Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you
Comments
-
Well no, I don't think anyone who has studied history at GCSE and beyond (and paid attention) thinks it's just regurgitation of dates.
But that does seem to be the predominant view.
0 -
History is politics and economics and sociology. And a better understanding of it would probably help prevent some of the repeated cycles of mistakes that we go through. For example, right now feels like we are in 1936. 15 years past a huge negative financial event, on the verge of trying to placate a dictator.
0 -
I dunno, I successfully argued in my last ever history essay for the question "can we learn from the past", that basically history is a contemporary thing, not a historical thing, so whilst everything is relative so you can learn pretty much whichever "lesson" you want from the past, it only hits home if it's situated in the current context, so you can't really use history to get away from whatever is happening now, because history is now, it's not the past.
0 -
I dunno either, I'm not a historian. But you seem to be inferring that it's important to ask the right questions if the past, to avoid just finding justification for whatever has been decided already.
0 -
Sure but the "right" question is relative.
For a certain individual, "never forgetting the lessons of the holocaust" may well be a window into exquisite train timetabling, which is probably not what is meant by the statement....
If history is all man has ever done, then there's something for anything if you look hard enough.
0 -
I always quite liked history. The biggest issue I ever had with it was it is such a vast subject (obviously) and therefore schools can only focus on very small sectors of it in any kind of detail.
0 -
What use is it then, other than as an academic exercise?
0 -
I mean, there is a reality that happened and a reality that didn't, and I think it's important to be custodians of the memory of the reality.
You just need to recognise that there are various epistemological and practical limits on what we can really know about what happened in the past and be vigilant and really critical when the past is drawn up for something contemporary.
Sometimes it's good and valuable, sometimes it isn't.
0 -
Okay, well if it's relatively recent history where there are extensive written contemporaneous records, perhaps it's more useful? Otherwise, is knowing for knowings sake all that useful? How many of the worlds current conflicts have crossed multiple generations? If you teleported the same people into a world without that history and presented wlthem with a status quo - for example that Taiwan is a separate country to China - would there be any real motivation to change.the status quo?
0 -
-
Quite.
Useful and interesting aren't synonyms.
Edit: surprised you are talking it down, tbh.
0 -
I guess what happened in the past is important to people for as many reasons as there are people. At the grand end you have people like Putin misusing history to reverse justify his imperial intent to annex Ukraine as part of Russia.
At the other end you have people that just want relatives or friend's role in the past recognised, for whatever reason. Whether that's a grave or an obituary or plaque or changing the narrative in a newspaper, legal recognition or whatever.
You can't really escape the past, so you might as well put some rational, logical and challengeable processes in place to make sure that we try to be as accurate as we can about the past, with all the various constraints.
Going back to the Rest is History podcast - listen to the stuff they say about Romans etc and think about how narrow the actual evidence is that that happened is.
0 -
Yes people like stories. That's why we are suddenly doing something about the Post Office and Horizon after someone dramatised it. Game of Thrones is a remix of
Having looked fairly closely at how my daughters are being taught history, they go very hard on the analysis of sources and and do seem to slightly lose sight of any narrative. Stories are how we have shared and understood ideas for as long as we have had ideas. Holland and Sandbrook are just bringing a bit of that story telling back.
Can I also recommend the History Rage podcast as an antidote?
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I didn't study history at school past the age of 13 (or whenever I made my GSCE selections) because I found geography more interesting and i had to pick one - i would have been happier to do both and drop RE but that wasn't an option. the brief bit of history that i did study at secondary school didn't leave much of an impression on me but I seem to recall it being more dates/names than narratives
I now listen to a bit of history in the form of podcasts (have been listening to bits of Empire recently) but as Rjsterry points out it is more like a 45 minute story, generally framed around a main character - if it started getting too much into analysis etc then I'd lose interest pretty quickly.
0 -
My O-Level (1979) was definitely mostly rote-learning of stories, and mostly WW2. Glad we didn't have to do kings & queens rubbish, at least.
0 -
Like monkimark I bailed out at the O-Level selection stage. History up to that point was very much date related and mostly Kings, Queens and battle dates. Very little to no narrative.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Yeah I think for me history is something best consumed through books, ultimately.
I tend to like podcasts for sports punditry, mainly as they can really get nerdy about the sport in a way that isn't possible elsewhere.
Can certainly point anyone to any decent history books, depending on the topic (anything post 1815, mainly Europe & Africa I can help with).
0 -
I suspect that the success of The Rest In History type podcasts is that people don't want to get bogged down in detail (or perhaps I am just projecting my own prejudices).
I would never sit down and read a book on the Ottoman empire but i'm happy to listen to a very brief summary, following a few main characters through the dramatic bits, gives me a vague overview of who they are and how they fit into the bigger picture of history (which I knew almost nothing about before). I'm sure I get an incomplete or possibly skewed impression of events but I'm not in it for academic rigour, just passing the time on my commute in a slightly less brainless manner.
0 -
The way history is taught makes a huge difference. First year of secondary school we had a great teacher that made it interesting, went into detail of how the British beat the Spanish armada through better ships and tactics. I chose History over Geography for my O level. Teacher we had for O level was awful, an old priest that made us sit there and copy from the text book into our exercise books, I hated it and as a result failed my O level. Passed all the others with ease.
Both my kids could recite all the kings and queens in order from a young age as a result of watching Horrible Histories.
0 -
My history teacher through GCSEs would spend an hour of the 70 minute lesson talking (in a very boring manner) then the remaining 10 minutes writing out blackboards full of stuff we had to copy down. For me the challenge was copying a board before she wiped it to write the next bit. Really ruined what was quite interesting (one of the topics we covered at GCSE was the industrial revolution which included a lot of very local stuff (as in we could see the places involved from the school grounds). The other things we covered at that stage were crime and punishment through the ages and the rise of communist China, again both should have been interesting although I did struggle a bit with the Chinese stuff. Not sure what I dropped as I did geography too whcih was aways my favourite and strongest subject.
0 -
Ugh. I'd managed to forget that particularly pointless form of teaching, but you've just reminded me.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Oh yes, I remember now, we did the Russian Revolution and Communist China too. I'm pretty sure we ignored the British Empire and America. Probably all too embarrassing, even in the 1970s.
0 -
Not intriguing but more mystifying: a small number of prominent (cis) women (Jk Rowling in particular) appearing to think that Scarlet Blake identifying as a trans woman somehow connects other women to Blake's crimes. As far as I can tell Blake's gender identity is entirely incidental to the crimes. The urge to publicly disown something that was never in anyway connected to anyone other than Blake is just weird.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
-
yr 3, home front, yr 5 blitz, yr 7 home front, yr 9 holocaust, yr 11 rise of Nazis, year 13 rise of Nazis, 1st year causes of ww2, 3rd year holocaust.
0 -
-
I don’t think I ever covered anything WW1 or WW2 related for some reason. The lower set at GCSE did Hitler’s Germany or something instead of communist China and I’d have rather done that.
i recently read a novel set in the English Civil War and realised I knew next to nothing about it even though there are a lot of battlefields marked on maps in my area. I’ve also recently read the Shardlake novels and learned a lot about the later years on Henry VIII that I also never did more than skim under a few weeks covering the whole Tudor and Stuarts era.
0 -
I’ve read a lot of history over the last 30 plus years. Although I enjoyed at school I was woefully ignorant about British history, my interest was sparked when discussing the band The Levellers and a teacher friend remarked the were part of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. I then went and got several books out of the library.
Just read Culloden by Murray Pittock which dispells the myth that it was sword welding Highlanders fighting the English army armed with muskets.
0 -
If only we'd had Horrible Histories when I was at school!
0 -
If you'd told me in the 90s that the Levellers were part of the New Model Army, I would have been very confused.
1
