“For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.” -Roger Bacon, Opus Major, c. 1267
“On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on.” -Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, c. 400 B.C.E.
All academic subjects have their negative (and therefore misleading) stereotypes. For history, this usually means thinking of it as merely a collection of facts – dates, names, places – to memorize for the sake of a test. But history is not a purely knowledge-based discipline. All those who practice it know this, but it might be instructive to explain what I mean.
Let us briefly compare history to something quite different: mathematics. Having an interest in one does not preclude a person from the other, though these two subjects are not usually spoken of in the same breath like one might do with, say, physics and chemistry. Math can be a very abstract field. Sure, you can have five apples and remove three apples to leave only two apples remaining (5-3=2). But when you get into algebra, trigonometry, and calculus, equations become rather bizarre. Take for example the following:
Summations, quadratic equations, Cartesian coordinates, integrals, probabilities, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, the list goes on. Sometimes there are real-world analogues for everything in an equation, but such comforts disappear very quickly. (Note: “i” is the symbol for the imaginary number that signifies the square root of “-1”. You will never ask to buy “i” apples from the store, but “i” is still an important and useful concept in mathematics.) Thus, mathematics can very easily get into abstract concepts, removed from anything as tangible as seen in simple arithmetic.
History, on the other hand, even for those who never paid attention in high school, is quite “real.” People who lived at some point in time at certain places and accomplished specific things. Certainly the past is intangible (one can’t “touch” July 4, 1776, or relive the American Civil War), but the effects can be solid as the Statue of Liberty (dedicated 1886) or as participatory as universal male adult suffrage (after passage of the 15th Amendment, 1870). People live with the effects of history, the good and the bad, every day. The odd thing, however, is that, despite how abstract math is and how real history can be, when we study these subjects in school, we tend to think of them quite differently.
Both school children and adults speak of these subjects in unusual but consistent ways. People tend to say, “I (don’t) know history” but “I can(‘t) do math.” (Maybe you’ll also hear, “I’m (not) good at ____” applied to either history or math, though I suspect more the latter.) Why the difference, and what does it mean? Simply put, most people think history is something binary: you either know it or you don’t. When was the Declaration of Independence sign? Who was the first African American to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947? Where was the first atomic bomb test done? Dates, names, and places. Facts.
Compare these to math questions, such as this: x2+10x=39, solve for x. This question is fundamentally different than those others about the Declaration of Independence, baseball, and atomic bombs. Why? Because, despite the fact that there is only one right answer to both the math and history questions, the math question is a problem that can be solved. One studies for a math test not by memorizing numbers but by learning the relationship between symbols so that, when given a seemingly random combination of numbers and symbols, you can rearrange them until they make sense. For the history questions above, however, there is nothing to figure out. You either knows the name Jackie Robinson or not. That is why people talk about knowing history but doing math. As a result, many people tend to think a historian is someone who simply knows a lot of names and dates while a mathematician is someone who has mastered the ability to make sense out of complex symbols. One is passive, the other active. One “knows,” the other “does.”
But as any historian can tell you, separating history as something you “know” from math as something you “do” is rather ridiculous. Historians are not people who simply know a lot of things that happened. For them, history is something one does. Historians certainly “know” a lot about their particular specialty (medieval history, American, gender, Asian, military, economic, etc.), but that is not all they are capable of. In learning their field, they have gained skills and perspectives in producing interpretations of the information that they work with. That is, historians certainly know a lot of names and dates, just like a mathematician knows many numbers. But in the course of study, historians also develop critical thinking skills used to analyze, criticize, and interpret information. In other words, historians, like mathematicians, look at information that might confuse or mislead other people and see it as symbols that can be rearranged in order to make sense out of. Knowing when the 15th Amendment was passed or who was the first modern African American major league baseball player is unimportant and meaningless trivia until they are connected by a historian (or anyone) doing history. Why did it take less time to codify African Americans’ right to vote following the Civil War than it did to accept them playing alongside white Americans in baseball? Why did women have to wait 50 years after the 15th Amendment for the 19th Amendment? (How) did Jackie Robinson playing baseball and worries about the nuclear Cold War influence ratification of the 24th Amendment, passed in 1964, nearly a hundred years after the 15th Amendment? To answer these questions in any meaningful way takes more than knowing history. It takes the ability to do history.
If you pick up a historian from one specialty (ex. 20th century American military history) and place them in another (ex. 16th century European religious history), they will know very few of the details, if any. I and nearly all the historians I know have had to teach well outside of their comfort zone. But while they may not know all the details and nuances of a particular time, place, and subject, they will be able to latch onto important ways that a society functions, how it expressed itself, how it chose to deal with problems, how it portrayed itself, and how it has since been remembered. This, too, is not because they know more history but because they can do history. Because history is not about know the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, or that the first atomic test happened at Trinity, New Mexico. Mathematics isn’t about know off the top of your head that in the equation x2+10x=39, x=3. Instead, mathematics is about knowing what to do when presented with any combination of symbols and numbers in order to create meaning. Likewise, history is about knowing how to make sense out of a near infinite combination of names, dates, places, and events found in texts (as well as artifacts left behind) in order to create meaning through interpretation.
And the wonderful thing about history that makes it different than mathematics? You can have more than one right answer! The “rightness” is not merely a function of the data but how you use it. And even the wrong conclusions, when arrived at through hard work and thoughtfulness, can yield great results.
People who know a lot of names, dates, and places are not historians. People who interpret these things are historians.
Now go on. Do some history!
Stables of the Apocalypse 