In last week's episode, we talked
about "The People vs. O.J. Simpson," "Downton Abbey,"
the past and history and how they all relate to one another.
Let's see what you had to say.
So before we get into comments themselves, first, a proposal.
A couple weeks ago we did a network wide survey.
PBS Digital Studios made a survey
for all of the audiences of its different shows.
And one of the things that we learned
is that people use Facebook more and more often than we
had actually realized.
And so I am of a mind to start responding
to comments left on episodes of the show on Facebook.
The problem being, there aren't that many comments on them.
So maybe this is more of a request than a proposal,
but if you want to write comments
on the posts for each individual episode on Facebook,
then I will read them and maybe they will end up
in the comment response videos.
What do you think about that?
I think it sounds fun.
OK.
So now, on to actual comments.
On the subreddit, [INAUDIBLE] started a really great
conversation about the nature of truth
as it relates to textbooks versus people who are
telling stories about history.
But I wanted to focus on something
that Bobart the Creator mentioned,
which is how we judge truthfulness
in history textbooks.
I just want to flag this because of the idea
that a history textbook doesn't necessarily have an agenda.
And I want to emphasize that that unfortunately,
at least in the United States it seems--
I'm not sure what it's like in other countries--
is not the case.
There are no shortage of textbooks.
And at least in the recent past, there
have been no shortage of controversies surrounding
the things that end up in textbooks,
end up left out of textbooks, or end up
misrepresented in them because of, it seems,
either the politics of the people
who are writing and publishing them, or what is more likely,
the politics of the market that is
likely to purchase the largest number of these textbooks.
A reason one, and one that a lot of people
might already be familiar with, was a controversy in Texas
where slaves brought to America were described in a textbook
as immigrants and workers, which I would say
is not even a misrepresentation.
That is just factually incorrect.
That is just plain not true.
And then there's other stuff that you
can argue is less egregious but is still really awful.
There was a controversy when I was a kid about a textbook that
devoted, I think, four fewer words
to the entirety of the causes of the Great
Depression than the entirety of the baseball career of Cal
Ripken, Jr. And the whole controversy
surrounding that was about why someone may or may not
want to have a textbook that spends
a significant amount of time discussing
the economic and social causes of a period
of great economic collapse in American history.
And I just want to flag this because I
think it's important for us to always have a reflex.
When we look at something and we think,
oh, well that has less of an agenda,
or because of where it ends up, we
assume that it doesn't have an agenda.
And I think those are the things that
are the most insidious, and worth
just trying to be sure that that is the case,
because I think often it's not.
[INAUDIBLE], also on the subreddit,
writes a really great comment connecting the past history
and game worlds that you create when you're playing a tabletop
roleplaying game.
And I really like this comment, because it
gets to this idea of the like personal experience
or the interior experience of history.
And that there are things that in both situations-- history,
tabletop roleplaying games-- that people
around the table, so to speak, can agree have happened.
People or characters that did exist, events that transpired,
but there's a certain kind of interior experience
of those things that you can't account for.
And that will be different amongst the people who
have experienced them.
And I think the idea of current GM
as historian, in some way, or the keeper of the past,
is a really, really interesting idea.
So this is a great comment.
Thank you for writing this, [INAUDIBLE].
Destiny QX and a bunch of other people
brought up "Hamilton," which is a great, sort
of test case for these ideas about the past and history
and the relationship between getting
at the truth of something, as "Downton Abbey" might,
without necessarily dealing with the complicated nature
of facts.
And I think that there is a lot to talk about, especially
as "Hamilton" relates to the identities of the people who it
portrays and the truth of maybe what they were about,
as divorced from who they are, which I think
is part of, at least, how I understand
the popularity of the show.
But yeah, this was a great comment.
Thanks for writing this.
Links to this one and all of the others in the dooby-doo.
Charlotte-Lucy Holland draws a comparison between history
and mathematics.
And this was actually something that
was in last week's script that got cut.
We ended up going with the comparison
between history and art and historians and artists.
But the other comparison to make is
that history kind of exists in the same weird transcendental
either, or weird transcendental space
that the number five exists in.
You can't point to five.
You can't point to the past.
But there is a set of people who are
able to operate on those things in such a way
that it gives them meaning and allows
them to act in some way for the people who need them.
And I think the reason that we ended up
moving away from that comparison is because we tend
to associate math with logic and the idea
that when you are working with numbers,
you're working with things that are completely divorced
from human input and our feelings and emotions.
Whereas with history, it's impossible to get away
from those things, as is the case with art and art works.
But yeah, I think in so far as their existence,
there is a great comparison to be made between mathematics
and the past, slash, history.
[INAUDIBLE] writes a really great comment
about the relationship between history and archeology,
which I highly suggest reading.
They also let me know on Twitter that there is apparently
some controversy as to whether or not Homer was even one
person, which blows my mind.
I had no idea that there was a possibility that Homer is just
an aggregate for some literary ideals that
existed in the past, which would have been a great thing
to discuss in an episode about the construction of the past
via history in the present.
Man, missed that one.
Too, we take 831 and everyone else who pointed out
that we messed up the Rurouni Kenshin Asset.
We're very sorry.
Ian, our editor, was in the comments
also apologizing, which he doesn't have to do.
It's a team effort here, and it's
just we sometimes just lose track of all of the assets
that we put in the episode.
But that's no excuse.
We should know what we're doing.
We should not be putting things in the episode
unless we're positive about what they are
and where they came from.
And you know, this is a lesson that we've learned now,
four or five times.
So thanks for bearing with us.
Sorry.
Matthew Potter Flint makes music,
and a bunch of other people were surprised
that the episode didn't contain any mention of the very
well-known phrase, history is written by the winners,
or written by the victors.
And the reason it wasn't included is, there's actually,
there's two reasons.
So the first, as Kai [INAUDIBLE] points out,
is that I think it's less and less true.
People like Howard Zinn, blogs like medievalpoc,
and other more skeptical or interventionist practices
of history point out that more and more we
understand that history is not necessarily something that
is reported from the perspective of people who did well
or who were successful.
That it is fundamentally something completely different.
And so the second reason that we didn't mention it
is because I think that there is an ethics to understanding
history that way.
That is, when we start to understand that history is not
necessarily made by people who had access
to the creation of knowledge, who had access to audience,
we can get closer to this idea that history is fundamentally
made from the perspectives of people,
and that it is worth investigating as many
of those perspectives as we possibly can,
not just the winners and not just the victors.
So I hope that that assuages some of the surprise
or upset that we didn't talk about that very idea.
So I would love to know what someone
who was involved in what happened in Ferguson
thinks about the difference between it being called a riot
and it being called something else.
I think it's worth noting that the Wikipedia entry is
titled "The Ferguson Unrest."
Something to consider.
God27dog, we are going to probably do something
like a story dice contest, like we did for the holidays,
but postmodern somehow.
So we'll release that as a Friday video at some point.