On History

On History

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte

History is more or less bunk.
Henry Ford

History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.
Voltaire

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato

History is written by the victors.
Sir Winston Churchill

So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.
Plutarch

Seeker:

I wanted to comment on your interesting comments last night but was unfortunately interrupted. As you can see from the above your concerns about history have a very long history of their own. It appears to me, speaking to your concerns, that history is not only the version of the past people have agreed upon, but also those versions of history they have not agreed upon.

The question of the dress is a good case in point, and certainly does raise an interesting issue. If, after 150 years there is still no agreement on whether he wore a dress or not, one has to wonder what is going on. James Swanson, the author of Bloody Crimes, studied history and law and has collected Lincoln memorabilia and such since he was ten years old. One would think if there is an incriminating letter from Davis’s wife he must have seen it. But he is quite firm in his claim Davis wore no dress. As I said in my review, I have no expertise in this field and only described what Bloody Crimes said. Your contention that Jefferson Davis was a coward, was running away from his wife and children, certainly does not jibe with Swanson’s account in his book. Yes, Davis did apparently gather up the gold, but it was gold that belonged to the Confederacy, not himself, and he apparently was relatively impoverished after the war. Of course Davis was running away, but I have no reason to believe he was running away from his wife and children, other than, perhaps to protect them by distancing himself from them. I also personally believe the charge of cowardice is probably not warranted. If, indeed, he was wearing a dress and trying to escape, that indicates to me either cleverness or desperation, or both, but not necessarily cowardice. But of course I do not really know. And, unfortunately, I suspect that even if I dedicated the remainder of my life to Civil War history I would end up still not being sure of much of anything. I might have better formed opinions about things, but I doubt I would “know” in any absolute sense.

Yes, it is true that what we learned in school is far from what actually happened in history. Witness the fine book , The People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. I think when one finally realizes the truth about things it can be traumatic, rather like learning that your favorite childhood idol or your father has feet of clay. Of course Black people were regarded as little more than animals and were thus deprived of even the most basic rights. The history of Western/European colonialism in general is actually much worse and characterized by such savagery as is virtually impossible to believe (and this by so-called “civilized,” Christian people). It is not entirely surprising that those responsible for such reprehensible behavior try to deny it.

I am not sure that even reading the “original stuff” solves the problems of history. Original and first person accounts are themselves probably biased one way or another. Why bother to read history at all? That is a good question. I guess we read what we can and form our own opinions about things, opinions that are not necessarily “the truth,” but serve us in some sense anyway. The late Clifford Geertz said, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” Strangely perhaps, webs of significance do not have to be true, or even realistic (or perhaps not even entirely “sane”), and they are certainly not entirely uniform for all individuals. Our webs of significance are partially spun out of what we know, or think we know, of history. It is inevitable that people do not agree. And it is equally inevitable that authors and others are going to “spin” things their way. We do not even agree about what is happening before our very eyes at the moment, how could we ever agree on history?

There are things that may be absolutely true, or at least we think so, that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the head, for example. Or that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, or that Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabrielle Giffords in the head from a short distance, or that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John Kennedy, and so on, but even in these cases there are differences of opinion and interpretation about the basic facts, and even more controversy about when and how and why. History is a minefield of confusion but who is willing to give it up?