The Uses and Abuses of History Read online

  Praise for The Uses and Abuses of History

  “This is an eminently sensible and humane book, lucidly and enjoyably written and argued. It is addressed to the general reader, and anyone interested in history should find it an engaging, quick read.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “The author maintains a tone of measured, reasoned and scholarly approachability … This is history used as its own best argument.”

  —Toronto Star

  “A good quick read … a timely read.”

  —Guelph Mercury

  Praise for Margaret MacMillan

  “MacMillan’s approach to history is to get under the skin of figures, to see them not so much as good or evil but as all-too-human actors struggling with a task of monumental difficulty even as they represented varying and conflicting interests.”

  —The New York Times

  “MacMillan is a worldly historian with a supreme gift for seeing the big picture … and telling the best story.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “MacMillan provides a highly readable narrative which

  combines detail and approachability.”

  —The Guardian

  ALSO BY MARGARET MacMILLAN

  Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World

  Women of the Raj

  Canada and NATO: Uneasy Past, Uncertain Future

  (editor)

  Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

  Parties Long Estranged: Canada and Australia in the

  Twentieth Century (editor)

  The Uneasy Century: International Relations 1900–1990

  (editor)

  Canada’s House: Rideau Hall and the Invention

  of a Canadian Home

  (with Marjorie Harris and Anne L. Desjardins)

  Extraordinary Canadians: Stephen Leacock

  Based on the Joanne Goodman Lecture Series of the

  University of Western Ontario

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Margaret MacMillan, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner

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  Manufactured in Canada.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-305478-8

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  The Joanne Goodman Lecture Series was established by

  Joanne’s family and friends to perpetuate the memory of her

  blithe spirit, her quest for knowledge, and the rewarding

  years she spent at the University of Western Ontario

  INTRODUCTION

  The History Craze

  History for Comfort

  Who Owns the Past?

  History and Identity

  History and Nationalism

  Presenting History’s Bill

  History Wars

  History as a Guide and Friend

  CONCLUSION

  FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  HISTORY IS SOMETHING we all do, even if, like the man who discovered he was writing prose, we do not always realize it. We want to make sense of our own lives and often we wonder about our place in our own societies and how we got to be here. So we tell ourselves stories, not always true ones, and we ask questions about ourselves. Such stories and questions inevitably lead us to the past. How did I grow up to be the person I am? Who were my parents? My grandparents? As individuals, we are all, at least in part, products of our own histories, which include our geographical place, our times, our social classes, and our family backgrounds. I am a Canadian who has grown up in this country and so have enjoyed an extraordinary period, unusual in much of the world’s history, of peace, stability, and prosperity. That has surely shaped the ways in which I look at the world, perhaps with more optimism about things getting better than I might have if I had grown up in Afghanistan or Somalia. And I am also a product of my parents’ and grandparents’ history. I grew up with some knowledge, incomplete and fragmentary to be sure, of World War II, which my father fought in, and of World War I, which drew in both my grandfathers.

  We use history to understand ourselves, and we ought to use it to understand others. If we find out that an acquaintance has suffered a catastrophe, that knowledge helps us to avoid causing him or her pain. (If we find that they have enjoyed great good luck, that may affect how we treat them in another way!) We can never assume that we are all the same, and that is as true in business and politics as it is in personal relations. How can we understand the often passionate feelings of French nationalists in Quebec if we do not know something about the past that has shaped and continues to shape them? Or the mixture of resentment and pride that formerly poor provinces such as Alberta and Newfoundland feel toward central Canada now that they have struck oil? In international affairs, how can we understand the deep hostility between Palestinians and Israelis without knowing something of their tragic conflicts?

  History is bunk, Henry Ford famously said, and it is sometimes hard for us in North America to recognize that history is not a dead subject. It does not lie there safely in the past for us to look at when the mood takes us. History can be helpful; it can also be very dangerous. It is wiser to think of history, not as a pile of dead leaves or a collection of dusty artifacts, but as a pool, sometimes benign, often sulphurous, which lies under the present, silentl
y shaping our institutions, our ways of thought, our likes and dislikes. We call on it, even in North America, for validation and for lessons and advice. Validation, whether of group identities or for demands, or justification, almost always comes from using the past. You feel your life has a meaning if you are part of a much larger group, which predated your existence and which will survive you (carrying, however, some of your essence into the future). Sometimes we abuse history, creating bad or false histories to justify treating others badly, seizing their land, for example, or killing them. There are also many lessons and much advice offered by history, and it is easy to pick and choose what you want. The past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present. We abuse it when we create lies about the past or write histories that show only one perspective. We can draw our lessons carefully or badly. That does not mean we should not look to history for understanding, support, and help; it does mean that we should do so with care.

  History, and not necessarily the sort that professional historians are doing, is widely popular these days, even in North America where we have tended to look toward the future rather than the past. It can be partly explained by market forces. People are better educated and, particularly in the mature economies, have more leisure time and are retiring from work earlier. Not everyone wants to retire to a compound in the sun and ride adult tricycles for amusement. History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun. How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history? There is a thirst out there both for knowledge and to be entertained, and the market has responded with enthusiasm.

  Museums and art galleries mount huge shows around historical characters like Peter the Great or on specific periods in history. Around the world, new museums open every year to commemorate moments, often grim ones, from the past. China has museums devoted to Japanese atrocities committed during World War II. Washington, Jerusalem, and Montreal have Holocaust museums. Television has channels devoted entirely to history (often, it must be said, showing a past which seems to be made up largely of battles and the biographies of generals); historic sites are wilting under the tramp of tourists; history movies—think of all the recent ones on Queen Elizabeth I alone—are making money; and the proliferation of popular histories shows that publishers have a good idea of where profits are to be made. Ken Burns’s documentaries, from the classic Civil War series to his one on World War II, are aired repeatedly. In this country, Mark Starowicz’s Canada: A People’s History drew millions of viewers. The Historica Minutes, produced by the private foundation Historica, devoted to promoting Canadian history, are so popular among Canadian teenagers that they often do school projects where they make their own.

  Many governments now have special departments devoted to commemorating the past. In Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage exhorts Canadians to learn about Canada’s history, culture, and land: “Heritage is our collective treasure, given to us and ours to bequeath to our children.” France, which has had a particularly active Ministry of Culture for decades, declared 1980 the Année du Patrimoine. Locals dressed up to re-enact the great moments of their history. In the following years, the number of heritage sites and monuments on the official list doubled. Scores of new museums—devoted to the wooden shoe, for example, or the chestnut forest—appeared. At the end of the decade, the government set up a special commission to oversee the commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution in 1989.

  In France there has been an explosion of re-enactments of the past, festivals, and special months, weeks, and days. The possibilities, of course, are endless: the starts and ends of wars, the births and deaths of famous people, the first publication of a book or the first performance of an opera, a strike, a demonstration, a trial, a revolution, even natural disasters. And the activity is not all government-inspired; much comes from local and volunteer initiatives. Châlonssur-Marne recognized the centenary of the invention of canning. It is not just in France that communities want to revisit their past: Perth, Ontario, had a week of festivities in 1993 to celebrate the giant cheese that it sent to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. As enterprising local governments and businesses have realized, the past is also good for tourism.

  It is not just about market forces, though. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do. For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is in part a result of our own biology. We have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies our story. Nineteen million people around the world are now signed up to the online service Friends Reunited, which will put you in touch with long-lost friends from the distant past, even from your earliest school days. If we want to go still further back, and an increasing number of people do, we research our own genealogies. Most national archives now have special sections set aside for patrons who are investigating their family histories. Thanks to the Mormons, who collect parish registers, genealogies, and birth records for their own purposes, Salt Lake City houses an enormous worldwide collection of records. The internet has made it even easier, with dozens of sites where you can search for your ancestors, with more specialized ones dedicated to a single family name. In Canada and the United Kingdom, the popular television shows Who Do You Think You Are? cater to our fascination with celebrities and the hunt for ancestors as they trace back, often with surprising results, the family trees of the famous.

  Recent developments in science make it possible to go beyond the printed records. The decoding of DNA means that scientists can now trace an individual’s ancestry back through the mother’s line and can find others with the same genetic makeup. As the databases of information build up, it becomes increasingly possible to see how human beings have migrated over the years. This is important for anyone who wants to go back beyond where the paper trail peters out. It is particularly important for those who never had much of a paper trail to begin with. Those immigrants who came in great waves to the New World in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to escape a miserable and uncertain life in Europe often lost all links with their pasts, sometimes indeed even their old names. For the descendants of American slaves, who lacked even the faintest hope of recovering the path their ancestors followed from Africa and not much more chance of finding out what happened to them once they were in the United States, DNA has suddenly opened the door to self-knowledge. A moving program called African American Lives, which was broadcast by PBS in 2006, looked at the DNA of famous black Americans, Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones among them. Sometimes the results are disappointing: Family stories about the great-grandparent who was descended from kings are often just that—stories. Sometimes there are surprises, as when an obscure professor of accounting in Florida found he was descended from Genghis Khan. Perhaps, thought the professor, he owed his administrative skills to his terrifying ancestor.

  Our fascination with our own histories can be narcissistic—how much time should we spend gazing at ourselves, after all?—but it also comes from the desire to know more about ourselves and the world in which we happen to live. If we can stand back and see our own histories in a wider perspective, then we see how we are not just the products of particular individuals but of whole societies and cultures. If we are members of certain ethnic groups, we may find that we have inherited views on other ethnic groups, and we may find that others regard us in particular ways. History has shaped our values, our fears, our aspirations, our loves, and our hatreds. When we start to realize that, we begin to understand something of the power of the past.

  Even when we think we are striking out in new directions, our models often come from the past. How often have we seen revolutionaries, committed to building new worlds, slip back unc
onsciously into the habits and ways of those they have replaced? Napoleon came to power as the result of the French Revolution, but the court he set up was modelled on that of the displaced Bourbons. The top Soviet Communists lived within the walls of the Kremlin, as the czars had once done. Stalin looked back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as his predecessors, as, I suspect, Vladimir Putin does today. The Chinese Communists scorned China’s traditional society, but their top leaders chose to live right at the heart of Beijing where the imperial court had once been. Mao Zedong himself withdrew into mysterious seclusion, much as the emperors had done over the centuries.

  “Men make their own history,” said Karl Marx, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

  During the Cold War, though, history appeared to have lost much of its old power. The world that came into being after 1945 was divided up between two great alliance systems and two competing ideologies, both of which claimed to represent the future of humanity. American liberal capitalism and Soviet-style Communism were about, so they said, building new societies, perhaps even new human beings. The old conflicts, between Serbs and Croats, Germans and French, or Christians and Muslims, were just that and were consigned, in Trotsky’s memorable phrase, to the dustbin of history. The threat of massive nuclear war, of course, was always present, and from time to time, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, it looked as if the last moment of the planet had come. But it did not, and in the end most of us simply forgot about the danger. Nuclear weapons took on a benign aspect: After all, the balance of terror meant that neither superpower dared attack the other without risking its own destruction. We assumed that the United States and the Soviet Union would remain locked in their conflict, between war and peace, perhaps forever. In the meantime, the developed world enjoyed unparalleled prosperity, and new economic powers, many in Asia, appeared on the scene.