5 ms·

I have had a dislike for history my whole life. I just now realized that I don't dislike history, but the way it is taught, as a list of important people doing

I have had a dislike for history my whole life. I just now realized that I don't dislike history, but the way it is taught, as a list of important people doing important things on important dates. This post on the other hand was probably the most interesting thing I've read in a long time.

cibritzio 6y ago
> I don't dislike history, but the way it is taught, as a list of important people doing important things on important dates. You might find interest in recent Howard Zinn thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24510079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24510079
jtolmar 6y ago
You'll probably enjoy the rest of the author's blog then. He really does his best to focus on systems, modes of production, and modes of organization. This is has been the standard for modern historians for quite a long time, but most pop history is still stuck in a "Great people, great ideas, great battles" framing. The author of this blog complains about this too at some point (I think somewhere in his Sparta series).
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I think the traditional way of understanding daily life in a given time is reading fiction set in the time.
  - OscarCunningham 6y ago
    He often does blog posts where he looks at a fictional work and explains what it got right and what it got wrong. So fiction is useful to learn history, and then fiction+diff is even more useful.
quacked 6y ago
This is true for most topics. The way that math is taught, the way that history is taught- all separate the vast and deeply interconnected miracles of human ingenuity and achievement and discretize them into asynchronous packets of information to be tested on. How could you learn about Arabic numerals and Roman numerals without learning about how they slowly spread across Europe and revolutionized business? One without the other is boring. Every human invention is connected. Some suggested things to look up, caveat that you may already know about a few of these- - John Taylor Gatto and his myriad essays about the state and education (especially "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" as a Gatto primer) - Buckminster Fuller's "Everything I Know" lecture series (transcripts are up somewhere) - Anything Richard Feynman wrote
- shawnz 6y ago
  Reminds me of A Mathematician's Lament. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/Lockharts...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lelandbatey 6y ago
I've long felt that the greatest exploration of history every created in entertainment form was the 20-year long show called Modern Marvels[0] on the History Channel. It was the History Channels very first show and since it's beginnings in 1995, Modern Marvels has treated us to 44 minute long explorations of the history of things (infrastructure, buildings, devices, earthworks, vehicles) with a format that avoids the boring and useless. All "5 Ws" are addressed each episode, but instead of focusing on "when" and "who" and "where", it focuses on: - "What?" What is this thing? What is it's purpose? How does it do what it does? What can we learn from it? - "Why?" Why was it built? Why did we drive to build something so important? Why should I care? Only after we understand what it is and why it is, do we start to look at who built it, when they built it, etc (though they sneak in some who and when to contextualize the why quite often (which is great!)). Take for example this exploration of the United States Library of Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZuXepy0DdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZuXepy0DdY What a sublime show. And it has such a fantastic narrator and opening theme as well! [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Marvels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Marvels
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Connections[0], The Day the Universe Changed [1], and Industrial Revelations [2] are other very good choices in this area. These series are very old (1978, 1985, and 2002 respectively) but their age gives them a level of quality that modern, dumbed-down, documentaries do not have. They're probably more readily available through forms of through non-monetary cultural exchange rather than by paying streaming service danegeld, however. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revelations
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  >Modern Marvels That show was sooo cool ! If you liked that, you will love "Big Bigger Biggest" from/on NatGeo ? Also available now on YouTube
agumonkey 6y ago
Shared feeling. I once ran into a early 20th researcher that rebuild history through causal analysis rather than event listing. I failed to note his name or the name of his field.. but it felt exciting.
nickik 6y ago
As a huge history fan that is beyond sad to me. History has more crazy story then Game of Thrones, is insanely complex and multifaceted dominated by changing climate, invisible hand of markets, spontaneous mass movements, total accidents, insane coincidences, raging passions and people doing great or evil things.
pron 6y ago
University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential Annales school [1], although that probably varies by country. Lots of economic and social structures, plus lots of documents, mostly court documents, that tell the lives of ordinary people. I took a class just on the everyday "things" of people in early-modern Europe -- what they ate and how, what they wore etc. What ultimately killed it for me was that after a few short years, when you get to the research level, the work becomes so hyper-focused, like shipbuilding in 17th century Spain or weddings in late-medieval Germany, that you don't have the chance to look at the bigger picture until you're an established professor and I didn't have the patience for it. But I was happy to put the skills I had learned into a personal project a few years ago, and composed an anthology of primary sources on the history of logic, algebra and computation, that I published -- in a rather crudely edited form -- as a series of blog posts: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra (although intellectual history is often about "important people"). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school
- jmalicki 6y ago
  This sentence was quite the meta-contradiction: "Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866-1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988)." - in other words, the Annales school was made up of important people doing important things :)
  - pron 6y ago
    I guess Annales is not a suitable genre for an encyclopaedia :) But it also doesn't focus on intellectual history, which it itself is part of.
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    I think there's a difference: the sentence is basically a reading list so you can get familiar with the school. You can't really read Napoleon or Caesar, because the first didn't write much, and the second only wrote PR fluff pieces. Thinkers are influential to schools of thought in a way more concrete way than individuals are to the course of history. It's easy to imagine a modern world without Napoleon (the French army was already kicking ass before he turned up, even if he turned it up to 11). It's not easy to imagine modern philosophy turning out how it has without Kant.

cibritzio 6y ago

> I don't dislike history, but the way it is taught, as a list of important people doing important things on important dates. You might find interest in recent Howard Zinn thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24510079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24510079

jtolmar 6y ago

You'll probably enjoy the rest of the author's blog then. He really does his best to focus on systems, modes of production, and modes of organization. This is has been the standard for modern historians for quite a long time, but most pop history is still stuck in a "Great people, great ideas, great battles" framing. The author of this blog complains about this too at some point (I think somewhere in his Sparta series).

im3w1l 6y ago
I think the traditional way of understanding daily life in a given time is reading fiction set in the time.
- OscarCunningham 6y ago
  He often does blog posts where he looks at a fictional work and explains what it got right and what it got wrong. So fiction is useful to learn history, and then fiction+diff is even more useful.

quacked 6y ago

This is true for most topics. The way that math is taught, the way that history is taught- all separate the vast and deeply interconnected miracles of human ingenuity and achievement and discretize them into asynchronous packets of information to be tested on. How could you learn about Arabic numerals and Roman numerals without learning about how they slowly spread across Europe and revolutionized business? One without the other is boring. Every human invention is connected. Some suggested things to look up, caveat that you may already know about a few of these- - John Taylor Gatto and his myriad essays about the state and education (especially "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" as a Gatto primer) - Buckminster Fuller's "Everything I Know" lecture series (transcripts are up somewhere) - Anything Richard Feynman wrote

shawnz 6y ago
Reminds me of A Mathematician's Lament. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/Lockharts...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lelandbatey 6y ago

I've long felt that the greatest exploration of history every created in entertainment form was the 20-year long show called Modern Marvels[0] on the History Channel. It was the History Channels very first show and since it's beginnings in 1995, Modern Marvels has treated us to 44 minute long explorations of the history of things (infrastructure, buildings, devices, earthworks, vehicles) with a format that avoids the boring and useless. All "5 Ws" are addressed each episode, but instead of focusing on "when" and "who" and "where", it focuses on: - "What?" What is this thing? What is it's purpose? How does it do what it does? What can we learn from it? - "Why?" Why was it built? Why did we drive to build something so important? Why should I care? Only after we understand what it is and why it is, do we start to look at who built it, when they built it, etc (though they sneak in some who and when to contextualize the why quite often (which is great!)). Take for example this exploration of the United States Library of Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZuXepy0DdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZuXepy0DdY What a sublime show. And it has such a fantastic narrator and opening theme as well! [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Marvels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Marvels

bleepblorp 6y ago
Connections[0], The Day the Universe Changed [1], and Industrial Revelations [2] are other very good choices in this area. These series are very old (1978, 1985, and 2002 respectively) but their age gives them a level of quality that modern, dumbed-down, documentaries do not have. They're probably more readily available through forms of through non-monetary cultural exchange rather than by paying streaming service danegeld, however. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revelations
rawoke083600 6y ago
>Modern Marvels That show was sooo cool ! If you liked that, you will love "Big Bigger Biggest" from/on NatGeo ? Also available now on YouTube

agumonkey 6y ago

Shared feeling. I once ran into a early 20th researcher that rebuild history through causal analysis rather than event listing. I failed to note his name or the name of his field.. but it felt exciting.

nickik 6y ago

As a huge history fan that is beyond sad to me. History has more crazy story then Game of Thrones, is insanely complex and multifaceted dominated by changing climate, invisible hand of markets, spontaneous mass movements, total accidents, insane coincidences, raging passions and people doing great or evil things.

pron 6y ago

University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential Annales school [1], although that probably varies by country. Lots of economic and social structures, plus lots of documents, mostly court documents, that tell the lives of ordinary people. I took a class just on the everyday "things" of people in early-modern Europe -- what they ate and how, what they wore etc. What ultimately killed it for me was that after a few short years, when you get to the research level, the work becomes so hyper-focused, like shipbuilding in 17th century Spain or weddings in late-medieval Germany, that you don't have the chance to look at the bigger picture until you're an established professor and I didn't have the patience for it. But I was happy to put the skills I had learned into a personal project a few years ago, and composed an anthology of primary sources on the history of logic, algebra and computation, that I published -- in a rather crudely edited form -- as a series of blog posts: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra (although intellectual history is often about "important people"). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

jmalicki 6y ago
This sentence was quite the meta-contradiction: "Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866-1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988)." - in other words, the Annales school was made up of important people doing important things :)
- pron 6y ago
  I guess Annales is not a suitable genre for an encyclopaedia :) But it also doesn't focus on intellectual history, which it itself is part of.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I think there's a difference: the sentence is basically a reading list so you can get familiar with the school. You can't really read Napoleon or Caesar, because the first didn't write much, and the second only wrote PR fluff pieces. Thinkers are influential to schools of thought in a way more concrete way than individuals are to the course of history. It's easy to imagine a modern world without Napoleon (the French army was already kicking ass before he turned up, even if he turned it up to 11). It's not easy to imagine modern philosophy turning out how it has without Kant.