I really disliked history in school and college. As far as I could tell, it was a jumble of disorganized facts. I did get a bit excited by my college freshman history prof who put us in the driver's seat of the emerging French nation. He made us feel as though the trials of the king were our problem. But, in most courses, I was lost or bored or both.
Now, things are different. I think the first change was when it began to dawn on me that Jack Kennedy was real and part of my life while many high school and college students automatically placed him in the same shadowy background as Woodrow Wilson or Abe Lincoln. I realized I had done the same thing with people who lived before me. I began to think about the fact that people who lived 100 or 1000 years ago were alive like me, had hopes and fears like me, triumphed and failed like me.
Then, the story of the Japanese film Rashomon and that of the four Gospels made me start to think about the reports of history. As a student of research methods, I saw that different analysts sliced the same data in different way and came to different conclusions. The witnesses to the Japanese crime don't give the same story and neither do the four Gospels. So, history must be much more questionable than my student days led me to notice.
I read "I, Claudius" and liked it very much. A puny relative in the Roman royalty but a man with great intelligence showed how it might be possible to observe and reflect and conclude while being overlooked and scorned.
I loved the books of Jacques Barzun, who was actually a historian and was fully aware of the multiple views that have been taken about history, particular people and the meaning, if any, of it all. His "House of Intellect" showed me the meaning of continuous intellectual society and thought that often operates somewhat independently of money, fame and popular developments. Barzun was born in 1907 into a wealthy French family and had a boyhood with leading people of his country in and out of his home on a regular basis. He seemed the opposite of the other writer I loved, C.S. Lewis. Lewis was British and lively in a British scholarly way. Barzun seemed much fuller of pepper and humor. We have 31 books by him in our local university library. 31! Later, I ran into his “Teacher in America” and “Clio & the Doctors: Psycho-history, Quanto-history and History”.
A couple of years ago, Lynn and I listened to Philip Dialeader discuss the early middle ages in his Teaching Company course
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=8267 . It was easy and fun to picture all the difficulties of life in those very different times. Who knew that the great King Charlemagne wanted very much to learn to read and kept a book under his pillow but never was able to learn the tricky art?
I read Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth” and “World without End”, set in 1100 and 1300 England. Reading them had me giving thanks for central heating, police, law, electricity and the many other features of life that make it comparatively pleasant and easy.
It seems odd that older people who already know that life is a continuous guessing game and memory is sketchy and selective can come to like history while youngsters can dismiss it as irrelevant.
