Most people are not interested in history.
In the United States, the most popular form of history, if we look at the number of books published, is military history. Above all, the largest market is for books on the American Civil War. Yet I know of no single volume that answers these three questions, while ignoring the text-hogging details of the major battles: (1) Why did it begin when it began? (2) How was it funded, North and South? (3) What were the changes in the elites, North and South? Also, no one does all four crucial historiographical steps:
1. Follow the money.
2. Follow the confessions.
3. Follow the media.
4. Follow the organizations.
No one also asks the five W's: What, where, when, who, and why?
Nobody puts all of these into a coherent narrative. There is too much to consider.
Nobody has studied the two dozen major American wars with this outline, telling the story of America's wars in terms of a pattern of historical causation: entry, financing, elites.
And that's just wars. There is a lot more to history than wars.
In second place behind military history is the Kennedy assassination. This is all right as a way to start studying history. My friend, the late William Marina, used to teach a class every few years on the Kennedy assassination. That was the way he was able to get students to learn about the difficulties of putting together historical documents into a coherent narrative. He was the best person in the country to teach the class, because he was only historian who was actually present at the assassination. (Sadly, he never wrote his long-promised book on the Kennedy assassination. The curious thing is this: he was a revisionist historian in some areas, but he thought that Oswald did it alone.)
THE MOST DIFFICULT DISCIPLINE TO TEACH
Of all academic subjects, history is the most difficult to teach over a lifetime. It is more difficult to teach than nuclear physics. It is more difficult to teach than organic chemistry. It is more difficult than any other academic discipline.
Why should this be true? Because the historian has a uniquely difficult task over a career. It is not a very difficult task in his first year or two. But over a career, it is.
A college-level historian has a fixed number of classes to teach. Usually, this is three classes a week, 50 minutes per class, for 14 or 15 weeks. There are vacations to consider. So, in general, there are no more than 40 lectures. The historian also has to schedule a couple of major exams. So, he has to tell the story in about 40 lectures. This can be done. People have been doing this for over a century.
Here is the problem. If he teaches for 30 years, events will take place during those 30 years that he has to consider. He has to devote some time to these events.
Which events will he drop?
That is the killer. He has to make a decision to drop certain events, people, issues, movements, organizations, ideas, or something. It is like a puzzle. It has to maintain its size and shape, but the designer must fit in new pieces.
The same is true of textbooks. It is possible for a historian to write a larger textbook than a competitor, but, on the assumption that he will be successful enough to have subsequent additions, he will have to keep the textbook about the same size. The same problem exists: which events will he drop?
The historian comes before his audience and tells the audience that the story he is about to present is the minimum necessary to understand the historical period in question. The problem is this: the period keeps getting longer.
If his story is coherent in the first year he delivers the classroom lectures, and if the story is going to maintain this coherence over time, how can he maintain this coherence, given the fact that he is going to have to drop parts of the story? In other words, what is the source of the coherence? If all the parts fit together in the first year that he delivers his lectures, then these parts cannot possibly fit together in subsequent years. Some parts will be removed. Other parts will have their edges filed down. It is like a gigantic puzzle in which pieces of the puzzle have to be removed, and all replacement pieces have to be cut to fit the puzzle. But when you cut the pieces to fit the puzzle, you are tampering with the integrity of the events. You are filing away at the events to get them to fit into the puzzle. In short, you must cheat.
The puzzle over time will turn into a different picture.
THREE CENTURIES FROM NOW
Think of somebody 300 years from now. He is going to teach a class on the history of the United States, or the history of Western civilization, or the history of the world. He will have to give a few lectures on the 20th century. What will he select?
If you took the course today in the same field, you would get a different narrative, because the narrative would include details that will absolutely have to be dropped in the lectures given 300 years from now.
Think of the historian's task today. Which events will he cover in his lectures, which will still be covered by his successor 300 years from now? Which key figures will have to be included? Lenin, Stalin, Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Who else? Here, the battle of the narratives begins.
The two courses will have to mention World War I and World War II. They will both deal with the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath. But the historian in 300 years will probably skip the Beatles. Yet, in all honesty, can you give a coherent account of the 20th century, and skip the Beatles? Can you understand the cultural history of the generation that came to adulthood or the teens in 1964, all over the West, and not mention the Beatles? It will be a lot easier to discuss this history in 300 years without mentioning Kennedy, except for his assassination. The Kennedy assassination was more relevant as a preparation for the arrival of the Beatles the following February, than it was for anything Kennedy ever would have accomplished. Kennedy's assassination disoriented Americans, especially liberal Americans. This was crucial for the Beatles. The Beatles were part of this disruption. There was a visible shift in culture over the next two years: the counter-culture arrived.
Are cultural shifts more important than most presidential elections? Yes. But it is easier to talk about presidential elections than it is to talk about cultural shifts. So, in the narrative 300 years from now, there may not be much discussion of the cultural shifts. If there is. If so, maybe nobody will mention Kennedy's assassination. Yet Kennedy's assassination is the number-one event covered by history books in our generation. It is the hottest of hot topics. His only rival is Lincoln.
I hope you see the problem. The historian has to tell a story that is coherent, but he has to keep inserting new pieces. The academic year limits the size of the puzzle. It limits the size of the textbooks.
Somebody supposedly asked Michelangelo how he did his sculpture. He gave an accurate answer. He said he started with a block of marble, and he chipped away at everything that wasn't essential. That's how you teach history. It is easy to do it in your first year. It is easy to do in any particular year. But the older you get, the more pieces you have to take out of the puzzle. You will have to revise your lecture notes. (Professors resist this.)
If you teach science, and you find that something that was almost universally believed in is no longer believed, so what? You just stop talking about any idea that has been dropped by the profession. But how do you drop events in a narrative? How do you drop one item, yet still maintain the coherence of the narrative? Even if the new narrative is coherent, will it be coherent in terms of the earlier narrative?
This is why there is historical revisionism. At some point, a new generation of historians enters the scene, takes out a bunch of the pieces in the puzzle, and discovers that the coherence of the narrative of the earlier generation is no longer viable. So, they come up with a new narrative.
This offers great potential for any revisionist historian who comes up with a new narrative. The problem is, it takes a lifetime of detailed study to come up with the narrative. Then, five years after you retire, or maybe 10 years, the next group of historians drops your version of the narrative, assuming your generation ever picked up your version. Maybe you only picked up its narrative.
HIGH SCHOOL HISTORIOGRAPHY
The teaching of history in the United States, beginning around 1840, was self-consciously substituted for a study of Christianity. National history became the acceptable religion of the public schools. The public schools became the only established churches.
The key figure in all of this is a long-forgotten historian named David Saville Muzzey. He was a liberal Presbyterian preacher who never went into preaching. Let me re-phrase this. He never went into a pulpit to preach. But he preached. He preached longer to the largest congregation than anyone in history: to half or more the high school students in America, 1901-1965. He was a Progressive politically. He shaped the thinking of American high school students. I was assigned his textbook in 1958. But what high school student ever recalls who wrote a textbook? Who cares? So, no one remembers him. He told tens of millions of Americans what to believe for over 60 years.
No one appointed Muzzey to be the man who would tell the story of America to probably half or more of the high school graduates in America, from 1901 until 1965. Nobody knew about him in the academic world. Yet his textbook, rewritten every 5 years or so, was the dominant textbook in the field for over half a century. He told the story of America in terms of the Progressive movement. He deserves a Ph.D. dissertation. Incredibly, there is no Wikipedia entry for him. He went down the memory hole -- America's #1 master of historical memory. There will never be anybody like him again. There will never be anybody who has that kind of dominance in the public schools. In any case, the public schools are headed over the falls. Who is going to tell the stories for the homeschool movement, which will be an online movement? A whole lot of people. That is why there will be tremendous competition for the right to tell the story.
I am beginning to assemble the puzzle's pieces for my version of the story of America, which I will begin telling on the Ron Paul Curriculum, beginning this June. But in the back of my mind is this question: who will tell the story in 30 years? Or, as it probably will turn out, who will tell the story, beginning within five years after I'm dead? I have no control over this. No historian has control over this.
This is why I think teaching history as a career is the most difficult of all academic disciplines.
IS THERE A COHERENT NARRATIVE?
I think there is. Every historian thinks there is. But there are different narratives. Online education will allow more of them. There will be serious competition among historical narratives.
Never forget: the winners write the textbooks.
Question: "When did they start winning?"
Question: "How did they win the first major victory?"
Question: "How have they kept winning?"
Question: "Do you want them to keep winning?" If you answer "no," then you need a replacement narrative. But you will still need many of the same pieces in the puzzle.
Question: "Which pieces must be in the puzzle?"
If you know of some pieces that need to be in my puzzle, but which are not in the establishment's puzzle, send me a list: garynorth@RonPaulCurriculum.com.
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