History for Dummies

History for Dummies

Well, not really for dummies, just for readers who aren’t professional historians. There was a time when some of the most esteemed historians wrote books that any educated reader could enjoy. I’m thinking of men like G.M. Trevelyan and R.G. Collingwood, women like Edith Hamilton or Amy Kelly. Now, however, historians write primarily for each other. Not only do they gnaw ferociously at the bones of esoteric controversies, or overwhelm the reader with arcane statistics; they often couch their narrative in academic jargon -- “privileging” a certain “discourse,” “foregrounding” a particular “meme” -- quite opaque to the uninitiated. If you like to read history but can’t put up with such stuff, here are a few suggestions, mostly in chronological order by subject.

For the ancient (European) world, I love Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion. Absolutely exhaustive but never forbidding, the book reveals what lies behind those familiar myths we learned in childhood. Ancient Greeks lived in a world that was strange (from our point of view) in many ways, and yet basic to the civilization that followed. Books like this one can help explain why we are who we are. Martin Goodman’s Rome and Jerusalem explores how those two cultures came to clash so catastrophically, and how Christianity arose out of that contradiction and inherited its hostilities. Goodman -- a renowned scholar of both Jewish and Roman studies -- carefully examines philosophy, culture, customs, and politics before recounting the historical events in detail. I was grateful for his thoroughness, and never bored for a minute. (I get bored rather easily).

The European Middle Ages are a delight for the amateur of history because there are all those kings and queens, and their romances, marriages, derring-do, and childbearing. (China and the Ottoman world are really at a disadvantage here, because polygamy muddies the waters, giving us too many spouses and offspring, and after awhile it’s hard to care). Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings really never goes out of style if you like that sort of thing, and I really do. Despite the title, there’s plenty of serious history here along with the royal follies. For sustained (and gripping) historical narrative, however, nothing beats Steven Runciman’s three-volume History of the Crusades. Of all the books I’ve mentioned so far, it is the most accessible despite its length. Runciman’s descriptions of sieges and battles are particularly good, almost cinematic. But of course, there’s plenty of genealogy here too. Runciman also wrote a short book on The Fall of Constantinople 1453. After being out of print for a long time, it’s now available. If you’ve gone to Istanbul, or are planning a trip, don’t miss this one.

Speaking of kings and their romances, you can’t really read Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King too many times. And you can’t really put it down either. This combination of sparkling prose, informed history, and splendid illustrations is just the recipe for interested but perhaps somewhat lazy history fans. The British historian Neville Williams does something similar in Henry VIII and his Court, and All the Queen’s Men. Although he cannot match Mitford’s style, it is solid history leavened with plenty of pictures.

The British novelist Gillian Tindall has staked out her own historical territory, with detailed research on the histories of small and not particularly famous bits of land or houses. Actually, her books range from a history of Bombay (City of Gold) down that of one building (House by the Thames) but my favorite is The Fields Beneath. This is the history of Kentish Town, the rather nondescript stretch of London between St. Pancras and Hampstead Heath. The title echoes a sign Tindall saw in the window of a condemned house, “The fields are sleeping underneath.” They are sleeping underneath all of our cities, and Tindall does her best to seek them out, to learn who has lived on those fields and what they built there from the earliest records to the present day. These are the actual bones of history. For me it led to a pilgrimage to Kentish Town, and a walk up from St. Pancras Station to see every street with new eyes.

Chinese history, as I mentioned, is less amenable to retelling for the interested amateur, partly because of that dearth of rulers whose lives we can revel in. If China had a Sun King, he didn’t have to bother with mistresses because he could just take any woman he chose as a concubine. (There are a few legends, but that’s what they are, legends). A four-volume history of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) has attempted to bridge the gap and has been enormously popular with general readers in China, but I doubt that it will ever get translated. For approachable Chinese history in English, there’s Jonathan Spence and -- well, there’s Jonathan Spence. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, about the 16th century Jesuit priest who became the first real scholar of Chinese is perhaps his best-known book. The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a history of the intellectuals and revolutionaries who created the Chinese twentieth century. But there are a lot of really engrossing books about contemporary China, and they’ll be the subject of another blog post.

I can’t finish without mentioning a couple of recent books that got good reviews but were real disappointments. The first is Jerusalem: A Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore. This is a case of an author biting off a good deal more than he (or perhaps anyone) can chew. Sebag Montefiore, a biographer of some renown, is not a specialist in Middle Eastern history. But his family was closely involved in the first Jewish settlements in Palestine in the nineteenth century, and the book seems to be a breathless rush to that point where he is actually knowledgable. Before that we have the results of patient and well-documented research that never comes alive. This is history as “one damn thing after another.” (Google reveals that the source of that phrase is disputed). The book is also full of typos, historical slips, and grammatical horrors like this one: “Polls consistently claim that over 40 percent of Americans as sometime in the future expecting the Second Coming in Jerusalem.” And yet the book was acclaimed as “A Meisterwerk” (Times of London), “Magisterial” (The Economist), “Impossible to put down” (New York Times Book Review). Did we read the same book?

The other book I can’t recommend is Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. This was Hughes’ last book, so perhaps one should be charitable. But once again, he undertook a subject that was just too vast -- and of which only a part engaged his real interest. For Hughes, most renowned as an art historian (though he did write one superb book of straight history, That Fatal Shore, about his native Australia), that period is the Renaissance and after. Although there are a great many plates, the reader must suffer through detailed discussion of many works of art that are not illustrated. That makes for hard going, but an iPad (or even a smartphone) close at hand can help. Meanwhile, ancient and medieval Rome receive rather perfunctory accounts. Perhaps that is why the many typos and slips cluster in those pages -- or maybe I just caught more of them in those earlier chapters, because that’s the period I happen to know best. Whichever it is, finding even a few errors in the descriptions of events we know creates doubt about the author’s reliability in areas new to us. And that’s not why we read history.