Or Where I Learn Something About History. (Maybe.)
I’ve been reading a lot of history books lately, initially for research, but in the end because bibliographies are full of tempting titles and the detours signposted thus are obviously more inviting than the trip at hand. So, am currently lost in history books about history. Besides, like Franklin P. Jones said “Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.” When you’re using Occam’s Razor for that morning shave, you can only hope it’s still sharp – unless of course Parsimony is your Principle..
And, seeing as one of the culprits in the historical Flat Earth scam (yes, distracted from that once again) was the author of Rip Van Winkle, who had no scruples about practising exactly what he preached: “For what is history, but… huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.”; I tripped over a quote, lost my bearings and ended up wandering off into history itself. (Irving, when he wasn’t penning epigrams, indulged in a good deal of epitaphs for infamy, by the way.)
For someone who is as allergic to fridge-magnet philosophy as I am to have assembled the following long list of quotes on history is a little disconcerting. (You can skip to the end if you haven’t the patience to read them.) But, they are poetic, cynical, exasperating, earnest, wise, offhand, occasionally foolish and even endearing all.
History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. (Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”)
History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
History is philosophy teaching by examples. (Thucydides, “The History of the Peloponnesian War”)
History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past. (Johann Huizinga)
History is a science, no less and no more. (J.B. Bury)
History is past politics and politics present history. (E.A. Freeman)
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. (James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”)
History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . .The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. (Jane Austen)
History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it. (Otto von Bismarck)
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters. (African Proverb)
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. (Winston Churchill)
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background. (Thomas Carlyle)
History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil. (Joseph Heller, “Good as Gold”)
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. (Herodotus, “The History”)
The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter. (Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon, “The Story of Mankind”)
History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. (Konrad Adenauer)
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. (Mark Twain, “Following the Equator”)
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. (Virginia Woolf)
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. (Plato)
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there. (George Santayana)
History is too serious to be left to historians. (M.P. Iain Macleod)
You never know what your history is going to be like until after you’re long gone (George W. Bush)
History is a great dust heap. (Thomas Carlyle, “Obiter Dicta”)
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. (Will and Ariel Durant, “Our Oriental Heritage”)
A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents. (Richard Reeves)
Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up. (Anonymous)
History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force. (Frederick Maurice Powicke, “History, Freedom & Religion”)
People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery. (Aristide Briand)
History doesn’t repeat itself, it just stutters. (Anonymous)
Sin writes histories, goodness is silent. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history. (Will and Ariel Durant, “Lessons of History”)
Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery. (Bruce Catton, “Prefaces to History”)
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind. (W.H. Auden, “The Dyer’s Hand”)
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. (Voltaire)
God cannot alter the past, though historians can. (Samuel Butler, “Prose Observations”)
History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes. (Paul Eldridge, “Maxims for a Modern Man”)
History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. (Walter Rauschenbusch)
There are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history. (John Toland)
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. (Jean Genet)
History does not unfold: it piles up. (Robert M. Adams, “Bad Mouth”)
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. (Bill Vaughan)
…what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History. (Thomas Carlyle)
I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is a tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today. (Henry Ford)
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future. (Jessamyn West)
History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases. (William Stubbs)
The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe. (Vincent Starrett, “Buried Caesars”)
Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. (Mason Cooley)
History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler. (Henry Glassie)
There is nothing more dangerous than history used as a defense, or history used for preaching; history used as a tool is no longer history. (Marcel Trudel)
It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths. (Herbert J. Muller, “Freedom in the Western World”)
You don’t change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall. (Jawaharlal Nehru)
Princes should have more to fear from historians than have ugly women from great painters. (Antonio Pérez, “Aforismos”)
History is a very large and ambitious painting done with a very small brush (J. Frank-Lynne)
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. (Alexis de Tocqeville)
History is the story of events, with praise or blame. (Cotton Mather)
It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology. (Leopold von Ranke, “History of the Popes”)
It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons. (Arthur Conan Doyle, “Micah Clarke”)
History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened. (Elias Canetti, “The Human Province”)
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. (Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”)
The study of history is the playground of patriotism. (George M. Wrong)
Historians are themselves products of history. (Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg, “Heritage and Challenge”)
History is the propaganda of the victors. (Ernst Toller)
People tend to forget that the word “history” contains the word “story”. (Ken Burns)
HIStory (Michael Jackson)
History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions. (Ted Koppel)
The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him. (Heinrich von Sybel)
All other forms of history – economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology – seem to me history with the history left out. (A.J.P. Taylor)
The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their place is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present. (David Lowenthal, “The Past Is a Foreign Country”)
History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another. (Jacob Burckhardt)
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. (Albert Camus, “The Rebel”)
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard. (Barbara Tuchman, “Can History Be Served Up Hot?”)
History is the discipline closest to life; and life is rarely free of contradictions. (Karl J. Weintraub, “Visions of Culture”)
History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies. (Frederick Maurice Powicke, “Three Lectures”)
History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. (James Joyce, “Ulysses”)
A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life. (Allen Johnson, “The Historian and Historical Evidence”)
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. (Thomas Jefferson)
History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make. (Author Unknown)
Since all of the above are right, then even considering the whole subject of “what actually happened” is an exercise in rhetoric, but nonetheless, an abiding desire to understand history seems to be ingrained in humanity as deeply as the desire to predict the future. We don’t seem to be very skilled at either.
To me, history is an eternal and ambitious contradiction, a samizdat that erases each preceeding version and pens its own on the same worn but lasting pages. Not of course the writing about it, which is motivated by any number of reasons from the most earnest to the most manipulative, (activity which also becomes history, about which historians can in turn write books) but the “making” of it, or at least our layman’s perception of it. Come to think of it, “making history” is in itself a term to keep a healthy distance from.
If we could learn from history, we would all be a lot smarter, but no, we have to do it all over again and again. Diligently poring over the book we’re given, but unable to make a new copy without erasing the original text and rewriting it in out own terms and words before passing it on. In the words of William Woods (A History of the Devil, Panther Books, 1975 ), “We are nothing but where our minds have been and what we have done.”
History tells us we shouldn’t talk to the oarsman or look back over our shoulders. When you get past the marching ranks of event on event and the daunting successions of dates – devices designed to facilitate the teaching but not the learning of history in what must be one of the grandest incomprehensions of Western education – you get to where the real stuff lies. It’s all about people, of course, about what they thought and what they did. And that is where it rejoins myth.* If Myth takes us ever down the same path, albeit in varying disguies, then why should History be any less intrinsically human?
Where my Knowledge of Geography is Improved Considerably
Recently, yet another site selling prints by illustrators was brought to my attention (my thanks here to all the vigilant eyes out there). Fantasy Wallpapers dot net proposed a portfolio of about 200 illustrators, each with a gallery of between 10 and 250 images, all downloadable and with prints enabled from three different online photoprint services. All, of course, entirely without anyone’s consent.
Happily, the discovery of such things is like a stone thrown at a wasp’s nest, so within 24 hours the company hosting the site must have received a few dozen irate e-mails from various illustrators and the site promptly disappeared. The site owner was in Moldova.
Moldova, I thought, now where the devil is that? (The first thing that sprang to mind was Syldavia, from Tintin.) So, I looked it up. It looks like a lovely country, one I’d have totally ignored had it not been for an enterprising citizen; the unexpected benefits of piracy.
Where I Can’t Believe What I’m Reading
A friend of mine who runs an agency sent along this request she recently received. It’s basically a request for information to pad out selling illegal prints. It’s so naive it’s almost funny and sweet.
hello, i was wondering if you could tell me what (the artist) thinks of this
painting, what period of her life she painted this in and whether culture
effected (sic) this painting in any way, this would be great as i am looking
for some real facts so i can sell a print along with some fun information.
Where I Plan a Little Trip
I’ll be attending Comic Con in San Diego this summer, event which I am quite looking forward to. More news on exactly what I’ll be doing out there when my editor tells me what I’ll be doing out there.
*This is where I almost wrote “Like the guy who DID ask the oarsman what time they were scheduled to dock – “Myth Happens”.” Been reading too much Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon lately…
