In Our Time Moment: History and Understanding the Past

The jumping off point for this March 2000 episode of In Our Time was The New Century by historian Eric J. Hobsbwam. The US edition of this book was published as On the Edge of the New Century in May 2001. Melvyn Bragg was joined by Dr. Hobsbwam and Richard J. Evans.

The panel discussed whether history is useful for understanding the present and future and whether or not the lessons learnt are applied appropriately. I particularly liked Dr. Evans' point that studying societies of the past can give a greater understanding of what it means to be human. Dr. Hobsbwam uses the national and global aspecs of football (soccer) to explain globalization.

The conclusion, I think of the discussion, is that history cannot predict the future, in part because conditions have changed so dramatically. For almost all of human history the vast majority of people have worked the land, now only about 2-3% do, and as Dr. Hobsbwam points out this fact, along with the increases in literacy and education, make the world a fundamentally different place. But what history can do is help explain why things are the way they are and suggest possibilities for the future.

Find this episode at the IOT History archive here or search iTunes.

In Our Time Moment: History of History

I was quite excited to listen to History of History, first aired in January 2009. Many people who haven’t studied history are quite unaware of how much the discipline has changed since the first Historian, Herodotus, wrote about the Persian Wars in the 5^th century BCE.  Since this podcast was billed as examining “how the writing of history has changed over the years” I thought it would be a quick and painless way for you, the reader, to learn about the subject. The panelists were John Burrow, Paul Cartledge and Miri Rubin.

I must admit that I was so frustrated with the podcast I really couldn’t enjoy it. It starts off well, but almost the entire time is spent in the Ancient World, then in the last 10 minutes skips several hundred years to the Renaissance Humanists and then another huge leap to the Enlightenment. Paul Cartledge takes on the inhuman task of summing up the past 50 years of historiography in about two sentences in the last minute of the show.

I suppose that to discuss 2500 years of historiography in 45 minutes was an ambitious task for Melvyn Bragg to set. On the other hand, the panelists didn’t help Bragg out much with all their ‘oh let me add to that comment’ and ‘before we move on, I need to footnote that.’ However, many of these comments and footnotes, to my mind, weren’t really relevant to the task at hand.

While, the podcast might not be what I hoped for, it is an interesting discussion of historiography in the Classical and Post-Classical World. The best bits, I think, are at the very beginning and at the very end.

Find this episode at the IOT History archive here or search iTunes.

In Our Time Moment: History as Science

One of my all-time favorite podcasts is In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg from BBC Radio 4. This series is an exploration of the History of Ideas and has been running since 1998. Last summer the BBC made every episode available to download. 

History as Science, aired in 1999,  features a discussion between Bragg, Jared Diamond and Richard Evans about Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize Winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

I purchased this book in 1998, but did not read until several years ago when I read it for a department workshop. I really enjoyed the book, as did most of the rest of faculty, and found the overall thesis interesting. The scope of the book is vast, about 8,000 years, and tries to explain why Europeans conquered the Americas and not the other way round.  Diamond’s answer is rooted in geography, people who are more connected to each other can exchange ideas better. Ultimately connections were easier in Eurasia than the Americas. It would have been a great discussion but for three of the instructors in the department (all non-Western, post-1500) absolutely hated it, said they’d never assign it to their students, and generally didn’t have one good thing to say about it. Seriously. I almost walked out.

What these three historians did, in a similar way that Richard Evans does, is to pick on the one thing they knew about and then criticize that particular aspect of the work. Of course this is qualified by words along the lines of “well, he might be right about those parts of history or places that I don’t know about.”  I think Evans was more sympathetic to Diamond’s work than my former colleagues, but his comments and tone made me think of the long ago workshop and it set my teeth on edge.

Diamond is a professor of Geography and Evans a professor of Modern History, so they approach the study of the past differently.  Some academics are much more willing to work in and with other disciplines. Diamond seems to be one of these academics, while Evans (based solely on this interview) does not.  With degrees in history and art history I definitely fall into the interdisciplinary camp.

One aspect of the interview I did find interesting is that comparison of history to science, particularly like geology. I mentioned in an earlier post that John Lewis Gaddis had made this same observation: History is like a Science where experiments can not be repeated. 

Find this episode at the IOT History archive here or search iTunes.