspiracy, crafted in order to remove Caesar from power and to promote his adversaries in power, and this is also correct, but still there are more things to be considered
– one more level up, and we can say that this was a conflict for power within the ruling group of the Roman aristocracy;
– and finally, we may add that the conflict for power was not for the sake of power simply, but for something more principled – the parties in it had, as far as we can understand today, different views on how the Roman state should be governed.
So, the scientific side of history is that it deals only with real events. Yes, the way they are appreciated, accepted by us, the way we evaluate them – all this changes; but what happens with the progress of time is that what we know about the past becomes richer in nuances – exactly like the different aspects of the murder of Caesar we have just mentioned.
But there is a more fundamental question – how do we know that this event really took place?
Well, in this case it is easy, for we have the testimonies of two contemporaries who were once and for a while allies, then fell out, and the one of them agreed for the murder of the other to be arranged – I mean Augustus and Cicero. In his great inscription ‘Res Gestae Divi Augusti’ Octavian mentions he punished the murderers of his father (he was the adopted nephew of Caesar); in his letters Cicero also writes that Caesar was murdered. So you see – these two so different people are, in fact, confirming that the event took place.
And to return to our initial, most important question – WHY did this event take place?
To answer this question, people have tried and still try to find explanations, and these are as different as the parts of the world and periods of time we can study:
– the Economy
– the Culture
– Genetic Inheritance
– Technological Advances
And so on…
Things are, however, simultaneously simpler and much more complex.
And to explain this, I shall turn your attention to this event, first drawn to my attention by the great and sadly late American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
“I do not understand why I was not broken like an egg-shell or squashed like a gooseberry”.
On December 13, 1931, a man was crossing New York’s Fifth Avenue. He was British, so he looked the wrong way, and a car driving 35 mph hit him and nearly killed him. Who was he?
Let us try and imagine the history of the 20th century without Winston Churchill. Can we even for a moment consider that it would be the same? When we consider figures like Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler – the conclusion is the same. Without them, the world of today would be a completely different place from the place it is actually. And in order to make things very clear, I am saying this not as a sort of hero-worship – even the best of men had their shortcomings. Let me give an example of what do I have in mind.
We humans have conscience and free will, and in every single moment of our lives – after a certain age – we have to make decisions. In every such case we have at least two opportunities – and we choose; the other one, two or more options will remain only this – opportunities that were not realised. It is therefore important to explain also this, and to do it right here – that we cannot even guess what would have been present-day reality, had something different happened and not what did happen in reality. Can we really imagine the present-day world where we live to be the same without the people mentioned above – Churchill, Hitler and so on? No, and for this reason the exercises in ‘alternative history’ are futile – the people who do it simply rearrange what they know in a more or less different manner starting from what happened really.
Part of this is the other important observation we have to make, namely, on the nature of events. When people do something nothing ‘happens’ in reality (in the sense that it does not happen somehow outside of us) but they, these very same people, simply take some action. Excluding the influence of things like natural cataclysms, epidemics (steadily declining since the end of the 17th century, at least in Europe), and the like, what we study as history is just that – the past action of other people, of our predecessors.
And this leads us exactly where we have to finish our first encounter with history – to its sources.
3. The Sources of History
This may seem a rather trivial affair but it is not such a thing.
First, we have to start with the observation that everything, even the most insignificant object from the past, is a source for it. For the sake of convenience, sources are very often divided into two great groups – material and texts; to me, the more exact division is textual and non-textual. The textual sources are most important – for without them it would not be possible to say anything about the past; it is enough to look at ‘mute’ monuments like this one, for unlike the builders of the pyramids, the builders of Stonehenge did not have a writing system, and therefore we cannot say anything substantial on them. Obviously, non-textual sources – pictures, buildings and so on – have their own value, but they can yield any information only when combined with textual sources.
Now, textual sources are obviously much more reliable and informative, but they also have their limitations, and these are not insignificant. We can subdivide textual sources into two great classes: narrative and documentary.
With narrative sources, things are clear – from the beginnings of history as a type of writing, and until the late 17th-mid-18th centuries, history was a very peculiar type of literature but NOT science; it began to develop as a science only from the moment pointed above. Till then one of its main functions was to advance a particular political and/or religious viewpoint (in a very complex way, of course), and not to provide an objective account of events. Now, with the coming of the modern age, memoirs, letters and so on remain a very important source – it is enough here to consider the memoir books of Winston Churchill, really indispensable for every student of the history of the 20th century. There is, nevertheless, a very substantial problem with narrative textual sources. Very often they are presented as biased – and certainly we can say that there has been bias directed at somebody, at least in given moments, in the lives of all people on Earth. However, bias is not typical of mature works written by mature people, and for instance in the memoirs of Churchill you cannot find any anti-German or anti-Russian bias as such; there is very often respect for the Germans and for the Russians as peoples, and only occasional manifestations of a more biting attitude when you consult the man’s wartime speeches. The problem is different – and it is called perspective. Churchill’s perspective is limited by his position on the surface of the Earth and by his position within British society and politics. In other words, if you write a book on the participation of Britain in the war, his Second World War is a must reading for you; however, it cannot be a primary source if you try to write substantially on Germany or the USSR in the period 1939-1945, although it has to be used. The same is valid of all textual sources – both narrative and documentary – and only by combining the different perspectives of the people who had written them, only by comparing these perspectives allows us to reach a conclusion, to make a statement on the past.
To put it in one sentence – history is a humanitarian science trying to understand the reasons for human action as we perceive it through our sources.
This is my understanding of history, and this is what I shall try to do here, to the best of my ability, having in mind the coming examinations.
Thank you for the attention.