History: A Very Short Introduction by John Arnold

Jun 12, 2006 Alun The Past 1 Comment Book, History, John Arnold, Review, Very Short Introduction

A post from Revise and Dis­sent archived here. You can add your com­ment on this at HNN.

At Leicester there’s a small group of people who will evan­gel­ise to who­ever will listen about the Very Short Intro­duc­tion series. In recent years the series, pub­lished by OUP has gained the ulti­mate in accol­ades. The format has been ripped-off by other pub­lish­ers. The concept, a pocket-sized intro­duc­tion to the prob­lems of an aca­demic field is easy enough to copy, but there is more to the suc­cess of the series than that. The writ­ing is usu­ally extremely good and His­tory: Very Short Intro­duc­tion by John Arnold is an excel­lent example.

The book opens with an action sequence. It con­cerns Guil­hem Déjean, a man on the trail of Cath­ars in Langue­doc. His arrival in the vil­lage Taras­con sets in train a series of events which leads to the murder of Déjean at the hands of heretics who seek to hide from the Cath­olic church. It’s a pacey and well-written start that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bond film, if James Bond relo­cated to 14th cen­tury France.

The point of the graphic open­ing is to give the reader a piece of the past to work with. Cer­tainly there’s a story to be told, but is that it? Arnold asks “Is his­tory the truth of the past re-told in the present?” In this book Arnold aims to show that his­tory is not syn­onym­ous with the past. As David men­tioned earlier, His­tory is an invest­ig­a­tion and this book tackles the ques­tions of what we invest­ig­ate and how we can do it. He also chal­lenges the reader to think about what his­tory is for, a point to which he returns at the end of the book.

The second and third chapters are a brief his­tory of His­tory. Start­ing with Nabonidus of Babylon and Hero­dotus he shows how what we would call his­tory has evolved along with changes in the soci­ety that it is in. Arnold makes a strong case that one of the driv­ing forces in the change of soci­ety and the his­tory it wrote was the chan­ging nature of Chris­tian­ity. The later chapter explores the influ­ence of Leo­pold von Ranke on his­tory and the pro­fes­sion­al­isa­tion of the sub­ject which Kevin Levin touched upon yes­ter­day. Arnold notes:

First, there has been an increas­ing gulf between the gen­eral read­ing pub­lic and the aca­demic his­tor­ian: writ­ing for learned journ­als or pub­lish­ing mono­graphs with uni­ver­sity presses gen­er­ally means writ­ing for an audi­ence of under five hun­dred people. Much that is inter­est­ing and import­ant to every reader is hid­den away under an off-putting blanket of pro­fes­sional appar­atus. Secondly becom­ing ‘pro­fes­sion­als’ has some­times made his­tor­i­ans pre­tend to an Olympic detach­ment from, and an object­ive judge­ment on, the present and past … simply note that pro­fes­sional does not mean ‘impar­tial’; it merely means ‘paid’.

If chapters two and three about about why we do his­tory then chapters four and five are about how we do it. Chapter four starts with a fire at the Nor­wich Record Office in 1994 and what the rebuild­ing of the archive reveals about his­tory. This leads to a descrip­tion of a brief note of a Mrs Bur­dett get­ting an annu­ity of 20 marks per annum because her hus­band had left her to go to New Eng­land. From here he shows how vari­ous records and archives can be examined to draw up a story of George Bur­dett, a rad­ical preacher who left for Mas­sachu­setts in 1630 and returned to Eng­land to fight for the King in the Eng­lish Civil War in the 1640s. The next chapter moves from the detail of the earlier case study and starts show­ing how we can frame wider ques­tions about soci­etal pro­cesses and how this relates to the his­tor­ical record.

The final two chapters tackle the prob­lem of relat­ing the past to the present. Chapter Six is titled “The killing of cats; or, is the past a for­eign coun­try?” which provides a use­ful start­ing point both for Fri­day Cat Blog­ging and instant notori­ety should I ever fol­low up on it. The aim is to show that when we look at the past we’re not examin­ing life as we would have lived it if we didn’t have elec­tri­city. Soci­ety was in some ways very dif­fer­ent from the world of today. The prob­lems this leads to are tackled in the final chapter with another case study when Sojourner Truth stood up to speak to the Ohio Women’s Right Con­ven­tion in Akron, what did she say? Arnold presents two ver­sions and talks about the dif­fer­ence between the real­ity and the per­cep­tion of how she acted. If one ver­sion writ­ten down more accur­ately reflects the effect she had on soci­ety then is it a truth even if it isn’t what actu­ally happened? In another con­text, is Pericles funeral ora­tion writ­ten by Thucy­dides his­tor­ic­ally import­ant even if it is what Thucy­dides thought was said or what Thucy­dides thought ought to have been said rather than what actu­ally happened?

Like many of the VSIs the book is a joy to read. It’s access­ible but not shal­low. The­ory of His­tory has the poten­tial to be a mind-numbingly dull sub­ject, but in this book John Arnold shows how hav­ing an idea of what you’re doing, and why, can make a his­tor­ical story more inter­est­ing and add more depth by sug­gest­ing ques­tions that might not oth­er­wise occur to you. It doesn’t elim­in­ate story of nar­rat­ive from His­tory but offers a scaf­fold on which to build a stronger narrative.

By the end of the book he makes a very good case for his cent­ral argu­ment: His­tory is not about the past it’s about search­ing for mean­ing in what happened in the past. It’s a beau­ti­fully writ­ten essay on what makes His­tory inter­est­ing. Essen­tial read­ing, not for his­tory stu­dents but for TV pro­du­cers who clog up the air­waves with those awful World War II doc­u­ment­ar­ies which reel off a string of battle names with archive foot­age and call it his­tory.
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