the rest is history ...

     The prospect of penning my thoughts on history and how it may – or may not – have a bearing on my literary endeavors creates some discomfort. But since history is my third great passion, after classical music and old movies (especially pre-Code and film noir), why not? Ergo what follows is a stream-of-consciousness grab bag of pronouncements on the endlessly fascinating, sometimes frustrating, topic of history, with no particular overarching thesis or point of view (aside from my own), or otherwise ideological ax to grind.
     I’m not so presumptuous as to suggest that I write historical novels – can genre fiction ever qualify as such? But since my mysteries are set in the early Thirties and late Forties I feel the need to have at least a modicum of sensitivity to historical events and trends, just to add some spice, along with the concurrent authenticity bolstered by accuracy in things like slang, clothes, music and so on.
     As for my nonfiction writings, both print and online, I’ve flirted with history, usually in the form of book reviews on subjects either historical or that touch on history in some way, such as biographies. But truth be told, I’m not qualified to offer any profound insights into matters historical or historiographical. True, I technically possess an advanced degree in music history, but this is such a specialized field and for the most part steers clear of the likes of political and diplomatic history, the philosophy of history, and the various historiographic controversies. [1] Besides, degrees, even advanced degrees, especially advanced degrees, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Completing a graduate degree program is not so much an accomplishment of intellect as it is one of persistence and determination, as well as a willingness to subordinate one’s more creative impulses and aesthetic flights of fancy in order to conform to academic protocol and tradition. But as the fellow said, I begin to digress.
     What I’d like to focus on here then isn’t so much how historical background creeps into my novels (which I actually cover elsewhere, both online and in print), but instead to offer my thoughts on the subject of history in and of itself. As mentioned above, studying history, strictly as an amateur mind you, is one of my favorite avocations when I get bored with writing. And I admit to a few parochialisms, among them Ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt, the Cold War, WW2, and the social and political, as opposed to the purely aesthetic, history of cinema. My basic approach and philosophy when studying history might be described as instinctively siding with underdogs, rebels, outsiders, in a word, those who challenge long-held, entrenched views (Shakespeare authorship question, anyone?). Or phrased another way, those who just plain see the world differently. I’m especially receptive to fresh or alternative, even offbeat and eccentric, approaches to orthodox history (provided said approaches can be rationally argued and supported by sound evidence and methods). Likewise I seek out topics, events or individuals that haven’t been so thoroughly covered already. If I must choose a label I’d call myself a contrarian, or better yet, skeptic. I favor these two appellations over the term ‘revisionist,’ which has taken on a bad odour [2], unfairly so in my opinion.
     However (and it’s a big however), I do have my limits. To wit, I’m not a fan of what might be called the conspiracy theory school of historical inquiry, which, alas, runs rampant on far too many blogs and other online sources, and yes, books too, that purport to go into history, and worse, politics. So many of these have a decidedly paranoid vibe to them, with a dearth of actual evidence to back up their breathless pronouncements. But the occasional nugget gets through, intelligently reasoned and presented, in unlikely places, that sheds new light on old stories. So best not to be too rigid in what to include versus what to discard in the historical quest.
     Aside: it’s often been said that historians have a leftist bias, but I’m not so sure. Any historian worth his salt will of course bring his own worldview, but will evaluate all evidence fairly and come to his conclusions accordingly, at least he should. In other words, he won’t cook the books or choose facts selectively. Even if we accept the notion that professional (read: academic) historians have a liberal bent, then we could also charge that most pop history sources have a decidedly right-wing slant [3]. Here I’m thinking of the ubiquitous usual suspects the ilk of the History Channel, Story, A&E, Wikipedia, the Hallmark Channel, the ‘liberal’ PBS, and, on balance, even the august Encyclopædia Britannica. And yes, I include the movies, especially the movies, when listing pop culture sources that have a rightist slant in their treatment of history [4]. To this group I might add the various print popular histories aimed at a mass audience. Somewhat ironically, these are frequently penned by professional academics. These tend to go over well trodden territory, rely on secondary sources, and take a narrative, storytelling approach, in the process generally reinforcing long congealed views that won't rankle the prospective audience (read: customers) too much.
      Here it’s only fair to offer an admission: I watch a goodly amount of television pop history (but don't tell anyone). And in defense of pop history, one of its virtues is that it tells a narrative with a minimum of fat: that is, it keeps the story moving, a virtue we can't always claim for academic history, or real life, for that matter. Also in its favor is that a viewer may be inspired to seek out further, meatier treatments of a historical subject. And to be sure some pop history venues at least make an attempt at academic sheen with various, well-credentialed talking heads flitting in and out in the basic narrative [5].
      An excellent example of a synthesis of the pop and academic is Caroline Winterer’s Unexplained History, in which she posits that what professional historians are concerned about is not what we already know about the past, but the things around the edges, in a word, what we don't know, or what I would term, the process and the discovery. (Caroline Winterer, Unexplained History: What Historians Still Don't Understand [DVD], Dreamscape Media, 2021). To this I would add my own two cents that real history is not so much the search for the details of what happened (though as in law, it's not always easy to agree on basic facts), but rather the how and the why of what happened, and as a consequence the influence of historical events on what came after.
     Another interesting take is Alex Rosenberg’s (relatively) recent book How History Gets Things Wrong: the Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, (MIT Press 2018). Rosenberg’s thesis is that the practice of interpreting history through narrative stories often results in bogus readings of the past due to our brain's preference for simple narratives over complex realities. Rosenberg bases his theory on evidence from three scientific disciplines: evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.
    In Rosenberg’s calculus, it’s when history considers data and analysis from other disciplines that we get a more definitive historical picture. Books like Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome and Walter Scheidel’s The Science of Roman History might be cited as examples of what other, somewhat related, fields can contribute to the historical gestalt. Rosenberg seems to be calling out for a more evidence-based, i.e. purely objective, purely scientific, and less narrative, approach to the study of history.
     Not so surprising then that professional historians have taken rather a dim view of Rosenberg’s thesis. As for my own reaction, some purely anecdotal evidence suggests that Rosenberg may actually be onto something. As opined elsewhere in these pages, my impatience with the, if you will, real life approach to storytelling – examples being those ‘you are there’ true crime police procedurals and live broadcasts of actual trials – is that their chaotic, arbitrary unfolding of events is the actual antithesis of the comforting, predictable flow of stories. Ergo it’s stories that we like. Since stories come after the fact, they provide a reassurance and explanation, a making sense of things that don’t make sense when they happen, because they are just experienced.
     Getting back to pop vs. academic history, sometimes historians get it just right and strike a fine balance between the esoteric and the popular. The aforementioned Prof. Winterer does just this in her DVD lectures for Curiosity University, in which she filters academic history through a prism that makes it accessible to a popular, albeit sophisticated, audience. Another source which deftly combines the academic with the popular, leaning academic, is the Great Courses DVDs and CDs, which at last count numbered some 280-odd lectures on history.
       Aside: perhaps this is a good place to address the phenomenon known as spin, which online sources tend to innocuously define as the attempt to control communication and opinion through selectively emphasizing facts and evidence. Such a definition, while abstractly correct, doesn't go into the deceptive – and destructive – aspects of spin as practiced in our world today by politicos and really anyone involved in the business of public relations. And with no disrespect to historians, it’s not so much of a stretch to opine that all history is spin, since historians, both professional and otherwise, present a certain interpretation of events, however couched in academic, arcane language, that by implication implores the reader to accept said point of view [7]. 
     In one of my online posts elsewhere I wrote on the seeming all-pervasiveness of spin these days. I asked: why so much spin in our current world? Was it always this way? I'm not sure I answered the questions satisfactorily, if at all. I also suggested that spin's evil sibling is advertising, but with regard to my views on advertising, as the man said don't get me started. Ditto for propaganda, probably the most egregious variant of spin. Spin is of course a form of disinformation, sometimes outright misinformation, and upon further reflection I now suggest the reason we see, and hear, so much spin these days is stunningly obvious: in a digital and media saturated 24/7 world there are simply more messages bombarding us, and a good portion, probably a majority of said messages, are spin or something like spin. Case in point: a good percentage of the messages I receive each day, without fail, are appeals to send money for such-and-such good cause, or to buy a product that will make me forever happy. In both cases the motivation is to separate me from my money.
     Regarding today's endless news cycle, they say journalism, be it print or television, is history in the raw. Ergo spin is really manufactured history, sometimes expressed as massaged and manufactured journalism in the raw. To be sure, journalism itself, even with the best of intentions, can be disinformation. In a perfect world in which we give journalists and reporters the benefit of the doubt, such disinformation would be unintentional, arising due to relatively benign factors such as mistakes or on-the-spot speculation without all the facts in an attempt to be the first to scoop a story. Still, in our murky world of mass messaging and the mind-numbing volume of images and messages, it’s becoming increasing difficult to tell exactly where ‘news’ ends and spin/propaganda begins.  
     In the case of, say, a self-penned biography, we must also admit the uncomfortable reality that a memoir is, to a large extent, spin, of the best, or worst, kind, depending upon one's point of view: memoir is by necessity selective and as such usually, though not always, self-flattering. Anyhow I propose now that spin has been around forever, just as malicious and mendacious in the past as today, maybe more so. It's just a matter of volume – both literally and figuratively – in our all-too-modern world.
     But getting back to history, all historians, be they purveyors of spin or no, are to some extent subjective and biased. In a perfect world they would be scrupulously objective and even-handed, but that would be like saying humans should be without likes and dislikes, and – horrors! – opinions [6]. So maybe it all comes out in the wash with the pop and academic sides cancelling each other out. But it still leaves us with the discomforting reality that, as has been pointed out, what we call ‘history’ is ultimately what the historian, whatever his motivations or ideological bent, chooses to point out.
 
    1 An exception here might be Wagner, not necessarily because he’s the most written about composer of all time. Then again, maybe it’s because he’s the most written about composer of all time. But more to the point, his life and work, along with writings about him, ergo his influence, intersect so many things historical. Thus he needs to be noted as an anomaly. This is true to form: Richard Wagner was the exception rather than the rule in so many things.
     While talking about Wagner we might mention the contentious War of the Romantics of the mid and latter Nineteenth Century, waged largely in print sources, by musicians, critics and enthusiasts. The conflict pitted the progressive forces represented by composers of the New German School –Liszt and Wagner in particular – against the Viennese based, conservative faction who chose Brahms as their champion. A vicious battle it was, conducted publicly. As they usually do, in artistic matters anyway, the progressives eventually won. Whatever the outcome, it remains that the imbroglio was not historiographic but rather philosophic and aesthetic.
   2 In a purely abstract sense, all history can be considered revisionist, and rightly so: the historian’s job is to examine conventional interpretations of history, consider new evidence, or interpret facts and events in a new light, applying more recent methodologies and fresh perspectives.
    In his excellent book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History is Revisionist History (Yale Univ. Press, 2021), author James Banner makes that very point. He demonstrates why historical knowledge is unlikely ever to be absolute, unchallenged and unchanging, and why history as a branch of knowledge is both a science and an art.
     Then there's the most extreme form of revisionism, actually not revisionism at all, but negation, namely the wholesale erasure of the past. This is usually done by extreme authoritarian states or groups that desire to promulgate a certain nationalist, militarist, corporate or racialist point of view, and thus have to rid themselves of inconvenient examinations of the past. National governments are the most egregious practitioners but it occurs elsewhere, more recently in corporations, news media, school boards, universities, public debate, and print publications. An antidote for the moment it would seem – both blessing and curse, some might say – is the online digital culture that gives expression to more diverse, admittedly sometimes extreme, unpleasantly so, views. Author Jason Stanley gives an excellent overview of erasing the past in his recent book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
   3 Here I define ‘right-wing’ to broadly include sources which reinforce orthodox interpretations of history, making them, more or less by definition, cautious and uncontroversial by nature, thus the inclusion of the likes of Britannica and Wikipedia. As for the much-maligned, supposedly left-leaning PBS and NPR, I don't see it myself. Whatever their content, which purports to be middle of the road and neutral, the tone of their broadcasts – civil, polite, intellectualized – is by and large conservative. Yes, programs like Democracy Now, Firing Line, America Reframed, Fresh Air, and Open Mind must be noted as exceptions, but these are islands of nourishment and spice in a sea of bland diet.
     Aside: when I talk about historians in above comments I use the masculine 'he' or 'his' simply for clarification’s sake, not out of sexism or any attempt to suggest that women can't be good historians. Reactionary or no, for me it just makes a sentence or idea flow better to use 'he' rather than the clumsy yet more politically correct 'he/she'.   
    4 When I refer to ‘the movies,’ I’m thinking primarily of films that fall under the rubric Hollywood, i.e. American produced, (mostly) for American audiences. In contrast, any number of other national cinematic traditions might well claim a leftist, or more equivocal, vibe. Be that as it may, the movies, especially those of the American brand, along with its evil sibling television, arguably have been the world’s dominant cultural and aesthetic force for at least a century, and as such have exerted an incalculable influence on the popular perception of what constitutes ‘history.’
    5 As Sarah Maza points out more eloquently and succinctly than present writer: "History is not only the ultimate hybrid field, borrowing its languages and methods from both the social sciences and the humanities; it is also the discipline that most frequently crosses over from the academic world into the public sphere . . . unlike sociology, history has its own television channel, unlike economics, its own book club." (Thinking About History, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017, p4).
    6 Even the most hard-headed of chroniclers can make a stumble. Witness the very public case of the redoubtable British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and the infamous 'Hitler Diaries.' A renowned Hitler expert and usually thought of as a conservative sort, Trevor-Roper examined the diaries and famously pronounced them genuine, based on preliminary, and dubious, evidence and opinion. That Trevor-Roper later recanted his initial assessment was largely lost in the media frenzy. Translation: the damage was done. The diaries were eventually revealed to be an obvious forgery, and Trevor-Roper's reputation was, to a large extent, irretrievably tarnished. The conventional wisdom is that the great man was victim of conflict of interest, being as he was a director of the prestigious Times of London, which had bought the rights to the diaries (for a hefty price). My own take is that, for his own private reasons, Trevor-Roper so wanted the diaries to be genuine that he hastily gave his imprimatur, a classic case of a historian getting emotionally too close to an issue. Thus his mistake was due more to psychological and emotional factors than ideological bias.
     Trevor-Roper's case is a cautionary tale on the need to, as much as possible, steer clear of emotional involvement with a subject. Easier said than done, you might say. One could opine that all historical topics are emotional, depending on whom you're talking to, what your audience is, and what nationalistic, ideological, or financial (especially financial) interests might be involved. When the topic is an emotional, or controversial one, there's the tendency to have a disproportionate emphasis on convenient material - to choose facts and 'evidence' selectively - that support a particular spin or thesis. From a purely American perspective, some obvious choices for treat-with-caution might be the genocide of Native Americans, the Civil Rights Movement, women's suffrage, gay and lesbian rights, the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.  
     7 If we accept this thesis – that all history is opinion, ergo spin – can there ever be anything as true history, or objective history? A big topic, both philosophical and otherwise, which greater minds than mine have written on at length, and which your humble servant really isn’t qualified to weigh in on, thus I’ll leave it there.