Why do we study history?
This is a question I asked myself again this week when I attended a one-day course at the City Lit college in central London on “Henry V And The Battle Of Agincourt”. One answer to the question is: to illuminate our understanding of the present because we are writing the first draft of history now.
What any study of history reveals is that: all history is very partially understood with very fragmented evidence; all history is written by the victors so we have a very biased account of events, especially where conflict and war is concerned; most history is presented from a very nationalistic perspective, most especially when a country is trying to rediscover a ‘golden age’ such as former states of the USSR.
We tend to think of so much history as almost deterministic and ‘big’ events – especially when ‘we’ won a battle or a war – as inevitable, but so many events could so easily have gone another way. Luck or chance was often a major factor.
Properly understood, history should teach us that we rarely know the full picture and, upon examination, everything is more complicated than it seems. The version of history propagated in our schools and our media is only one version and we would do well to bring critical thinking to our study of both historical events and current affairs.