It has been said, rather too often, that in the past year we have been living through history. But we live through history all the time, as long as we live at all – we have no choice. Even the supposedly dull 1950s were history. We had the imminent threat of nuclear war, Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack on democracy, and the even more imminent horrors of Rock and Roll to worry about.
History is what has been written down. No written record means no history, or what we call prehistory, when all kinds of things must have been happening, but we don’t know what. People who lived in prehistory missed their chance to be part of the record, but they never knew, and never cared. Even most recorded history is forgotten almost as soon as it happens. Presidents, pop stars, and pandemics come and go, leaving only a few lines in old books and the faintest memory trace. In the long term, we retain only the edited highlights. We may know from books that a thousand years ago, in 1026, King Canute made a pilgrimage to Rome, although not why, and that five hundred years ago, in 1526, Charles V married Isabella of Portugal, although we can guess why. Those events must have grabbed the headlines at the time, but who knows or cares now? The human story, seen through the historical record, is one, long soap opera of greed and violence starring the rich and famous. Ordinary lives and ordinary people like you and me, or at least like me, are scarcely mentioned.
We would like the events of our own lifetimes to be remembered as History with a capital H, and chances are that some of them will. The last few chaotic years have been documented in the most intense detail in every imaginable medium – not just dry written reports for scholars but videos, interviews, and live news reports on every disaster, every outrage. The newspapers and journals were filled with dismal year-end reviews. There’s no shortage of information for future historians, and no shortage of lessons for future generations. Unfortunately, the past we need to remember is precisely the past we prefer to forget – the defeats as well as the victories, the fools and cowards as well as the heroes. As Julius Caesar said (and he was an expert): we believe what we want to believe, which makes the past into a kind of kaleidoscope – shake it and it changes.
Not surprisingly, professional historians are an endangered species. As the teaching of history fades away in schools and universities, each new generation will remember less, care less, and learn less from the past. They will get their history from the movies. The movies make everything clear. Only the most dramatic, colorful, or romantic moments make it into the movies. History becomes more digestible when it is simplified, tidied up, translated into American English, populated with big-name stars, decorated with a love interest, dramatic settings, and perhaps (as in the case of Alexander Hamilton) music and dance. Who knew about the Trojan War before Brad Pitt joined in, or that Mel Gibson put so much energy into the lost cause of Scottish Independence in 1298? Unfortunately, history as presented in movies bears about as much relation to real life as the Muppet Show – not that I have anything against the Muppet Show, which in some ways was more real than real life. We can do what we like with history. The people who lived through it don’t care.
