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No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories. Almost every sphere of human activity has history a

No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories. Almost every sphere of human activity has history attached to it. Anything you do, people did before and there is a chain of influences and knowledge. We have to concede that the major developments in any of those histories do intersect with politics. For instance, if we trace the history of almost anything across the years 1940 to 1950, we almost certainly cannot ignore the both the disruptive and reinforcing effect of World War II. A lot of progress in STEM was accelerated by the war. But there isn't going to be a detailed political discussion there if our historic focus is something in STEM and not politics. The political details are tangential to that kind of history. That's not to deny that there isn't an interesting point of view in exploring the connections among different threads of history. James Burke's fantastic Connections series comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series... Some people are keenly interested in the history of their profession or hobbies. E.g. musicians interested in the history of music, or the development of their favorite instrument and such. Hackers, software devs and computer scientists interested in the history of computing and retrocomputing. Etc. Usually they are not into the political connection unless they are also interested in politics.

tossandthrow 2y ago
Attribution in science is one of these areas where people are led to believe that is apolitical. But when you dive into it, it is almost cringy. An obvious example is the story about Alan Turing that mostly leaves out the foundational work carried out in Poznan.
- labster 2y ago
  Or how women’s contribution to sciences were continually overlooked and sometimes purposefully hidden, going along with the social/political status of women. History is stories we tell ourselves about the world, stories backed by the evidence not yet lost to entropy. But which stories we choose to tell and which to forget — and what records to preserve — are always influenced by politics.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    You two point out something important: a history that appears apolitical on the surface can have a social/cultural/economic/political bias in it (whether conscious or not) by omission or emphasis. As someone who was born and raised in behind the Iron Curtain of the Eastern Bloc, for instance, I remember the Periodic Table of the Elements being taught as "Mendeleev's Table". That's a political stance: crediting "Us" as much as possible for every development rather than "Them". Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      > Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle. It sounds like you are talking about intent rather than politics - you example does, however, seem to be made with intent.
      - labster 2y ago
        I think they’re just not used to thinking about historical study. Even in science, do you focus on the Great Men like Einstein and Newton, or do you choose an Annales approach like Connections? Neither is wrong, but there are right and left overtones to these approaches. The way you assign causes is not always clear; even events themselves are socially constructed. History is a map to the past, but the map is not the territory.
    - tremon 2y ago
      Why do you assume that table was named differently in other parts of the world? I lived on the west side of that curtain, and I was also taught it was called Mendeleev's Table.
duped 2y ago
That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were all political projects that are impossible to divorce from politics. They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.
- kazinator 2y ago
  It's entirely possible to divorce the histories of those developments from politics, giving just the progression of discoveries and technical improvements. The next level up from that is to just touch on major political currents or events and how they shaped the development; and that's the most that some technical buff would care about. You would have to add several orders of political detail before you can call it a political history.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    History is written by the victors, though. And no one is omniscient. It's a bit hard to say "just the progression of discoveries" as if every voice is equal. And this isn't just about governmental politics. the dispute over the inventor of the light bulb is a big example.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      The “victor” here is the technology which allowed you to survive into adulthood and fed you inexpensively and clothed you and supports the infrastructure for this forum which lets us have this discussion in the first place. The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy, the conditions which unleashed it held back by their own stubborn insistence.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        that's a pretty bizarre angle. we're overlooking centuries of abuse because "it made my life easier"? My grandfather couldn't de facto vote. These politics are not that far removed from any country. >The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy and the biases of the winners, yes.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories. No, history of any kind is always political. Why? Simple: History is written by the victors.
- kazinator 2y ago
  History is written by the survivors and descendants. Not all those who are vanquished are so completely eradicated that they don't have descendants; and even in those unfortunate cases, someone unrelated to them will dig up and reconstruct their story as best as possible, and tell it to the world. Some of the loudest voices are from the descendants of those who had been trampled. Not all kinds of victories are political. Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Or just a matter of the former not being easy to shrink to microscopic sizes, or operate without high voltages and waste heat.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Sure, feel free to research how much resistance (no pun intended) there was over the mass adoption of transistors. the years of meetings and debates, the propoganda and fear tactics against transistors, the subjective claims over quality and safety of vacuum tubes. This wasn't just some iterative upgrade like an RTX 2080 to a 3080.
    - kazinator 2y ago
      A transistor and tube don't know anything about politics though. You can't hold a referendum to eliminate the Early effect from a transistor, or Miller capacitance from a tube stage. We can give an accurate and informative technical history of electronic parts, while completely avoiding discussions of mass adoption struggles, and vendors spreading FUD and whatever other fluff. If you add some that to the story it's still primarily a technological story and not political.
- throwawayq3423 2y ago
  Just the concept of "history" depends on a shared objective reality, which is under attack in 2024 more than any other time.
basfo 2y ago
I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview, with what we might call party politics. History is always political because you can’t document every event that occurred during a given time; you’ll inevitably choose certain events over others. That very selection reflects a political stance, whether you realize it or not. Moreover, the subject itself is inherently political—for example, if you’re writing about music history, why focus on European composers rather than on whatever Chinese music existed at the time? There isn't anything wrong in that, is just the way we work, we live in a particular culture, in a particular social system, in a particular time, and we are political beings. An true history without politics would be like raw data of the state of every atom trough history, and even that may be political (why you choose to view the world as data?)
- kazinator 2y ago
  You are talking about the potential of political bias. Actual political history itself can have political biases. An apolitical history can also have political biases. The biases aren't what make political history political, but rather its explicit discussion of politics: political events and the people behind them: the when, where, what who. I am certainly not confused among "study of politics" and "personal politics" and "political bias" and such.
  - basfo 2y ago
    Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political. History in itself tries (or should try) to be objective and avoid the bias you mention, but that doesn't make it less political by any mean.
    - andsoitis 2y ago
      > Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political. Aristotle said politics is the study of how communities can achieve “the good life” through governance and organization. He said we are political animals (zoon politikon) who naturally form communities, such as the polis (city-state), to achieve common goals and virtue. The idea that any human action is political cannot be attributed to Aristotle. It is also a silly and amateur assertion — to breathe is not political, to think is not political, to eat is not political, etc.
cess11 2y ago
Which of these histories do not reflect any ideology, any regimes, any political settings, are expressed in a universal language, &c.?
atoav 2y ago
You may say the history of some niche topic isn't political, but it is and I am pretty sure most historians would agree. E.g. if you look at technological inventions you just have to look how that history treated prior or parallel inventions by people who were seen as lesser by those who wrote the history books, that means women, people of non-european cultural and ethnic decent. Don't get me wrong: There should be no reason at all to make technological history political, but in practise it is, was and will be made political, either subconsciously or on purpose. Even a good historian can't separate themselves from their own blind spots or darlings — and those colour their selections. And whenever you have to make selections you get political no matter how hard you try not to. Try to talk to a certain class of people a about whether Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first thing deserving to be called a computer program — this should be a matter of facts, but you may quickly find yourself in a heated debate lead by people who have no clue what the logical flow of that program entails. Every history is political because telling a story about the past that isn't commonly told is political and not telling a story about the past that should be told is political as well. And both constantly happen, regardless of which subsection of history we look at.

tossandthrow 2y ago

Attribution in science is one of these areas where people are led to believe that is apolitical. But when you dive into it, it is almost cringy. An obvious example is the story about Alan Turing that mostly leaves out the foundational work carried out in Poznan.

labster 2y ago
Or how women’s contribution to sciences were continually overlooked and sometimes purposefully hidden, going along with the social/political status of women. History is stories we tell ourselves about the world, stories backed by the evidence not yet lost to entropy. But which stories we choose to tell and which to forget — and what records to preserve — are always influenced by politics.
- kazinator 2y ago
  You two point out something important: a history that appears apolitical on the surface can have a social/cultural/economic/political bias in it (whether conscious or not) by omission or emphasis. As someone who was born and raised in behind the Iron Curtain of the Eastern Bloc, for instance, I remember the Periodic Table of the Elements being taught as "Mendeleev's Table". That's a political stance: crediting "Us" as much as possible for every development rather than "Them". Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    > Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle. It sounds like you are talking about intent rather than politics - you example does, however, seem to be made with intent.
    - labster 2y ago
      I think they’re just not used to thinking about historical study. Even in science, do you focus on the Great Men like Einstein and Newton, or do you choose an Annales approach like Connections? Neither is wrong, but there are right and left overtones to these approaches. The way you assign causes is not always clear; even events themselves are socially constructed. History is a map to the past, but the map is not the territory.
  - tremon 2y ago
    Why do you assume that table was named differently in other parts of the world? I lived on the west side of that curtain, and I was also taught it was called Mendeleev's Table.

duped 2y ago

That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were all political projects that are impossible to divorce from politics. They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.

kazinator 2y ago
It's entirely possible to divorce the histories of those developments from politics, giving just the progression of discoveries and technical improvements. The next level up from that is to just touch on major political currents or events and how they shaped the development; and that's the most that some technical buff would care about. You would have to add several orders of political detail before you can call it a political history.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  History is written by the victors, though. And no one is omniscient. It's a bit hard to say "just the progression of discoveries" as if every voice is equal. And this isn't just about governmental politics. the dispute over the inventor of the light bulb is a big example.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    The “victor” here is the technology which allowed you to survive into adulthood and fed you inexpensively and clothed you and supports the infrastructure for this forum which lets us have this discussion in the first place. The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy, the conditions which unleashed it held back by their own stubborn insistence.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      that's a pretty bizarre angle. we're overlooking centuries of abuse because "it made my life easier"? My grandfather couldn't de facto vote. These politics are not that far removed from any country. >The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy and the biases of the winners, yes.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories. No, history of any kind is always political. Why? Simple: History is written by the victors.

kazinator 2y ago
History is written by the survivors and descendants. Not all those who are vanquished are so completely eradicated that they don't have descendants; and even in those unfortunate cases, someone unrelated to them will dig up and reconstruct their story as best as possible, and tell it to the world. Some of the loudest voices are from the descendants of those who had been trampled. Not all kinds of victories are political. Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Or just a matter of the former not being easy to shrink to microscopic sizes, or operate without high voltages and waste heat.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Sure, feel free to research how much resistance (no pun intended) there was over the mass adoption of transistors. the years of meetings and debates, the propoganda and fear tactics against transistors, the subjective claims over quality and safety of vacuum tubes. This wasn't just some iterative upgrade like an RTX 2080 to a 3080.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    A transistor and tube don't know anything about politics though. You can't hold a referendum to eliminate the Early effect from a transistor, or Miller capacitance from a tube stage. We can give an accurate and informative technical history of electronic parts, while completely avoiding discussions of mass adoption struggles, and vendors spreading FUD and whatever other fluff. If you add some that to the story it's still primarily a technological story and not political.
throwawayq3423 2y ago
Just the concept of "history" depends on a shared objective reality, which is under attack in 2024 more than any other time.

basfo 2y ago

I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview, with what we might call party politics. History is always political because you can’t document every event that occurred during a given time; you’ll inevitably choose certain events over others. That very selection reflects a political stance, whether you realize it or not. Moreover, the subject itself is inherently political—for example, if you’re writing about music history, why focus on European composers rather than on whatever Chinese music existed at the time? There isn't anything wrong in that, is just the way we work, we live in a particular culture, in a particular social system, in a particular time, and we are political beings. An true history without politics would be like raw data of the state of every atom trough history, and even that may be political (why you choose to view the world as data?)

kazinator 2y ago
You are talking about the potential of political bias. Actual political history itself can have political biases. An apolitical history can also have political biases. The biases aren't what make political history political, but rather its explicit discussion of politics: political events and the people behind them: the when, where, what who. I am certainly not confused among "study of politics" and "personal politics" and "political bias" and such.
- basfo 2y ago
  Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political. History in itself tries (or should try) to be objective and avoid the bias you mention, but that doesn't make it less political by any mean.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    > Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political. Aristotle said politics is the study of how communities can achieve “the good life” through governance and organization. He said we are political animals (zoon politikon) who naturally form communities, such as the polis (city-state), to achieve common goals and virtue. The idea that any human action is political cannot be attributed to Aristotle. It is also a silly and amateur assertion — to breathe is not political, to think is not political, to eat is not political, etc.

cess11 2y ago

Which of these histories do not reflect any ideology, any regimes, any political settings, are expressed in a universal language, &c.?

atoav 2y ago

You may say the history of some niche topic isn't political, but it is and I am pretty sure most historians would agree. E.g. if you look at technological inventions you just have to look how that history treated prior or parallel inventions by people who were seen as lesser by those who wrote the history books, that means women, people of non-european cultural and ethnic decent. Don't get me wrong: There should be no reason at all to make technological history political, but in practise it is, was and will be made political, either subconsciously or on purpose. Even a good historian can't separate themselves from their own blind spots or darlings — and those colour their selections. And whenever you have to make selections you get political no matter how hard you try not to. Try to talk to a certain class of people a about whether Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first thing deserving to be called a computer program — this should be a matter of facts, but you may quickly find yourself in a heated debate lead by people who have no clue what the logical flow of that program entails. Every history is political because telling a story about the past that isn't commonly told is political and not telling a story about the past that should be told is political as well. And both constantly happen, regardless of which subsection of history we look at.