History and history

History and history

As most anyone who knows anything about history can tell you, the writing of history has undergone many changes over time.  The aim of Herodotus, the 5th century BC Greek "father of history", was much different than that of the modern historian, which is often to provide explanation for historical events and to analyse their relation to the present.  His aim was "to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict."  Here is the primary aim of the pioneers of history in classical antiquity: to preserve information so that events would not recede into the misty realm of legend.

The oral tradition of history is precisely the story of fact fading into legend and myth.  But, there is a real material base for these misty beginnings.  Writing was known in Mycenaean Greece, but the difficult "linear B" script appears to have been primarily used in the keeping of palace inventories and for the purposes of trade.  The latter is the root of the drive for written language generally; it is no accident that written language appears first around the coasts of the Mediterranean, and reaches darker Europe only in later ages.  The development of the Greek alphabet, through the adoption and adaptation of Phoenician written characters, was the first prerequisite for the writing of history.  The Phoenicians were a civilization that the Greeks had become very familiar with during this period through their colonial and trade expansion.  As Greek society expanded, it adopted many of the more advanced aspects of its neighbors.

Thus began the period of "primitive accumulation" in the keeping of history.  A second prerequisite was, naturally, events worth chronicling.  War is the natural starting point of history - the long seasons of peace were too uneventful to call out for a historian.  As 19th century American historian Theodore Ayrault Dodge beautifully wrote:

 "the greatest of poems would never have seen the light had not Homer been inspired by the warlike deeds of heroes; nor would Herodotus and Thucydides have penned their invaluable pages had not the stirring events of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars impelled them to the task.  Xenophon, Arrian, Caesar, are strictly military historians; and the works of the other great writers of ancient history contain only the rehearsal of wars held together by a network of political conditions influencing these struggles."

The ancient historians were primarily interested in preserving the events of importance, those outside of the mundane and usual; war was usually that break in normalcy.  But war alone was not enough - as Mr. Dodge suggested, war had long been the subject of oral legend and myth, but not necessarily history.  For the Greeks, real history begins with the Persian Wars, and this is important.  It is the event that thrust Greece into a qualitatively higher level of material and political importance.  The terrible menace of Xerxes' invasion marks the point where history in the West separates itself, definitively, from legend.

The task of the classical historians was to collect and preserve.  Herodotus, in his history of the Persian Wars, presents the reader with an incredibly broad range of information; this is quite unusual to the modern student, acclimated as he is to the rules of strict focus and depth of sources.  But, Herodotus was vigorously engaged in the primitive accumulation of historical knowledge; like the adventurers and conquistadors of the late middle ages, he collected and extracted wealth, but his wealth was made of words and stories; upon its base, modern history would one day be built.

The ability to distinguish between truth, legend (half-truth), and outright fabrication was difficult, given the nature of many of his sources, but he made honest attempts in this realm.  Indeed the nature of his work required that he be quite inventive and flexible in his methods of gathering material.

The modern historian is presented with an incredible amount of information and sources.  He will spend a great deal of his time pouring over them, separating and categorizing them.  This does not mean that the role of the chronicler has disappeared - far from it.  But, it is no longer the principle aim of history; explanation and analysis has taken on a very large role.  But, it was only possible because of the long period of accumulation undertaken by the classical historians, even though they may have no known they were doing it.

The higher stage of capitalism has no problem recording events.  High literacy rates (although they are not as high in some places as they once were) and high levels of production in recording instruments and media - from pens and paper to cell phone cameras and internet blogs - have ensured that events are captured from an overwhelming number of sources and views.  The historian has been freed from the chains of simple recording to concentrate on the more sophisticated work of analysis.  And the objective and subjective development of society has also unlocked the mysterious force that drives it, through a social structure simplified by the dominance of only two classes: the struggle of classes at the most basic level of productive and social relations has driven forward the massive shifts from slave society to feudalism to capitalism.

The historian is unfortunately tied to society as it exists.  As capitalism rots and we enter an age of revolution, history serves either one of the classes locked in combat; it is not, as some suppose, above the world it chronicles.  In order to make use of the advances in our understanding of history, it must be viewed in such a way to serve the interests of us workers, we who represent the future.  The way forward can be found in a serious analysis of the past, unlocking the laws of social development.  This is the task of the historian today, which has come full circle from Herodotus: from preservation of the past to a preservation of our future.