So, when it transpired that a generally forgotten (and determinedly locked-up) nineteenth century example – Tarner Folly – was being opened up for the Brighton Festival, I had to take a look. Not only that, but it was also to house an innovative piece of public art called ‘Path of the Echo’, which endeavoured to exploit the unique acoustics of the folly’s inside chamber.

Tarner Folly is a small, flint-studded tower, half concealed by foliage, that sits in the corner of a children’s play area, sandwiched between Kemptown and Hanover on the east side of Brighton. It has not been opened for quite some years, which is a shame because such things get forgotten all too easily. There is a question as to whether it can genuinely be described as a folly, since it appears to have been built as a lookout tower and local myths abound that it concealed the entrance to a tunnel that led to the shore (perhaps suggestive of a smuggling operation). Frankly, I’d say that its correct categorisation is really more a matter for the folly anorak, if such people exist.

Tarner Folly.

However, an enterprising artist had managed to persuade the city’s council to open up the folly for the festival in order to house an experiment that could well be described as an attempt to forge a symbiotic relationship between public art and architectural history. Inside, I discovered, sat a rather ingenious art installation. The artist, Mark Mitchell (no relation), demonstrated that by pulling various ropes and cranks, the apparatus would play a variety of string and percussive sounds, which would echo around the chamber. The installation was almost entirely constructed from ‘found material’ – a admirable recycling effort – although I was told that, in fact, Mark had liberated his flat-mate’s wok for part of the mechanism!

The 'Path of the Echo' installation.

As an exercise attempting to draw in two distinct audiences – the historical community and the artistic one – I thought that the installation worked marvellously well. The trouble with such experiments, though, is that they can be somewhat short-lived if funds of some description are not forthcoming. Thankfully, Mark and the Friends of Tarner (a local historical society) have come together in an attempt to keep the tower open. The idea is to curate the folly as a space for other exhibits, which might be generated by other artists through workshops with local community groups and schools. To bring the tower up to standards of public safety, however, requires funds in the region of £30,000, for which a bid to the lottery heritage fund is being prepared. I can only hope that these efforts to rehabilitate the folly as a valuable piece of history and a unique art-space are successful, since even in straitened times society needs its circuses as well as its bread. Besides, there seems something curiously apt about melding together public art and social history in this fashion. The folly builders of the Georgian age had a far more limited audience in mind, but they too were often inspired to construct their idiosyncratic monuments by a desire to create a dramatic talking-point, an aspiration that seems wholly reflected in contemporary public art.

Taking it further

If the above blog has caught your imagination, you may also find the following resources from The Open University interesting:

High Street History

Explore the hidden corners of your high street and see how history is buried in the everyday environment with our interactive high street history feature.

Learning Space: Brighton Pavilion

On the other hand, if you’re interested in the history of Brighton, then the OU offers you this free Open Learn resource on the Brighton Pavilion – which perhaps could even be called a folly itself!

Related courses from The Open University:

Heritage, whose heritage?

Who decides what should be preserved from the past as our heritage? Who is this heritage for and how should it be presented and explained? How can I engage actively with my heritage and have an impact on it? This course endeavours to answer these questions and to engage with current debates on the preservation of the past.

Art of the twentieth century

If you are drawn to art history more generally, this wide-ranging course discusses developments in the recent past and includes study of all the major twentieth century artistic movements.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts

 

In the past few years, for example, I have been experiencing a certain level of minor social embarrassment when watching plays at the theatre. Not always – I stress – and not caused either by any repellent physiological problem. It occurs solely when I am watching a play written at some time before the last decade or so, and it generally becomes more acute the further back in time the piece was composed.

And the simple fact is that I laugh (or, on one occasion, gasped) when practically nobody else in the audience is laughing (or gasping). This is, I assure you, no inexplicable nervous tic, but rather is entirely down to my profession. Because the thing is that I’m able to contextualize the writing within the period in which it was composed, as I suppose relatively few of the audience can. At The Importance of Being Earnest, this exchange (amongst others) between Jack Worthing and Lady Bracknell struck me – and no-one else – as splendidly ticklish:

Lady B: What are your politics?
Jack: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

"Hahaha," I laughed, amid the silence. Thinking: "That would have been very funny in 1895." Later, however, I was mortified to imagine my fellow audience members wondering of each other who the bloke with the inappropriate cackle was.

This was not a one-off, however, as I have also descended into solo guffaws at The Revenger’s Tragedy, HMS Pinafore, and The Cherry Orchard. And whilst it helps that all of the above (yes, even the Chekhov) have comic moments, that advantage is largely cancelled out if one laughs at the "unfunny’"bits.

Man laughing.
[image by Thomas Hawk, some rights reserved]

At a Shakespeare play this is not quite such a trial. An unaccompanied chuckle at Shakespeare is more like boasting to the audience. As if to say, "I understand the complex language here, that you – poor sap – do not." When the language is much simpler, much more akin to how we speak in the twenty-first century, the solo giggler is immediately marked out as an idiot.

All the same, I wouldn’t be without the understanding that underpins my social faux pas. It has enriched my enjoyment of all art forms hugely. This is not merely a matter of being the jovial twit at the theatre: I could say the same of various poems, songs, paintings, films, or novels. The essential point is that it is history that has opened up such things for me. It is just regrettable that it can cause social side effects of such a laughable kind. 

Taking it further

• The arts past and present
• Film and television history
• Shakespeare: text and performance 
• Repetition and Deviation
  
  
   

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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Now, because of the superficial parallels between 1963 and 2009, you might well think that this blog is going to harp on the common maxim that history always repeats itself. In fact, I don’t think that is true in the great majority of cases. However, the reason I started with that list is to show just how seductive the idea is, and how difficult to challenge. Because, on seeing those ostensibly startling parallels, there emerges a temptation to map the trajectory of 1963-64 onto 2009-10 and to make some predictions based on what happened in the past. Forty-six years ago, the government apparently became mired in ‘sleaze’, antagonised its core supporters, scuppered its relations with the EEC, and subsequently lost the 1964 election to a rejuvenated opposition. All too easy to see how that pattern might repeat itself, right?

Alec Douglas-Home, Prime Minister (1963)
[image © copyright BBC]

Wrong. Whilst that’s one possibility – it is very possible that the Labour Party will lose the next election, for instance – I sincerely doubt that it’s a likely one. If it does, though, then it will be caused by contemporary circumstances; it will not be because history circles around in an unending groove. To understand why, we need two things essential to the historian: intimacy and distance.

The past was different from today. This might sound pretty damn obvious, but it’s surprising how many people don’t take it into consideration. Explaining just how it was different is one of the historian’s jobs; unsurprisingly, we get a bit peeved when journalists and various other commentators seek to do it for us by looking for lazy parallels like the 1963 one. By intimacy, I meant that we must look very closely at the past, to show how it was unlike today. Let’s take some of the points I made above. The winter in 1963 was actually more severe and the snow lasted longer than it is likely to now. Most of the major wildcat strikes in that period were the result of the government’s attempt to impose an incomes policy – they were principally about wages, not jobs. Relations with the Common Market were scuttled by General de Gaulle, not by anything done by administration or public on this side of the channel. Unemployment was generally not tolerated to the extent that it is in 2009: in fact, the figure for those out of work was barely over 600,000. The Prime Minister was replaced, through ill health, later in 1963. And finally, though the government lost the election of 1964, a four-seat majority was hardly a lively endorsement of the opposition. That’s a snap-shot, of course, but nonetheless even from this list we can see that 2009 is far from being a mirror of 1963, whatever the superficial resemblance. Symptoms, to put it another way, are not causes.

Distance, too, is important, because by standing back and viewing the whole vista of the past, we can see how the neat congruence of factors that offer parallels across time may be obscuring other realities. A media culture of complaint, for example, has been a fairly constant escort to British society for a very long time. It may have reached rather shrill peaks in 1963 and again now, but, frankly since the Reformation, Britain has been off to hell in a handcart so often that it is somewhat surprising that the country has conspicuously failed to reach its destination. Other examples come readily to mind. Bar the severe winter and the imminence of a general election, practically every aspect that I outlined to begin with was present in 1981. The Falklands conflict resurrected Margaret Thatcher, but prior to the war the public generally saw her as out of touch, and she undoubtedly presided over a strike wave, a huge surge in unemployment, and magnificently frosty relations with the EEC. And, speaking of frost, Britain has ‘ground to a halt’ under a spell of bad weather pretty regularly in the past – 1947, in the midst of savage rationing and production problems, springs to mind – but it has never generated the level of criticism that would fatally wound a government. The phenomena with which I started have appeared periodically throughout history, at least in the democratic age. Sometimes a handful of them have occurred simultaneously, but they have never brought about exactly the same outcomes.

But I like to be even-handed, and I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that historical parallels are at all times bunkum. One thing that recurs consistently in history is the sort of generic lunacy that occasionally grips the human character. Cupidity is a good stimulant of this – so, in a way, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the railway mania of the 1840s, and the dot.com boom of the 1990s are instances, in a broad sense, of history repeating itself. But even in those cases, we must understand that the circumstances, and the outcomes, of each were somewhat different.

Perhaps a rather more useful way of employing historical parallels is to challenge those policymakers, and I do not mean only politicians, who would serve us up re-heated pottage. So, if a long forgotten policy is suddenly revived by a bright young thing, keen to make his or her mark on the world, it is incumbent upon the historian to ask, ‘if it didn’t work in 1952 (or whatever date), then why should it work now?’ There may be reasons why it could work now – nothing in history is inevitable and, as we’ve seen, it rarely repeats itself – but the question is important to ask nonetheless.

Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make here is to watch out for the easy analogy and the casual comparison – and to shoot them down when spotted. An onerous task, no doubt, but nevertheless one that allows the barely concealed show-off in every historian to shine.

Taking it further

If the above blog has interested you, you may also find the following resources from the Open University to be of interest:

Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics
This course invites you into the world of politics in a fresh and accessible way, using a wide variety of case studies drawn from the UK and beyond. It sheds light on the inner workings of power, decision making, and protest. It covers politics from parliament to the street, and the politics of ideas as well as institutions.

History Lessons: Parts One & Two

My earlier blog covers other common history ‘howlers’.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts

 

Nothing wrong with any of that, I stress: maintaining a viable and interesting national heritage is not just a matter of preserving the physical fabric of long past centuries. It also involves looking after and opening up whatever is culturally significant from more recent accretions to civic life – piers, pubs, sports stadia, and all.

So I was very pleased when recently the Open2 unit asked me to update our innovative web interactive called ‘High Street History’. You may have seen the original: but if not you can access it by following the link at bottom of this blog. What we tried to do was to show the ways in which the past is embedded in the urban landscape, and how that has grown to be so familiar to us that it’s become almost invisible. We chose a number of generic features that are characteristic of practically every town and then sought to explain how we could view them afresh, to glean clues about the tangible way in which the past was lived. Okay, so churches and statues are obvious indicators of history – and we used those too – but you might not expect brickwork, street signs, or public buildings to yield up a similarly rich vein of material. We tried to illustrate these eclectic sources and show what they can reveal to the passer-by with a series of concrete examples. This wasn’t altogether straightforward. I had thought I had a reasonable understanding of urban and architectural history, but it quickly became clear that I barely knew my cornice from my portico.

Rectifying my weak spots required quite a lot of street tramping to take pictures: a task that fell not only to me but also to Rissa, Open2's creative force behind all the neat web stuff that I utterly failed to understand. There ensued a seemingly everlasting phase of filleting our considerable findings - by which I mean tons of photos - to identify the best possible instances of the townscape features which we wanted to explore. The photos I’ve included here are two that, unfortunately, narrowly missed the final cut.

Factory bell, c.1800s.

The first shows what remains of a factory bell pull: but there’s no trace of any such building, even under new usage, nearby. This is the sort of tantalising puzzle that can get the local historian digging around to discover what happened in the vicinity. And, indeed, I discovered – by rooting through the local Victoria County History – that there had been a factory making lead goods built there in the late eighteenth century. It appeared to have been demolished to make way for a playground in the early 1980s.

The second is completely different. It's a cinema built before the First World War, but which you could easily mistake for a 1930s creation because of the radical overhaul to its frontage just before World War II. Such phenomena are revealing about past shifts in public and artistic tastes and we made sure that we delved a little deeper into them in the interactive.

Phoenix cinema, 1930s façade.

Whilst I think that the original interactive did a good job and fulfilled its brief, it did nonetheless lack a little regional variation. For some reason, the project budget didn’t stretch to me undertaking a national tour to find good photographs, so rather a lot originated from a two mile radius around my home. Another slight limitation was that I didn’t perhaps make as much of heritage issues – what’s of value? what deserves saving? – as I should have done.

The new, expanded interactive, which we’re preparing for an autumn launch, overcomes these shortfalls with a much wider geographical remit and some ideas on critical topics such as the public commemoration of war. I hope that it represents a solid attempt to show the history that’s ubiquitous around us and to engage more crisply – albeit in a prècised way – with the sort of heritage debates that frequently emerge into the public eye. Do by all means have a look at the interactive now, but also remember to check back (the link will be the same) to see how it’s altered. 

Taking it further

If this blog has interested you, the following resources from the Open University should also appeal:

High Street History
Explore the hidden corners of your high street and see how history is buried in the everyday environment with our interactive high street history feature.

Heritage, whose heritage?
Who decides what should be preserved from the past as our heritage? Who is this heritage for and how should it be presented and explained? How can I engage actively with my heritage and have an impact on it? This course endeavours to answer these questions and to engage with current debates on the preservation of the past.

Cities and Technology: From Babylon to Singapore
This very wide-ranging course uncovers the interactions between technological development and the growth of urban living from the ancient world through to the present day. It scrutinises in detail the applications of major technologies – in particular building construction, transport systems, energy sources, and communications. It is designed to develop critical skills such as comparative analysis and the use of historical models of urban development.

Commemoration and history
Go to Open Learn, our selection of free-to-use educational material online. This link offers you a chance to explore debates over the public commemoration of war.

History in decay
A previous blog examines the issue of history’s presence in the physical fabric of urban life from a somewhat different perspective.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts

 

I didn’t, however, find these places depressing. I thought them fascinating, beautiful even. For shabby and unrestored areas offer to the historian a quite unique glimpse into the past. Let me explain: both Clacton and Haw Par Villa are examples of the development of a modern leisure industry in the early twentieth century, albeit in wildly different parts of the globe. The one is typical of the seaside towns created by the expansion of British working class leisure time and holidays in the handful of decades either side of Queen Victoria’s death – the inter-war entrance to its pier, with its sly little Deco windows, is testament to that. The other, meanwhile, is really not typical of anything at all, but was nonetheless enormously popular when it opened in the 1930s and much of its subject matter (which includes vast concrete tableaux of Buddhist legends and morality tales) is of intrinsic interest to anyone wishing to see how Chinese culture has been transmitted around the world by its nationals.

And it is precisely its decayed state that makes each so valuable for historians. Buildings are no less informative than textual sources in the study of history (it depends on what you want to know!) and can similarly be analysed by historians’ techniques. So these would be, of course, primary sources no matter what condition they were in. Because they are largely unrenovated, though, then with a little imagination and background knowledge we can gain a more genuine idea of what such places were like in their heyday. We can gauge the types of amusements that drew masses of working people from East London to the Essex coast to take their holidays in the middle years of the twentieth century. Or we can imagine the influence of Chinese cultural values on Haw Par Villa’s visitors juxtaposed with those of the ruling British imperial élite in the years before World War Two. Renovation and even restoration – if not done with extreme care – can add often impenetrable layers of extra meaning to properties. It was invigorating, therefore, to see things that are much closer to raw history.

Such faded marvels also allow the historian to pose questions about changes in fashion and practice in the years since they were first constructed. I found myself reflecting on why these places had avoided the ubiquitous momentum of modernisation. In Clacton, I saw practical manifestation of the annual seaside holiday’s decline in Britain: but what had replaced it? And why was our cab driver so surprised when we told him that we were going to Haw Par Villa?

I should, nonetheless, finish on a note of caution – because historical interpretation is rarely easy (that’s what keeps historians in their jobs). Although Haw Par Villa and Clacton’s waterfront both have many things to tell us about the times at which they were built, and though they come quite close to the concrete, unrefined form of the past, neither has been left entirely untouched since the 1930s. Things will have been damaged, moved, re-painted. The odd nod to a new fad will have been added here and there. In the case of Clacton, indeed, it is very much the case that more contemporary advertisements, slogans, and diversions co-exist with far older ones. Even these examples, wonderful though they are, are not preserved in aspic. They require filleting before we can make sound historical judgements on them: but at least these run down, untouched, decayed spectacles can give historians a decent head start.

Taking it further

If the above blog has intrigued you, you may also find the following resources from the Open University to be of interest:

High Street History
Explore the hidden corners of your high street and see how history is buried in the everyday environment with our interactive high street history feature.

Heritage, whose heritage?
Who decides what should be preserved from the past as our heritage? Who is this heritage for and how should it be presented and explained? How can I engage actively with my heritage and have an impact on it? This course endeavours to answer these questions and to engage with current debates on the preservation of the past.

Cities and technology: from Babylon to Singapore
This very wide-ranging course uncovers the interactions between technological development and the growth of urban living from the ancient world through to the present day. It scrutinizes in detail the applications of major technologies – in particular building construction, transport systems, energy sources, and communications. It is designed to develop critical skills such as comparative analysis and the use of historical models of urban development.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts

 

1. Global warming is a real, man-made phenomenon that threatens the future of the planet.
2. The spread of democracy is the only way, in the long run, to ensure a more stable and peaceful world.
3. It is inevitable that China will become the world’s next economic global superpower.
4. Obesity in the UK is set to reach epidemic proportions in the next couple of decades.
5. British international sporting teams (especially in football, cricket, and rugby) are suffering from a lack of talent because of increasing numbers of foreign players in professional club sport.

I hope you agree that what each assertion has in common with its neighbours is that it is, if not universally, then at least widely believed (in Britain, anyway) at present. Indeed, perhaps you agreed with all of them; certainly it’s likely that you believe some. And you would not be in the least stupid to do so: they all seem perfectly plausible. There is, though, a reasonable chance that at least one of them will be proved wanting in the future. I have no idea which, though I have serious doubts about at least two of them.

Now, since this blog is about the lessons of history, does that discipline offer any indications about the truth of our five cases? Or does it suggest appropriate ways in which humankind should respond to any of these? No, it doesn’t.

To begin with, there are really no comparable situations in history that can enlighten us about things like global warming or obesity in Western Europe. But, even if analogous circumstances had existed in the past, they would – as I said in the first part of this blog – surely tell us very little about the ‘right’ courses of action that should be taken in each of the above instances. And yet I insisted that history does offer its pupils lessons, and I’ll go so far as to say that these lessons can be applied to this whole series of paradigms. To explain why, I’m going to ask you to think like a sixteenth century Christian for a second. Okay…are you in a suitably renaissance frame of mind?

Now: does our planet go round the sun, or does the sun go round the earth? If you said the former, then perhaps you’re not thinking hard enough. An ample majority of people – if they thought about it at all – believed the latter. Indeed, the heliocentric view of the heavens was considered to be heretical (as Galileo found to his cost in 1633), since it appeared to contradict Biblical scripture. Though Galileo was not the first to challenge the ascendant view, he was certainly the most famous and influential of those who sought to disprove geocentrism. But that did not mean that his theories were accepted quickly – in fact, the Catholic Church did not officially accept them until two centuries after his death. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in destroying a presumption that millions of people in the sixteenth century (and beyond) took for granted, and he is correctly held to be one of the founders of modern science in consequence.

Maybe renaissance Europe is too distant to picture – so let us move to late eighteenth century Britain. It was around this time that the established theory that explained the spread of disease (contagion: that is, that disease was passed from one person to another) began to be replaced by the notion that sickness was the product of polluted air. In a very simple sense, diseases came from ‘miasmas’: dirty environments, bad smells, and so forth. Admittedly, small numbers of contagionists remained, but by the 1830s the miasma hypothesis dominated scientific thinking: being happily repeated as established truth in the press, government reports, and all manner of media. But, as we now know, this belief was wrong. It was not until the work of sceptical pioneers like John Snow (who identified the water-pump that was dispensing neat cholera to the residents of Soho in the 1850s) and Louis Pasteur that germ theory began to overturn the prevailing paradigm.

Perhaps those two examples are too scientific, so let me give you an illustration in a socio-political vein. From the eighteenth through to the early twentieth century, it was commonplace for the residents of western European countries to assume that African societies were ‘naturally’ uncivilised and that there was practically no chance of Africans ever being able to govern themselves in a democratic manner. Though this view is, rightly, repugnant to today’s world, it was so obvious to those who lived barely a century ago that it was hardly challenged at the time. Even celebrated philanthropic reformers – William Wilberforce in 1807, say, or August Bebel in Germany almost a century later – would have unblinkingly accepted that African peoples were inferior and unlikely to be able to run their own affairs. They may have been concerned to diminish the shocking exploitation of Africans, and justly they are praised for their campaigns, but they were nonetheless confined in the mental prisons of their age.

I confess that the three cases above are little nuanced, having of necessity been boiled down to their rudiments, but nonetheless each hints at one of the most important lessons of history. What is it? I am claiming that people in the past were markedly more stupid than we are now and thus we are superior to them? Far from it. In fact, any pride in present day sophistication versus historical dim-wittedness is almost as much a capital sin in history as it is in Christianity. True, I have been trying to show that human beings have believed things in the past which we would now consider spectacularly mistaken. But what I hope I’ve also signalled is that such opinions were widely held – precisely as those ideas with which I started are believed now. Moreover, miasma theory, geocentrism, and assumptions about African inferiority were only overturned by a slow process of challenge and argument. And it is in this that one of the foremost lessons of history lies. For, unless we succumb to the arrogant idea that we have somehow become infallible in the early twenty-first century, it must surely be likely that some presently commonplace notions will prove unfounded. If that’s the case, history’s lesson must be that we should – individually and collectively – cultivate a frame of mind that encourages us to question generally accepted ‘truths’. This is not to advocate unbridled cynicism. Since, say, the reality of global warming is based on the best information that human beings currently possess it would be unwise not to calculate – for the time being – on the basis that it is true. Rather, it is to acknowledge that without a mindset of reasoned scepticism human beings have often been herded down blind passages, where they await directions from a John Snow or a Galileo Galilei. History reminds us to try to think like them. 

Taking it further:

If the above blog has intrigued you, you may also find the following courses from the Open University to be of interest:

Medicine and Society in Europe 1500 -1930
This course traces the development of medical knowledge and its application from the early modern period through to the twentieth century. It is not just a straightforward history of medicine. Instead, it shows how western medicine interacted with ideas from contemporary science and religion and demonstrates its deep impact on European societies.

Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900
The problems and methodologies of history are well covered in this OU course, which gives students a very broad introduction to the study of history. It highlights three big historical themes - changing beliefs, producers and consumers, and state formation - and looks at how they altered from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. Amongst the topics covered are slavery and the slave trade, the European Reformations, Imperialism, the French Revolution, and the Wars of the Roses. 

The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500 - 1800
Why did modern science develop solely in Europe, and then only in some parts rather than others? This module attempts to answer these fascinating questions with a survey of scientific development from the Renaissance through to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Along the way, it looks also at the roots of European science in Arabic and Chinese scientific cultures.

You might also be interested in the programme 'Blame and historic injustice' from the podcast series Ethics Bites

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts

 

Both statements were thoroughly understandable, but just as thoroughly wrong. In the case of the former, it was easy enough to point out that if the British state had more effectively ‘appeased’ the dictatorships of Stalin and Mussolini then World War Two would likely have been averted. And if nothing else, the late success of the Northern Ireland peace process seems to have mortally undermined the latter. (Though I’m not suggesting that governments should in consequence be assiduously soothing the fits of all tyrants or laying on tea and biscuits for the most deranged terrorist.) Those two old saws are less repeated these days, thankfully. Still, my suspicion has lingered that, for many people, history’s utility lies in the great social and moral prescriptions it can allegedly offer its students.

I decided to test this hypothesis with a small experiment, which you may like to try yourselves. I googled the phrase ‘the lesson of history’, to see what the world’s favourite search engine would come up with. And I must admit that amongst the almost 65,000 results were several that appeared quite sensible, or at least arguable. Nevertheless, history was also conjured up to defend a whole variety of dubious proclamations. The panoramic seemed in vogue:
"The inevitable lesson of history is that, when you change just one thing, you end up changing everything."

As did the audacious:
"The lesson of history is that there is no economic force on this globe that is stronger than free people and their desire to create a better life."

And even the potentially hazardous got a good look in:
"The lesson of history is that when doctors start telling patients what they should and should not eat, patients would be well advised to ignore them."

However, what struck me was the continuing popularity of the type of prescriptive assertion sprung from the same seed as truisms about resisting dictators or defying terrorists. For instance, what did history have to say about one of the most debated contemporary issues - the conflict in Iraq? It seemed from my results pretty clear that history required America’s troops to stay in:
"The lesson of history is that walking away will cost more, whether in Iraq or elsewhere."

Or get out:
"The lesson of history and the solution [to problems in Iraq] is pretty simple: The US has to withdraw."

And history’s prevarication on contentious topics did not end there. The capricious sprite incessantly served up contradictory advice. It taught us that free trade was the best solution to world poverty, although it was only ever beneficial for rich people; that dictatorships were always ephemeral, but likely to be long-lived without foreign intervention to remove them; and that America’s military strength was a mighty deterrent to and cause of war. In short, history was evoked to support all manner of idiosyncratic, hectoring, or unshaded opinions. (I’m not denying that some of these opinions might contain a little truth, but what they’re not is ‘lessons of history’.) 

What does this tell us about the discipline, though? Does it simply lend weight to the idea (also fashionably repeated in my Google search results) that history provides us with no lessons at all? That - beyond the subject being rich, complex, and interesting in its own right - there is no reason to study it? Has history no social function? As it happens, history does provide ‘lessons’ for those who care to study it, although they are hardly ever of the rigid prescriptive kind that I’ve been talking about above. What some of them are will be the subject of the next part of this blog.

Taking it further:

Related courses from the Open University:

Total war & social change   - explore the relationship between war and the transformation of society that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. You’ll examine questions about possible relationships between total war and social, cultural and geopolitical change, and includes topics such as: European governments; societies and armies in 1914; the nature of warfare and differences in the conduct of those wars; social developments in Western democracies; the holocaust; the division of Europe after World War II; women and war; film and propaganda; and war, literature and the arts.

Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900 - the problems and methodologies of history are well covered in this OU course, which gives students a very broad introduction to the study of history. It highlights three big historical themes - changing beliefs, producers and consumers, and state formation - and looks at how they altered from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. Amongst the topics covered are slavery and the slave trade, the European Reformations, Imperialism, the French Revolution, and the Wars of the Roses.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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