Historians: Past Eras Were Worse Than Now

[Harp]

I was being facetious about Homer. Everyone thought Troy in the Iliad was fiction but it ended up being found by Henrich Schleiman on the west coast of Turkey.
J

The Homeric aphorism, Aphrodite robs the wits of the wise so'er prudent, aptly sums Troy.

 

[Fletch]

Comparisons of past "eras" to today are ultimately meaningless, because the term "era" always winds up standing for a reductive, best-fit stereotype.

Vicksburg 1864 doesn't compare with Anytown 2005. Nor does it compare so closely with New Jersey or Nebraska 1864. The question is how does it stack up against New Orleans 2005?

I have no desire to travel thru time on a package tour.

 

[dr greg]

past it

I recommend Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror", which is a look at the 14th Century in Europe when plague killed 2/3 of the population etc, it makes an interesting point about the juvenile and stupid actions of people possibly due to the fact that anyone over 30 was considered a senior citizen. The times maketh the man is a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum though if you think about it.

 

[Dr Doran]

The answers to this thread are highly subjective. Good or bad times are often little more than your definition of 'good'. I think things are good right now, but I don't think they will stay that way much longer. Since all facts are subject to interpretation, professors aren't accurate purveyors of facts any more than anyone else is. Whoever is in power at the time gets to write the textbooks and to interpret history.

Statisticians have shown us that if you put a man's head in the deep freeze and his feet in the oven, he will feel pretty good on the average.

I love seeing old threads revived.
My two cents on this: Yes, there are different subjective definitions of "good," but being as objective as possible is the goal: that's why hard facts, like mortality rates, information on skeletal remains, actual legal rights, etc., are so valuable. And that's why comparison is valuable. I think the road that leads to the assertion that everything is subjective (not that that was necessarily being said) is a dead end.
As far as the point about professors not being accurate purveyors of facts more than anyone else: well, the advantage of history professors is that their job is to read about an era, to read all the primary sources and as many secondary sources as they can. Plus they have training in logical interpretation of sources. Plus they spend lots of time, year after year, lecturing on topics which forces them to think about these topics. Plus they personally know, or at least are able to contact, the best minds in the field, the people working on the historical problems at hand; so those are their advantages, which are pretty good ones, I'd say.
As far as whoever has power at the time getting to purvey history: true to an extent. But look: Thucydides was an Athenian. Athens LOST the Peloponnesian war. Plenty of people lost a conflict and still wrote about it. And academia has been trending for many years (since, say, 1980) toward paying attention to, and publishing, the previously "lost" perspectives, the hidden peoples, the losing side (look at the book ads in the New York Review of Books). Then again, that only works in a country with remarkably free press, like this one. But at the moment, there is a good number of countries that allow almost unlimited publication of anything.
Of course, the Holocaust deniers would disagree with that last sentence.

 

[Dr Doran]

Comparisons of past "eras" to today are ultimately meaningless, because the term "era" always winds up standing for a reductive, best-fit stereotype.

Vicksburg 1864 doesn't compare with Anytown 2005. Nor does it compare so closely with New Jersey or Nebraska 1864. The question is how does it stack up against New Orleans 2005?

I have no desire to travel thru time on a package tour.

Good point on the bit about eras; without generalizations, though, we can never get anything said.
Vicksburg 1864 against New Orleans 2005: I'd rather be in N.O. for my own safety, but Vicksburg if I could simply take that time travel tour, which I'd love to do.

 

[panamag8or]

Leave it to today's kids to think something is the most important, because it happened TO THEM.:weneedaneyerollemoticonhere:

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

It's best to think about it in the way of the game "Telephone". The first player will whisper a phrase to the next player, who will then whisper it to the next, and so on. Eventually one child will misinterepret the phrase, which in part, alters it entirely. By the time the last player receives the message, it is not at all the same phrase as it had began. This is the misinterpreted evolution of time.

Through the years, humans become distant from the truth because of the power of interpretation. We will probably never know every fact from fiction of the past, because so many years have passed since. Unless there was someone who survived lets say a "plane crash", we never know what really happened, but a newspaper reporter or grandfather might have told a story for whatever reason, and now it has transformed from fiction to fact.
The world is full of undiscovered stories.

 

[Dr Doran]

It's best to think about it in the way of the game "Telephone". The first player will whisper a phrase to the next player, who will then whisper it to the next, and so on. Eventually one child will misinterepret the phrase, which in part, alters it entirely. By the time the last player receives the message, it is not at all the same phrase as it had began. This is the misinterpreted evolution of time.

Through the years, humans become distant from the truth because of the power of interpretation. We will probably never know every fact from fiction of the past, because so many years have passed since. Unless there was someone who survived lets say a "plane crash", we never know what really happened, but a newspaper reporter or grandfather might have told a story for whatever reason, and now it has transformed from fiction to fact.
The world is full of undiscovered stories.

The world certainly is full of undiscovered stories; but one of the reasons why writing was invented is because people wanted to record, with both parties watching, a transaction. And that's why when history is written down, the historian relies on primary sources, on actual source documents. And one of the reasons why writing, and history-writing, caught on is because people wanted to make sure future generations knew about something they knew, as in the prologues to Herodotus and Thucydides; both prologues are programmatic. Herodotus says he wants to record the battles between the Hellenes and the Persians and record the amazing things (thaumasia) that each did so that they not become obscured by time. A rather telling phrase in relation to what you just said. Thucydides says he wants to write down what happened in the war between Athens and her allies versus Sparta and its allies because this was the greatest movement/motion (kinesis) that had ever happened, and he challenged the veracity of Homer and the Trojan War in order to explain why his own war (the Peloponnesian War) was the "greatest" (megistos) by which I think he meant the biggest, not the most fine. In other words, he CHALLENGED tradition, sifted through it, rationalized the mystical crap as much as he could. He also promised to record things as well as he could and to compare accounts and to report speeches as accurately as possible while, in the case of speeches of which he had no report and which he did not see, conjecturing what was probably said. This is a pretty impressive thing for 2430 years ago.

 

[Feraud]

Leave it to today's kids to think something is the most important, because it happened TO THEM.:weneedaneyerollemoticonhere:

It is not just kids who think that.

 

[Dr Doran]

It is not just kids who think that.

Exactly. That's why subjectivity is dangerous. It is misleading to oneself and to others. One needs to be as objective and as comparative as possible when describing any event and also when looking at one's own experiences. If one does not do that, and if one does not insist on others doing that, then one ends up reading accounts that may be very poetic but have more to do with a person's interior monologue, feelings, etc., than with actual events.

 

[griffer]

Anyone else read this?

It's an oldie but a goodie!

The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible! (Paperback)

 

[Rooster]

We got it made today, Life in the USA is like living on Easy Street. It WILL all change one day, then watch what happens.....

 

[Dr Doran]

Anyone else read this?

It's an oldie but a goodie!

The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible! (Paperback)

... in my favorite antique store in the world, on the main drag in downtown Vancouver, Washington (NOT CANADA) (NOT D.C.), where I got most of my tie clips, my sunglasses, and various other fine sundries, there is a photo of a dirt-smeared family in a hovel from the 1880s. The caption: 'Still wanna live in the "good old days?" '

 

[Fletch]

We got it made today, Life in the USA is like living on Easy Street. It WILL all change one day, then watch what happens.....

You really ought to check out this discussion at the Straight Dope Board:
Does humanity have a deep seated need for apocalypse?

 

[jamespowers]

The world certainly is full of undiscovered stories; but one of the reasons why writing was invented is because people wanted to record, with both parties watching, a transaction. And that's why when history is written down, the historian relies on primary sources, on actual source documents. And one of the reasons why writing, and history-writing, caught on is because people wanted to make sure future generations knew about something they knew, as in the prologues to Herodotus and Thucydides; both prologues are programmatic. Herodotus says he wants to record the battles between the Hellenes and the Persians and record the amazing things (thaumasia) that each did so that they not become obscured by time. A rather telling phrase in relation to what you just said. Thucydides says he wants to write down what happened in the war between Athens and her allies versus Sparta and its allies because this was the greatest movement/motion (kinesis) that had ever happened, and he challenged the veracity of Homer and the Trojan War in order to explain why his own war (the Peloponnesian War) was the "greatest" (megistos) by which I think he meant the biggest, not the most fine. In other words, he CHALLENGED tradition, sifted through it, rationalized the mystical crap as much as he could. He also promised to record things as well as he could and to compare accounts and to report speeches as accurately as possible while, in the case of speeches of which he had no report and which he did not see, conjecturing what was probably said. This is a pretty impressive thing for 2430 years ago.

Good points all but Thucydides was wrong. There was a Troy and it did burn. The other parts of Homer's story are a bit murky.

Regards,

J

 

[Dr Doran]

Good points all but Thucydides was wrong. There was a Troy and it did burn. The other parts of Homer's story are a bit murky.

Regards,

J

Thucydides never says there was not a Troy. Further, he never states there was no Trojan War.

In 1.10 he states (Warner translation, Penguin -- I don't want to look at the Greek right now) "There is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that had ever taken place ... it is questionable whether we can have complete confidence in Homer's figures, which, since he was a poet, were probably exaggerated."

And in 1.12 he says "Even after the Trojan War, Hellas was in a state of ferment."

He clearly believed it happened. He only questioned some of the details Homer gave. In the section in 1.10 that I gave above, he nicely drew an early (he wrote in the late 5th or perhaps early 4th century BC) and very very clear, decisive although implicit distinction between poetry and history-writing.

Decisive because the distinction is there; implicit because he does not feel he needs to go out and state "and historians are concerned with being accurate whereas poets are concerned with creating a feeling."

 

[Harp]

... since he was a poet...
"and historians are concerned with being accurate whereas poets are concerned with creating a feeling."

"Helena, ena poli orea eunecka..."

 

[Tony in Tarzana]

Also, I think Homer's obsession with donuts clouded his judgment.

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

The events in which we think of when thinking about the past are the highlights. Football commentators give the highlights, only a true historian will tell it all (if all of the facts exist). We are evolving, not de-evolving.

 

[Les Gillis]

Quality Of Life

1864, Vicksburg: No food to be had, rotting bodies piling up; some people have taken to eating their clothing to stay alive. Everyone has lost someone they loved, often as not to dysentery. Civilians - women and children - have died of horrible wounds from the constant shelling.

1933, Nebraska: A woman loses a 1/2 cent bobby pin between the floorboards in her bedroom and cries for half an hour, because there isn't a single cent with which to replace it. Everything is cheap, there simply isn't any money to be had. Banks have failed, families made homeless overnight. Then the dust storms! The dust was so thick that people scooped up bucketsful while cleaning house. Dust blocked exterior doors; to get outside, people had to climb out their windows and shovel the dust away.

1944, New Jersey: You're a jewish person hearing incomprehensible stories from relatives in Europe and fear for their safety. You've given everything you can think of to scrap drives and bought war bonds until the pinch is severe. Your son is in a jungle in the Pacific somewhere, the tires on your car are patched beyond limit and your gas rations ran out last week anyway. News is days old. You feel cut off, worried, as though the world might be ending.

2005, Anywhere, USA: The falling of the Twin Towers was so horrific you felt lost, angry, deeply grieving. You came to avoid news of the cleanup as it was just too painful. Your cousin serves in the ongoing, forgotten war in Afghanistan and her safety is a daily worry for the entire family. All the Support newsgroups are filled with anxious messages, and many must be downloaded to your iPod to read later, at your office. You're thinking of trading in your Suburban for something smaller to save gasoline, maybe a Lexus, but a call to the dealer via cell phone on the way to TGI Fridays for dinner confirms that the rate may be better next month...

Scotrace hit the nail on the head with this....


I had a History Professor that told us people would ask him what time period he would rather live in if he could. His response was an affirmative "nothing any earlier than the present."

The quality of life for the average person today is without a doubt infinitely better than any other time period in history. We've become so conditioned to the comfort and ease of modern life that we'd be hard pressed to handle something on the scale of the Great Depression, World War Two or heaven forbid another Civil War. I was in New Orleans less than two weeks after Katrina hit. It was really bad for a lot of people in more places than the Superdome. There are still places that haven't fully recovered and will never be the same. Although it was bad it still wasn't as bad as the Hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas in 1900. I don't think the survivors in 1900 were given a Red Cross cash cards or a FEMA Trailer. We just don't know how fortunate we are to be living in this era.

Rooster may be on to something too...