David Nash - History: A Beginners Guide

A Oneworld Paperback Original

Published in North America, Great Britain and Australia by
Oneworld Publications, 2016

This ebook published 2016

Copyright David Nash 2016

The moral right of David Nash to be identified as the Author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

The publishers have made every reasonable effort to trace copyright holders and
to obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material. In cases where they
have been unsuccessful they invite copyright holders to contact them direct.

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78074-802-3
eISBN 978-1-78074-803-0

Typeset by Silicon Chips

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England

For my sister Barbara Tallis

who introduced hundreds to history and still does

History without doubt brightens and enriches our contemporary world. It enables us to see and discover both physical and psychological aspects of ourselves located in another place the past. Beyond the familiar, that past can also seem enticing, distant, and exotic. Frequently it is this blend of the familiar and the exotic that has been the central reason for making history popular with people at large.

History is a sometimes daunting and overwhelming subject that has many different shapes for many different people. At the grandest scale it can explain the changes that have occurred to vast empires, countries, and continents over centuries or even millennia. At the other end of the scale it can also chart the experience of individual people, sometimes over a few days or even hours. Yet history also deals with cultures on these twin levels of magnitude. It can chart the history of a race or a people over a similar timespan, or trace what has happened to individual cultural beliefs over a few short years. It can tell stories about the concrete artefacts of our past (objects, works of literature, buildings) or follow the evolution and change of the most intangible of emotions. History spreads itself over a vast canvas of our existence to shape and make sense somehow of all that has happened to this planet and its inhabitants. But it is also a search for the truth about the past, something the nineteenth-century English constitutional historian William Stubbs considered to be one of historys great charms and perhaps its very greatest temptation. As such it is difficult to escape from historys reach and its touch. History, in some way, is a part of every living thing on this planet and its impact is impossible to evade.

However, exploring this dimension is in danger of making history sound as though it is purely something that happens to us without our consent, or even sometimes our knowledge as though it were some unseen force at work within the universe. Yet it is possible to be actively empowered by history if we choose to understand its processes and to make it coherent as people have done since the very earliest times. History can also be enthralling, engaging, and fun all that is required to start experiencing it in this manner is curiosity and a willingness to follow our thoughts and explorations to their natural conclusions.

If you, the reader, have this curiosity, you certainly want to know more, but perhaps you are unsure about how to dip your toe into the potentially dark and deep waters of historical studies. This book aims to make this process easy without the risk of the reader ever feeling out of their depth. This, then, is a gentle introduction, but one that nonetheless has a robust and serious intention: to enable the individual to embark on their own discovery of the past. This is because, for many of us, a passing interest in history is simply not enough. We crave a greater depth of knowledge and the opportunity to understand what makes history tick, and to ensure the experience of history is as valuable and enriching as possible for all of us.

Craving a depth of knowledge and insight into what makes history tick explains why historical narratives are so regularly fictionalized in novels, on the cinema screen and on television. These ambitiously hope to make history cross over from knowledge and investigation into the world of entertainment. Although it is interesting to plunge into what such narratives can tell us, really this is the creation of a history lite species that only gives us a mere flavour of the past. This past is a portrayal and spectacle. However, building real knowledge and explanations is a different enterprise and this is what we actively call history.

The popular writing of history regularly stimulates the imagination and each year new magazines are launched which cover ever-widening aspects of the subject. The last twenty years has also seen a dramatic upsurge in television coverage and investigation of history and the reasons for this are not really very hard to find. The past can be an intensely visual subject and many documentaries have concentrated on the physical and visual residue of the past. Documentaries on the eighteenth-century English country house, for example, have been able to show lavish interiors and furnishings, and to speculate about the manner of life that went on in these surroundings. The preoccupation with this has also been stimulated by a wave of costume dramas that focus on the past as a place where universal human actions are played out. Other factual television programmes try and bring the past to life by juxtaposing individual stories with a look at locations as they appear today. This particular tendency has been a feature of television coverage of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Television has also developed the genre of the personal journey, in which an individual investigates the past through their own ancestors and their own life stories. A once-again-fashionable way in which people encounter popular history has been through the historical scoop story, or the attempt to find a solution or resolution to a long-running historical puzzle or mystery. The most recent examples of this include the apparent discovery of Richard IIIs body buried beneath a Leicester council car park and the supposed unmasking of Jack the Ripper through the use of forensic evidence.

Whilst these often provide fascinating entertainment, and glimpses of real insight, some people watching them often wish for a still greater level of understanding of the history these phenomena represent. Does this display and outline of history ask enough deep and penetrating questions? Are these displays taking into account different approaches and aspects of the history they try to explain and portray? Lastly, whether it is a presentation of the eighteenth-century country house or the solution to a historical whodunnit, many ask whether these are telling the whole story, or indeed the truth, and how far we should allow these representations to claim that they are definitive. The eighteenth-century country house and the lavish wealth needed to fill, furnish and support it was arguably accumulated through applying increasingly tough farming and market practices. These marginalized and removed rights from poor members of the population living on subsistence land and lifestyles based on grazing and foraging. Likewise the rapid haste with which the solution to the Jack the Ripper case was trumpeted by the Daily Mail in September 2014 reflected a journalistic urge to provide a solution to the murders, rather than think deeply about the supposed facts being presented. Not only was DNA taken from a discredited source, but it was also mistakenly traced to the descendants of the wrong man with the same name! Besides, actually finding the identity of Jack the Ripper would not answer some of the wider and more important questions about Victorian England thrown up by the case. Why did these murders attract publicity when others did not? Indeed, the continuing fascination with this particular case, stretching well over a century, actually has its own history. Once we begin to think more deeply for ourselves about the questions generated by history, we become less satisfied with its presentation in magazines and on television and the easy answers they offer. In short, we wish to know more, to be capable of analysing and thinking more deeply about the material and answers history gives us. Ultimately it is not surprising that we ask more sophisticated questions because, unless we do, history portrayed as spectacle becomes merely superficial mood music.