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People who decide what becomes history

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• KingOfCoders 5y ago
  History is what people want history to be, E.g. the Native American Genocide.Always was, always will be.History is always the tool to justify the status quo.
  • mjfl 5y ago
    I never witnessed Native American genocide ommitted from any history class, even in elementary school, in a very red state.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • KingOfCoders 5y ago
      How many monuments are there in the US? How are they visited? How is a monument to the pilgrims visited a hundred times more than a museum to the genocide of Native Americans? History is not what is teached in school but how a society sees itself. German society at large has accepted the Holocaust, because it was useful, but hasn't accepted the history E.g. of the Deutschritterorden or the genocide of the Herero and Nama - it hasn't been useful to do so. There is no monument to the genocide of the Herero in Germany. History is a tool how society sees itself.
      • themitigating 5y ago
        School is a part of how that vision formed
      • WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
      • RC_ITR 5y ago
        We just got rid of the Cleveland baseball team and Washington football team, but people act like society has come to terms with the genocide. Hell, Chicago hockey is still the Blackhawks, but since it’s “tasteful” people aren’t complaining loudly enough to get it to change.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • josephg 5y ago
        > History is not what is teached in school but how a society sees itself. Sounds closer to a definition of culture. And culture is never monolithic. Plenty of people are horrified by past atrocities committed on their behalf. And plenty of people don’t care. But you don’t measure a society’s collective perspective by counting monuments. Monuments signify what was important to the people who made them. Not the people who see them. For my money you’d do better to look at modern media of all kinds. What are the stories being told today, in news, in movies, in textbooks and in social media? They aren’t the same stories our forebears were telling.
        • KingOfCoders 5y ago
          No, just read the "history" of countries or events in different languages on Wikipedia, they are completely different.
    • qiskit 5y ago
      Really? I remember being taught about pilgrims and indians in elementary school and then they simply stopped being mentioned. Nowhere did I ever read the native americans were genocided. I certainly never read we were the bad guys exterminating the natives. Everything was couched in terms like pilgrims, settlers, explorers, etc. Nowhere in any history book are we portrayed as genocidal villains like we portray the nazis. We are portrayed as the good guys. But then again, I'm from a very blue state. How many lines were dedicated to george washington and his family's history of exterminating native americans? I'm betting 0 lines. If native americans took the country back, do you think the history will remain the same?
      • mjfl 5y ago
        It was never moralistically portrayed like you seem to want. But definitely it was mentioned that 90% of Indians were killed by European diseases, sometimes intentionally delivered like the trail of tears, and additionally whenever gold was rumored to be on a site the indians would be pushed out.
        • qiskit 5y ago
          > It was never moralistically portrayed like you seem to want. How else do you portray an intentional and centuries long systematic genocide of an entire continent of nations? How do you portray the greatest genocide in human history? > But definitely it was mentioned that 90% of Indians were killed by European diseases, sometimes intentionally delivered like the trail of tears, and additionally whenever gold was rumored to be on a site the indians would be pushed out. Nothing you listed indicate an actual genocide. You didn't read about actual hunting and raping and exterminating of natives that happened all across the country? You didn't read about actual statehood laws ( majority white ) which encouraged settlers to kill off the natives. You didn't read about the US government working with railroad tycoons to kill off the natives to build railroads? As I said, if the natives were in charge, how do you think the history will be written? We'd be portrayed as monsters far worse than nazis. That was my point. History is written by the victors. Which you proved with your comment but yet deny.
  • RealityVoid 5y ago
    > History is always the tool to justify the status quo. Strong disagree on this one, especially on the _always_ part. Many times it is, in state propaganda especially. But history is the study of things that have happened and there are many facets and things in the past worth knowing and thinking about. It need not be the only about the things thaught in schools. It is much more, much richer than that.
    • yunohn 5y ago
      > But history is the study of things that have happened Sure, but the point being made is that often you don’t have documentation of reality and so, that history is completely erased. “History is written by the victors”
      • rcxdude 5y ago
        This isn't really true though, if you look through the historical record you can find plenty of sources from people who lost. Usually what's missing from the record is people who were illiterate (which is a lot of people as soon as you go any significant length of time back).
        • qiskit 5y ago
          "History is written by the victors" doesn't mean it is only written by the winning side at that time in history forever. It means history is written by those currently in charge today. Meaning today's victors get to choose what is history and how to view history. Imagine if there is a war between the US and Mexico and we lose and mexico takes over. The history of the alamo, mexican-american war, annexation of texas, etc will be quite different even though we beat mexico in the 1800s. Imagine if the south does rise again and the south takes over. The history of the civil war will be remarkably different even those the north won the civil war. Doesn't really matter who the victors were back then. What's important is who the victors are today.
          • RealityVoid 5y ago
  • pm90 5y ago
    > History is what people want history to be Yes > .Always was, always will be.History is always the tool to justify the status quo. No and yes. We have various sources to determine what happened. To create a specific kind of narrative using that data is a choice that many can make. But historical data is still there, and different narratives might still arise. Liberal democracies and the freedom of speech create the fertile ground required for historians to look at past records and explain what happened.
    • trzy 5y ago
      True but the thorny question is not “what happened” but “what happened that was important?” What do we focus on investigating and how do we connect it to a broader narrative (and when writing a paper, a book, or a lecture, there is always a narrative because that’s how we communicate).
• xcambar 5y ago
  The status of History and the contents of History school books are not to be conflated. History, as a science, is a mixed bag of debates and consensus. History school books are bound to national political ideologies. Edit: s/confounded/conflated/
  • bruce511 5y ago
    I think you mean conflated, not confounded?
    • xcambar 5y ago
      Indeed. Thanks!
  • UncleMeat 5y ago
    The way professionals usually distinguish these is as history and historical memory.
  • qiskit 5y ago
    Firstly , history isn't a science. History is part of humanities. > History, as a science, is a mixed bag of debates and consensus. Science doesn't work via debates and consensus. It works by hypothesis and experimentation. History is part of myth making which exists to form or preserve a tribe, institution, nation, etc.
    • xcambar 5y ago
      certainly you should ask Copernicus or Darwin if their hypothesis and experimentations were enough to reach consensus in the scientific community of their times. They were right eventually, but they were very controversial and their ideas started very strong debates.
      • qiskit 5y ago
        > They were right eventually, but they were very controversial and their ideas started very strong debates. They weren't right eventually. They were always right. Are you claiming copernicus was wrong and the sun was circling the earth? They were right because of the evidence, not because of the debate and consensus. Heliocentrism didn't end because there was a debate and a vote. It ended because of the evidence. Arts/humanities work via debate/consensus/etc. Science works by tests/experimentation/evidence/empiricism.
• shisisms 5y ago
  Wonderfully well written piece, summed up with: > And that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet? > Cohen thinks that it should matter, that we cannot read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” properly unless we know the person who wrote it, scrotal affliction and all.
• aestetix 5y ago
  I don't agree with this article at all. If we cannot judge a work without knowing anything about the author, then how are we supposed to judge works like the Iliad and the Odyssey? Sometimes knowing the bias of an author can impact how our present biases color our own views. For example, most people these days who read Thucydides' Melian Dialogue would assume the correct conclusion is to side with Melos, and it's often a shock that Thucydides himself sided with the Athenians. However, this does not change the quality of the work itself, but merely how we perceive it. I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history. To me, that is trying to dismiss a work by attacking the character of the person who wrote it.
  • aestetix 5y ago
    For those who have downvoted me, could you grant the courtesy of explaining why?
    • psyc 5y ago
      Looks like a quality comment to me. But some will reduce it to: vote(-isProblematic(wokePerceptualHash(“separate art from artist”)));
  • geraneum 5y ago
    > I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history. This. The example that’s used in the article seems extreme and the author of the article is not elaborating on how this connection is made. Could be true could be not. Also, I can add from personal experience that you don’t need to know the author to judge an artwork but knowing the author helps you connect to the art on a whole different level. As another example, first listen to Beethoven’s symphony No. 5 and then read about his personality traits and struggles in life, etc. it is fantastic. This is art of course and history might be another matter in which the artist’s credibility is in question.
• BenoitP 5y ago
  Well, let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth: History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon Napoleon Bonaparte
  • AmericanChopper 5y ago
    > All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Maybe in 1850.
      • paskozdilar 5y ago
        Maybe in 2022.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • spacemanmatt 5y ago
    > Don't believe everything you read on the internet > --Albert Einstein
  • qiskit 5y ago
    "It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over until we forget that it's a lie." -- Littlefinger.
• EnKopVand 5y ago
  Much thanks to my then undiscovered ADHD I spent my university years switching between ”categories” (it’s not exactly the same as majors/minors here in Denmark because everything on a bachelors was tailored for you up front), 7 times before I ended up with Computer Science (which was where I started). Two of those years was spent studying History, and the primary subject through everything was that sources matter. Because history is exactly as described here, influenced by its writer and the context in which it was written. Which is why history as far as academia is concerned tends to be much more “peer-decided” than anything. With good and bad side effects. But basically a lot of history is a group of experts spending their careers discussing whether or not a set of pottery inscriptions can mean that Denmark went on a crusade or not. But that is academia, and though my brief period there I got the impression that it took its sources very serious. I’d like to say that maybe I got this article wrong, but isn’t what this article talks about more political science than history? The fall or the Roman Empire is a part of history, but how it’s used in political discourse has nothing to do with history, until decades from now anyway. People with an agenda has always used texts and history to further it, but isn’t it those people who are far more in control of what becomes history than the people who wrote the works?
  • igorkraw 5y ago
    > more political science than history? The fall or the Roman Empire is a part of history, but how it’s used in political discourse has nothing to do with history, until decades from now anyway This exact example shows how interwoven they are. Which "fall" are you referring to? The end of the western Roman empire, or the end of Byzantium hundreds of years later? Or do you mean the replacement of the republic by the empire proper, and later the decline and division? What you consider the empire and its fall, if you choose to consider it one, isn't just semantics, it's a meme that defines a history based on a political need: for the Holy Roman empire of Germanic Nation, Rome was the mantle of legitimacy from an older time, for the various post renaissance empires the fall and the subsequent "dark ages" was some darkness to push back with their own order and light, for Nazi Germany and various connaisseurs of "degeneration theory" the fall always serves as a reason why they must impose strict social and moral control...history is inevitably tied to the time and politics it is born from (acting as a lens) and the goals it served (possibly subconsciously)
• mherdeg 5y ago
  I've been having a tough time wrapping my head around how little recorded history there is. All individual people have rich lives and have been around for, what, 200,000 years? But only like 2.5% of that is covered by any written history at all (some inheriting from older storytelling tradition no doubt). What entire cultural trends and phenomena have we totally forgotten? What were we even doing the other 97% of the time -- just trying to find enough food and not die?
  • vharuck 5y ago
    I was amazed to learn that the Japanese people didn't use a writing system until the 4th century, and even then it was just Chinese. Not an adaptation of Chinese characters, which came later, but the Chinese language. Japan had agricultural residents since the 4th century BCE. To go 800 years without writing, despite depending on long-term planning and trading to survive, is incomprehensible to me.
  • gilbetron 5y ago
    It is crazy to think about, I agree. Additionally, before 200 years ago, nobody even owned anything written, except for a tiny amount of people. We spent the vast majority of our existence knowing nothing, at least how we think of knowledge now. But we still had these awesome brains - instead we had it filled with local knowledge - people, places, and things from the environment we lived in, which was pretty small. Can you imagine the detail we understood back then? And yet nobody knew the answers to what we consider important these days. It's really mind warping to contemplate this. Even now compared to 30 years ago or so is weird. Prior to the internet, largely speaking if your immediate group didn't know the answer to something, you just largely didn't know it ... ever. I mean you could find out if you really wanted to, probably. But there were things we just didn't have the answer to. "Remember that episode of Three's Company that had that one guy in it? What was his name?" Guess what - we never found out that answer! The lyric of that song? Never found out before the Internet. Even today I still find myself remembering things I wanted to know growing up but the knowledge was inaccessible back then, but now I can find out in seconds. Such a weird time we live in if you think about it. We have this weird mono culture, in a way, but within that mono culture we're getting all these tiny nano-cultures embedded in it. My son (13) loves some of the most obscure things and is able to find people also excited about it (Not just SCP, but SCP maps and mods done in Garry's Mod, for instance - there's like 100 people in the world that like that combination). Now I'm just rambling, but yes, the vast majority of our existence we were isolated (globally speaking) and ignorant in profound ways. And now we are just the opposite.
• thoweiru234 5y ago
  [flagged]
• kaycebasques 5y ago
  My undergrad degree at Cal was history. One of the required classes for the major was historiography, the study of how history is created. This quote from the New Yorker article sums up one of the key ideas of the historiography class: > It’s that bias in history-making is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it. I imagine that anyone who majored in history in the USA over the last 20 years is familiar with this idea. I'm not trying to make a value judgment. Just noting that it's a very widespread idea among academically trained historians.
  • photochemsyn 5y ago
    The issue is really whether people are aware of their own biases and actively try to counter them by trying to look at events through the lens of different biases, or just run with their own biases because they're trying to promote them, generally with ulterior motives in mind. Hence George Orwell: "Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future." For example, if you ardently believe in investment capitalism as the best economic system in history, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of Wall Street's close ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, such as the IBM story: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-years-of-corporate-denial/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-yea... Alternatively, if you ardently believe Marx-inspired socialism is the optimal solution, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine: https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine/ https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on... Historians who are merely trying to promote their own particular ideology, or to justify the past actions of their own particular nation-state, are best viewed as propaganda peddlers.
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    It's also important to note, I think especially in this context, that this framework isn't really a matter of ideology. I'm not saying you think it is, but I think a fair number of people here are likely to interpret it that way. This view is so widespread because people who practice history find it valuable. When you come across, for example, a widely known primary document that contradicts or undermines a view common to historians for many years, how do you explain that? The answer isn't in the facts of the documents, it's in the social construction of "history." I think there's a really common implicit assumption that historians are just people who know a lot of things about history. But once you get away from that and into the understanding of it as a skill- and research-based social practice, you start to need something to explain why we know what we know, or think we do. This ends up being a fairly useful one!
• agumonkey 5y ago
  There's another side, the post victor generation. Today you can read all about the GAFAM era by young people that may not know about computing, so the world of computing will be just that. Whatever reigns in this world will be the main thing discussed about, because it's what defines the value ladder of the writer's reality.
• throwaway0x7E6 5y ago
  after reading wikipedia articles about the events I have personally watched unfold and paid extremely close attention to, I have absolutely no faith in any written history. some particularly damning lies literally have video evidence that contradicts the editors' headcanon, but good luck challenging that fucking cabal
  • jcranberry 5y ago
    Can you give some examples?
• antattack 5y ago
  “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell.