Hi, I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European history and we've done it!
We've reached the end of history or I guess I should say we've reached the present day,
and what a day it is. So today we want to look back on this course to examine history itself.
How did the study of history begin, how has it changed and how will it continue to evolve? And why does it all matter?
So last time we mentioned a book by Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich called an oral history,
which shows a new-ish way of studying the past.
New-ish because it depended on [the] evidence of people's spoken words
and on their memories instead of just written records.
Alexievich valued memories- sad, opinionated, defiant or nostalgic-
as markers of what was historically important.
For example;
how did ordinary people react to events like the Chernobyl disaster or, say, Stalin's regime?
Instead of making Stalin and the people close to him the center of the story,
Alexievich centered the story elsewhere .
and in doing so she showed what life felt like for a much broader range of people
A woman recalled her childhood of intense poverty, living in a mud hut and having for
companions the interesting bugs that crept along the walls.
History hadn't always taken bugs and desperately poor people's lives as its subjects.
Like as you may remember when Crash Course European history began
the hundred or so years war and the Bubonic plague were killing off people
And in those days people noted big events such as
plague or weather disasters because they were seen as evidence of God's work,
and so, back then, history was kind of a calendar that showed what God was doing to us and when.
But not nearly enough about the why!
Why?
Anyway, remember when plagues were a big driver of human history? Stan, can we roll the tape back to 2012?
If some superbug shows up tomorrow and it travels through all these global trade routes
and kills every living human then
globalization will have been very bad for human history.
Yeah, great. Thanks, Stan. If I knew it was coming, why wasn't I prepared?
Right, so away from my existential crisis and back to history.
So historians started out noting what God was doing to us and when and then began
noting the big events of a monarch's reign and royal genealogy.
Which increasingly became the motto of what history should be
a record of what a monarch had caused to happen,
Alongside records of what God had caused to happen.
For generations historians in Europe followed this idea of noting big,
political events and European historians set many of the standards
for doing history that are still in practice today around the world.
And then from around the time of the french revolution and the age of
nation building, history started to lay down several claims about
why we should study history and why history was so important. First history was said to be
objective- based on records found in government archives. Second,
it was an important foundation to the growing nation-states taking shape in the 19th century.
Like imagine that you're a newborn baby nation,
you need to find ways to legitimize yourself to define for instance what it means to be
"French"
And why "France" is a real and legitimate idea. And part of how nations did this was by studying,
and in some ways creating, French history.
The idea was that the nation-state could be
demonstrably truthful because it relied on official documents
about how it came into being and how it replaced absolute monarchs.
So instead of getting its authority solely from God as absolute monarchies had,
the state's authority would come from
objective history, showing the factual historical ties that bound to people together.
That's why in the United States, students study American history
and in France, students study French history;
and alongside studying and legitimizing
the nation-state, historical teaching and writing became a profession.
Increasingly attached to universities and upholding strict standards of truth and objectivity
and these professional historians teaching in universities
and doing research in government church or other archives
devised the seminar method in which they presented documents for their students
to decipher and debate and scrutinize
so that those students could find the true and objective meaning about the workings of politics and government.
The seminar method was most developed in Germany and took place in seminar rooms.
You know, wood panels, fancy fireplaces
the rooms they put in the college brochures and
then you get to the actual college and it's just a bunch of cinder blocks.
Professors sometimes even locked those rooms to keep out the public,
especially women, who might be interested in history
but weren't seen as worthy or capable of studying
the grand formation of nations or the deeds of national leaders.
And yet all the while in the 19th century, there were amateur historians
studying a range of quite different matters,
they wrote about village customs, domestic life, and the work-life of ordinary people like
blacksmiths, or shoemakers or farmers.
In England, the Strickland sisters
wrote hugely popular histories and much-reprinted biographies
of queens and princesses from the middle ages down to their own 19th century.
And so at times, it was amateurs working outside the university system
who brought professional historians into the 20th century.
But also as the industry developed and working-class men and farmers,
and eventually women got the right to vote,
history slowly came to understand that those people's lives were also
noteworthy, and that in fact, they were driving much
historical change not just through their votes, but also through their other choices.
From how women spent money to what kinds of seeds farmers used in their fields.
Let's go to the thought bubble.
In 1897 in the United States, Lucy Maynard Salmon,
a professor at Vassar College, wrote a history of domestic servants and then
Histories of kitchens and cookbooks and the historic sites a pedestrian might see in an ordinary town
she used newspapers as evidence. Some historians found her work unworthy
of her talents as her first book had been a
prize-winning study of an important topic, "The Appointing Powers of the U.S. Presidents".
To them, Salmon seemed to have fallen
that was because the history considered most important,
, which professors and teachers researched and taught, was about treaties and
alliances and the much-loved topic of warfare.
But in this way of teaching history, much was being lost.
War, for instance, wasn't only about generals and their planning.
As Lewis Morton, a famed military historian at Dartmouth College said to his graduate
class, "Anyone can draw a battle plan and its execution." and on the spot
he drew several on the blackboard that students suggested.
"But the real history of war is about the involvement of
society at home and on the fronts, and the policies needed to pursue the war itself."
Thanks, thought bubble.
And so over time history became less a study of individual great geniuses
and the great genius of their battle plans
And more a study of large groups of people working together.
Because in the end
generals without soldiers don't get a ton accomplished.
All right, let's move on to another long ignored kind of person in history: children
But that would change. In 1960, French historian, Philippe Arias produced his classic,
"Centuries of Childhood"
Which argued that love was not necessarily a family value before modern times.
Much of Arya's work is now refuted
But its emphasis on emotion and changing moral values and childhood was very significant.
Meanwhile, notable English historians like E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm
began writing about working-class religion in 1963.
Social and cultural history expanded in the U.S as well,
where Eugene Genovese wrote "Roll Jordan Roll- The World the Slaves Made" which
re-centered historical narratives about slavery
In 1975, Amero-Canadian author Natalie Zeamon Davis presented a picture of the
Charivari- an event in which ordinary people turned the world upside down through social mockery.
Cross-dressing and obscenity. German historians proceeded to
make the study of everyday life not only into historical narratives
But also into a theory of history, complete with a magical German word to describe it-
alltagsgeschichte
I'll remind you by the way that mispronouncing things, especially German things, is my thing
But in all these cases we see history expanding beyond the battlefield or the deeds of the rich and powerful.
Now, some might protest that history should be about the powerful
But even notions of power have changed. In older historical understandings,
power involved the direct force of a king or other ruler on a person or group. Like, think about the command
"Off with his head". I mean that's a real statement of power
If you can say the words, "off with his head" and then someone's head is removed from their body,
that's obviously power.
But it's not the only kind of power, right?
and in modern times, power is often seen as participatory and
moving through society and political power is often seen as participatory, too.
Not just in the form of voting, but also public protest
We're not necessarily powerful in the way royalty once was, but instead as part of a modern
society, power flows through us as we act as citizens or soldiers or patients or
Skateboarders or shoppers or viewers or anything else
we each express our power by participating in systems that in turn have power over us. Whether that's
systems of criminal justice or
Transportation systems. It's critical to understand, however,
that the way those systems function and the way that power flows- is uneven
and unjust. I'm speaking to you amid a global disease pandemic that has reminded us that it's an
Expression of human power to leave the house and also an expression of human power to stay inside
Because how we interact with each other, and right now whether we physically interact with each other,
shapes the way we all end up living.
Or indeed whether we all end up living
So in this new understanding of power flowing through systems and individuals,
Power operates among everyone, and in order to understand the story of humans in the world,
We need to look at more than just political and military leaders.
We've also learned that we can't understand human history without understanding
the forces that act on our history from the outside whether that be
microbes- the most underrated historical force of all time,
or natural disasters. And the history of every community and every region has long been a global history because
For centuries humans have been connected to globalized power systems
in the obvious form of trade and empire and migration and warfare
But also in less obvious movements of world religions cultures diseases
foodways and communication systems
So studying European history
for example, necessitates understanding the world
because Europeans migrated and traded and fought and learned from and with people all over.
For example, the history of France until recently appeared in books as the history of this hexagon
Despite France's involvement with the rest of the world and despite the multi-ethnic nature of the French nation
Now historians are rewriting the history of France to include its colonies and its colonial past
They're also rewriting the histories of world war I and world war II to give
More attention to the horrific facts of those war's eastern fronts and to the experiences of colonial troops
We call this process Revisionism.
As new facts are pointed out through research and as historians become aware
that they have ignored certain truths
they revise the narrative of the past. Making revision a crucial part of achieving historical accuracy
Now it's worth noting that some people provide historical interpretations
that do not accord with the facts. For example,
the belief that Lenin was a sweetheart and then Stalin came along and ruined everything.
Constructing Lenin as some kind of idealistic pacifist
just goes against historical facts.
But humans are sometimes committed less to evidence than to ideology
They may want to hold up the idea of the good in Bolshevik communism
That ideology, that Bolshevik communism was good, then creates the belief
that Stalin's murderous regime perverted Lenin's wholesome communism.
The same kind of loyalty to ideology has been used to minimize or deny the downsides of
Capitalism, or to argue that colonialism was good for the colonized.
But the evidence contradicts all those beliefs. In fact, one way we know that history is important is that
interest groups and legislators often demand textbooks be revised to reflect certain versions of the past
Including versions that do not line up with what we know to be true. The way we understand the past
shapes the way we understand the present and the way we imagine the future.
So I think William Faulkner really was right
when he famously wrote that the past is never dead, it's not even past.
Current historical practice seeks to acknowledge the power of ideology and partisanship
as well as the bias that exists in official documents. So instead current historians try to rely on multiple
evidentiary sources to ascertain truth what actually happened as Leopold von Ranke described history's goal.
and so for current historians and for all students of history, evidence, truthfulness and mindfulness of bias
in our own writing and research,
Mirror the most important values of lawful societies in our age. One thing we try to remember around here,
thinking you lack bias, is one sure sign that you not only have it, but that you aren't aware that you have it.
So paradoxically, the quest for factual truth must exist alongside the recognition of
the inescapability of bias.
As we've discussed throughout this series, so much depends on individual perspective.
History can't eliminate those biases and it can't achieve some kind of factual perfection,
but it can improve our understanding of the human endeavor by helping us to
shift and expand our perspectives
So history is always a work in progress
Thank you for being here with us and for learning with us
Here in the middle of history.
Our crash course in European history has been filmed in the Jaden Smith studios here in Indianapolis.
Huge thanks to this series writer, Bonnie Smith
And curriculum consultant Kathy Keller.
Meredith Danko is our editorial director
Zulejo Razak and Nikki Hua supervised the script.
Stan Mueller shoots and edits the show.
The amazing team at Thought Cafe makes the animation.
Thanks especially to Cody Brown
and thanks to all of you for being here with us and learning with us. As they say in my hometown,
Don't Forget to be Awesome.