Surveying the Historical Record - Mountain Peaks and Mineshafts
Everyone ought to have their own intellectual hobbies and areas of study; curiosity for the particular can reveal something about the reality of the whole.
There’s an early 2000’s British reality TV show about archeology called Time Team, and almost every episode is on YouTube. Each episode follows a team of archeologists who’ve been invited out to a dig-site to see what they can find, and the “will they or won’t they” catch is that the team only has three days to try to figure out what’s underneath a farmer’s field in Oxfordshire, or below the village green in a charming old hamlet.
Having a three day time limit on a dig is apparently not just a television gimmick, but a realistic constraint for many projects, due to the sheer number of archeological sites in Europe, and the need to quickly assess what might be underground in the face of time-sensitive construction projects (modern construction frequently clashes with archeological interests in Europe; in 2012, King Richard III’s bones were found under a parking lot). Not every site will be as important as Bath or Hadrian’s Wall, and most simply can’t be fully excavated. So archeologists are frequently called in to assess a site by mapping, dating, collecting samples, and determining if further excavation is warranted.
Time Team is well worth watching, especially as background-viewing while doing chores (little kids can get into it as well). You can learn quite a lot about both British history, and the technical trade and vocabulary of modern archeology, which is both cutting edge high-tech, and remarkably old-fashioned at the same time. As a British show, Time Team is also simply so much more pleasant than many American reality shows; the archeologists are constantly running over to each other and expressing their delight and pleasure at finding “a nice bit of fine Samian ware pottery.” It’s also remarkable how much can often be learned from broken bits of pottery, the outline of fence posts, or an old refuse ditch. One area where modern archeology is paradoxically hamstrung, is that the discipline today is so highly skilled and painstaking that workers can spend hours or days scraping through the earth inches at a time. Early 20th century archeologists excavated much more quickly…and probably lost a great many artifacts along the way. So if you only have three days to excavate a Roman villa or medieval manor house, there’s no way you’ll actually be able to dig up the entire site.
The solution for modern archeologists then, is to first survey the landscape with both old-fashioned field walks, and modern electronic imagery (today, this can include ground-penetrating radar, LIDAR, and more), and then pick a few likely locations on the site in order to lay down several trenches for more careful excavation. Most of the site won’t be physically excavated, but what will be dug, will be very carefully examined and documented. If the site was inhabited for long periods of time, there’s a decent chance the trenches will turn up enough pottery, tools, bones, and building materials to allow the site to be identified.
The Difficulty of Surveying Mountain Peaks
This approach to archeology is echoed in the larger challenges of studying and teaching history in general. The historical record is vast, and changes every year. Even a very great historian reading voraciously for years and years can only hope to become an expert in a relatively small part of the past. As anyone who has learned a discipline or body of knowledge knows, the more you learn about a subject tends to show you how much you don’t know as well. The landscape of history will always have more mountains to survey, and on close inspection, the mountains turn out to have endless crags and valleys that add up to explaining the whole.
I was prompted to towards this problem of historical mountaintops while writing the last two articles on Aristides the Just, and thinking about how he could remain broadly under-appreciated. It’s possible that Plutarch, writing hundreds of years later and eager to enhance the significance of his subject, dresses up Aristides’ role during the Greco-Persian wars, but the importance Plutarch assigns to Aristides is both plausible, and fits with our other sources (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, etc). Nevertheless, Aristides is not as well known a figure as Miltiades, Themistocles, or Pausanias; he seems to fall into the valleys and ridge-lines that connect the peaks of the Greco-Persian Wars.
The Greco-Persian wars are usually taught or written about with a narrative that jumps from peak to peak. Each battle can be told fairly quickly, covering the background context, major leaders, and progression of events, before moving on. As a teacher, once you’ve finally made it through Salamis and Plataea, there’s often pressure to move the narrative along efficiently, so the Delian League falls into the cracks, as both a postscript event to the Persian Wars, and simultaneously the prelude event to the rise of Pericles and the Athenian Hegemony leading up to the Peloponnesian War. I might also add that, over the last half-century, a point of emphasis for teachers and historians has been to flesh out the Persians as more than two-dimensional villains, treating them instead as fully-formed characters with understandable motivations and goals.1 So, to the extent that the broader public narrative on the Greco-Persian wars has changed, the emphasis has shifted somewhat away from the Greeks, and more towards the Persians. Most teachers and historians today would say that to best understand the conflict, you have to look at the mountaintops for Greece, and now also for Persia. The general trend towards teaching World History in most public high schools also has the effect of surveying many more mountain peaks, but at even greater distance.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that supporting characters such as Aristides get lost in the shuffle. But what ought to be unsettling, is to think about how often this is true for other subjects, especially when dealing with a survey-level introduction to a historical topic. There are undoubtedly thousands of other Aristides’ out there. If one grand historical narrative (such as taught in a single course, or in a large survey-length manuscript) looks like an entire mountain range, and each peak is upheld by layers of geological strata representing background events and context, then truly understanding the deep connections, interlocking events, and sub-themes running under the surface would be a lifetime’s work. Indeed, to hear a true master on a subject talk at length, is to get a glimpse of that depth and complexity.
And of course, this entire mountain range is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, reflecting a single overarching framing (history, after all, is map). A mountain range depicting a military and political history of the Medieval crusades would draw a different outline than a spiritual and purely religious history of the period, and that also different from an economic history. But we’re still just getting started, because the peaks and valleys we uncover also reflect our own preconceptions and points of emphasis. It’s not commonly appreciated, but Medieval Islamic accounts of the Crusades were far different from modern 20th century narratives in post-colonial studies, or those used by radical groups such as Al Qaeda (after all, from the Medieval Islamic perspective, they’d won). Grievances about oppressive Western crusader states gained extra traction in light of 20th century events such as the Founding of Israel. Sometimes, the events that stand out as mountain peaks shift around, not just according to contemporary narratives, but contemporary events.
So there are almost certainly many important characters and supporting events out there in the historical record that our narratives jump over and miss completely. Some of these key figures and events may be genuinely undiscovered pieces of knowledge that will transform our understanding of the mountain peaks above them (I rather doubt that I have discovered something unknown about Aristides; it was very probably just undiscovered to me personally, and there’s probably a fair few books by classicists and historians on the topic).
However, if I tried to list off many examples of other underappreciated “greatest person/place/thing you didn’t know about X” in history, I think we’d pretty quickly find that, with even a moderately wide-ranging and diverse audience, most underappreciated phenomenon are only underappreciated in a general sense. There are almost always niche groups and enthusiasts who know very well how important a given “underappreciated” thing is. To an early modern military history historian, Maurice of Nassau’s Dutch military reforms were not at all under-appreciated, and neither were Cistercian monasteries to a medieval economic historian. Indeed, the story of historiographic debates is often one of arguing which heretofore underrated things ought to become properly rated, and which are currently overrated. Such arguing is where I think professional academic history is most useful and important; we need experts who can see the mountaintops and the deep geological layers underneath. But I am not a professional academic, nor am I writing to such an audience.
What should teachers and interested layfolk do with such a vast (and changing) historical landscape? Like an archeologist on a deadline, we might try digging some trenches.
Where and How to Dig Mineshafts underneath Mountains
We can’t become experts in everything, or even really in one thing. But, a few deep trenches (perhaps, given the mountain metaphor, we ought to think of them as mineshafts) dug here and there can give us a sampling of the substrata beneath our peaks. We can’t excavate every mountain, but picking a few in clusters can give us a deeper sense of the historical context in one area or series of events, and suggest how one mountain might be similar to another beneath the surface. This somewhat resembles what academic experts do, except that academics also have to stay abreast with other experts in their field. As a lay person, it’s helpful to know some of the broad contours of various historiographic schools (for example, how a dominant interpretation has been challenged in recent decades), but it’s usually not necessary or practical to stay current on each new monograph or journal article.
The polymath economist Tyler Cowen recommends reading multiple books on a single topic or individual as a way of really understanding something. Tyler Cowen, however, has a photographic memory, and most people would be proud to read in a year what Cowen reads in a month. For most of us mere mortals, I want to suggest a less daunting, but still useful approach to studying history (I think this approach can be applied to many other areas of disciplines, as well as personal hobbies and interests).
Have a few areas of study where your knowledge-base runs deeper than just the “who/what/when/where” highlights. Much of this can be accomplished simply by reading deep into a topic, and in different ways. If you want deeper-than-average knowledge on the Age of Exploration, you might start with the accounts of the great explorers themselves, but as you go you’ll gradually learn politics, economics, medieval and early modern science, and the indigenous history of the regions discovered. You would even end up understanding part of the culinary history of Europe, crusading prophecies about Jerusalem and the Day of Judgment, and Dante’s view of the Cosmos. You’ll also start comparing and contrasting your area with others outside your initial interest, such as the Chinese tribute fleets of Zheng He, Marco Polo and the Silk Road, or later 19th century British explorations in Africa (sometimes, you’ll find new areas interesting that were previously dull, precisely because of the contrast).
Biography is an extremely useful historical mineshaft (it was Plutarch, after all, that pointed me towards Aristides). A deeply researched and well-written biography will not only give you a colorful and nuanced understanding of a particular individual, but it will also serve as a cross-sampling of that figure’s time and place. Biographies can’t help but teach you about norms, customs, manners, and small slices of material history that larger surveys frequently leave out. The best biographies have an eye for those golden quotes and anecdotes that can sum up a story or provide a mental anchor for your understanding of a topic. Biographies also frequently reveal connections and relationships between key individuals in ways that, once again, surveys tend to overlook.
For example, over the last few years, I’ve slowly made my way through some of the major biographies on MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton. Reading three separate accounts of some of the most important generals of WWII proved enormously useful in comparing and contrasting their educations, careers, personalities, leadership styles, and their relationships with each other (Eisenhower was close friends with Patton in the 1920’s, and served on MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines in the 1930’s). Among other things, all three officers were closely involved with the Bonus Army riot in 1932, in which MacArthur (with Eisenhower in tow as an aide) ordered Patton to forcibly disperse out-of-work veterans gathered in Washington DC. To put it mildly, the riot became rather controversial, and one upshot of reading three different biographies was getting three different interpretations of the event. Additionally, all three biographies gave me a better sense of who I might like to read up on next (probably George C. Marshall), and were very useful last year when I was following the rancorous bickering within the Allied high command while reading Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy on the American ground campaign in Europe.
You can sink another type of mineshaft by selecting themes and subdomains within history across time periods. “Types of history” (political, cultural, economic, intellectual, military, etc.) have value not just in and of themselves, but as representative samples across different historical periods that can be compared and mined for patterns and exceptions, and which reveal larger truths about societies at large. If you study enough military history, you’ll learn not just about battles and weapons systems, but about technology, economics, political systems, social and cultural norms, and how they change over time (and often, what causes them to change) . Personal interests in various historical themes don’t have to select from only the most “important” sub-disciplines; they can be very narrow or niche. A person with a pet hobby in the history of metallurgy, ship-design, pottery, fashion, theater, cars, or other particular subfields can end up acquiring a great deal of generalizable knowledge. An individual who developed a life-long passion for the history of games and athletic contests could, if they truly thought deeply about the topic, learn a great deal about ancient Greek city-states, Roman imperial politics, and the Industrial Revolution and rise of mass-urbanization.
In Conclusion, our Mineshaft Metaphor is now a Tree
There are real benefits to picking a few areas to semi-specialize in, beyond just the intrinsic value of knowing something for its own sake (though this should not be discounted). Knowing a topic deeply is a good intellectual practice that hones our ability to acquire and analyze knowledge, and the ability to contextualize anything is an important step on the road towards genuine wisdom. Knowing a topic well can also help you evaluate other sources and authorities; just as a serious sports fan distinguishes the difference between a good and bad tv announcer. Personally, I’ve often found that, if a political pundit or journalist opines on a topic I know something about, I can better judge their relative expertise on that topic, and mentally apply that into how I evaluate them on other topics, as a sort of “Gell-Mann Amnesia” antidote.2 Also, while very few people can become genuine experts on a topic, almost everyone can become above-average on one or two topics; all it takes is curiosity and time. A dinner party full of very “normal” individuals, who just happen to all have different niche hobbies and interests, could generate enlightening conversation for all.
I’ve used archeological and geological metaphors throughout this article in reference specifically to history, but this approach to studying and learning can obviously be applied to any body of knowledge. The interconnectedness of a liberal arts education is often compared to the branches of a tree, and traditionally, all intellectual subjects were subsets of philosophy, with each discipline sprouting as a limb or branch from a main trunk. Part of the beauty of a tree is the repetition of patterns across the whole, combined with the uniqueness of each individual part; each branch and leaf-pattern is at the same time similar and distinct. There is joy in the knowledge of a single close sample, and further joy in the revealed pattern of the whole.
There’s a long history and discussion of so-called “orientalizing” narratives about Greece and Persia, arguably stretching back to Herodotus himself. Some new histories of the Persian Empire don’t even call it Persia anymore, but the Iranian Empire (and, truthfully, modern Americans might understand the country of Iran better if we viewed it as part of a continuous civilizational tradition stretching back thousands of years).
I have always loved military aviation. A decade ago, I was following the development of the F-35 fighter program, and trying to figure out how much media criticism about the airplane was warranted or not. Much of the final answer for me referred back to childhood reading about the WW I German fighter ace and theorist Oswald Boelcke, whose “Dicta” became the first formal rules for air warfare. Boelcke’s Dicta firmly validate the F-35’s design philosophy.
so good!!
very good piece, informing and preformed very well!