“I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a good deal of it must be invention”: exclaimed Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, when discussing history. I hope to demonstrate to you and Miss Morland in this often quoted outburst (most famously in E.H. Carr’s book, What is History?) that these prejudices and fears are groundless.
I am biased but I can think of no subject that has improved more in its teaching during the last 30 or so years. At my very traditional English prep school, we were given a list of 100 history dates to learn. Each form had different coloured dates and if you didn’t get a certain mark in the end of term test, you risked punishment, even a beating. As one of my former students bitterly complained: “The trouble with history is that it is just one thing after another”.
Enter any history lesson now at any level and you are confronted by a very different picture. Gone are the obsessions with dates and an endless rote learning of facts about kings, queens and battles. For some years I co-authored a history text book; when I finished my writing, I thought it was all over. We had in fact hardly started; there were illustrations to find, exercises to devise, websites to organise, primary sources (evidence created at the time) to be chased up; and suggestions for visits and other interesting activities to suggest.
Delivery of history has changed too beyond all recognition. No more endless copying down of illegible writing from the blackboard or, even worse, taking down dictation from browning notes. Posters, charts, pictures and other artefacts adorn the walls and other spaces. I took a group recently to the Imperial War Museum and watched as they experienced at first hand a re-enactment of a World War One trench. Video, DVD and tape recorders, video and digital cameras, radio and television have also made a huge difference.
History has also diversified. It is no longer just a straight plod through political history, largely explaining why the world map in the 19th Century was overwhelmingly red. There is women’s history and new areas opening up in studies of sport and recreation, fashion, popular culture, music, leisure, communication and a whole lot else besides.
History brings enormous benefits at all levels – personal, local, national and international. The first thing that any doctor asks when he or she sees a new patient is for their medical record. Family history, helped enormously by new technology, is a boom activity and I know some very sane people who have become totally obsessive about it. Everybody has a history, not just the famous or the infamous.
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