Why Is So Much of What We Call "History" Wrong? [View all]

History has for many centuries been a branch of literature, eg fiction. Nice stories but like the term "legend" the term history has long implied that it may or may not be true.

When we read about Gilgamesh or Romulus and Remus we recognize a mixture of fact and fantasy. Gilgamesh is an epic poem from around 2100 BCE. It embodies the history of a people, the Sumerians, even though it conveys almost no facts. The Bible is a collection of books, a canon, which was treated as an account of the lives of various Judeo-Christian people and groups. Until very recently, the Bible WAS the history. The Puritans, among others, had no concept of secular history. IOW everything that has happened or will happen had to be viewed within the narrative of the Bible.

One very significant shift came in the 1700s. Building on the foundations of rationalism laid by Descarte, Locke, Spinoza and others, Thomas Jefferson published a version of the Bible which omitted the miracles. Meanwhile in the secular branch of history biografiction remained the dominant format. Most famously Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) wrote a fictional biography of Colombus by imagining what Colombus's family, beliefs, decisions, etc were.

Biografiction makes heavy use of fictional anecdotes perhaps because people love little moralistic life lessons even if they are total bullshit. "Shakespeare poached deer" "Washington cut down a cherry tree" and could not lie about it. But to the present these lies persist and new ones are being added. The purpose of history according to some is to advance a unifying narrative. James Loewen in his best selling "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (1995) said that 'What is taught in public high schools would more accurately be called 'Patriotism'." He also cites that after sex education, history is the most common reason for strong disagreements between parents and school systems.

Even at the college level, history is treated as literature; a Bachelor of Arts not Science. Yet the arc that began before Jefferson, from myth to science, continues. Recent advances in science have created something of a crisis for traditional history. For example DNA confirmed what prior to advances had been unprovable rumors about Sally Hemings and Jefferson. Major historians of Jefferson, aka "experts", had denied Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children for over 150 years. Science won that one but it doesn't always win.

In 2016 a GPR scan of the nameless and dateless 3-foot slab on the floor of Trinity Church in Stratford Upon Avon confirmed what skeptics had said for 400 years: Shakespeare isn't buried there. It's empty. We didn't need LiDAR to tell us that 3-feet is not big enough for an adult body but even with the scan the myth of Shakespeare is uncorrected. Science be damned. BY the thousands, people still come to Stratford and many pay $30 to stand in a room called "Shakespeare's birthplace" even though that entire house was built in 1857. Why? Because Shakespeare is a national icon and the myth unifies Anglophiles (except Henry James and Mark Twain).

As the saying goes "You cannot reason a person out of belief which they did not arrive at by reason in the first place." The strength of our attachment to beliefs is proportional to the amount of time we have held those beliefs. Emotion often beats fact but a sea change is underway.

College History departments are being abandoned. Far better would be to revitalize them and embrace science and primary source materials. Currently a Bachelor of Arts in History is good prep for law school or teaching but there is no good reason not to integrate new tools and teach students how to use those -- DNA, LiDAR, AI, GPR, comparative analysis. Accurate history gives us lessons in what can go right and wrong. How dictators emerge. How they are overcome. How entire societies fall into immoral and catastrophic practices. Accurate history tells us how we are doing. It is data points that form an arc of progress or decline.

As literature, history is full of lies and biases, many of which hide scandals, crimes and failures. We will be well served to empower younger generations to pursue the truth with all of the tools and primary sources we can give them, and to discount the myths which prevent learning and course-corrections. Let history finally become a science.