TOP 10 SUBJECTS OF HISTORY

 

 

It’s another top ten on the spot, a shorter shallow dip as opposed to a longer deep dive – and in this case intentionally reminiscent of my Top 10 Subjects of Mythology.

And like that top ten, it prompts the obvious retort that’ll be a shallow dip indeed – it’s history, innit? Historical events, people, and places. Historical wars and empires.

 

Or historical babes in the excellent words of Bill and Ted –

“Bill: We gotta go, this is a history report, not a babe report!

Ted: But Bill, those are historical babes!”

 

Setting aside that I do indeed have a historical babe report, history has more permutations than that. I’m not just talking subjects within history, such as the Roman Empire or the Second World War, but getting meta with subjects of history – as history meaningfully overlaps with or includes many other subjects that are interesting of themselves.

The subject of history in its broadest sense is perhaps straightforward enough – “the systematic study and documentation” of the human past or past events. Beyond that, it gets a little tricky with all the permutations of the various subjects of history or even the concept of history itself – so many permutations that, well, you get this top ten.

 

History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

History does not repeat but sometimes it rhymes.

History is just one damned thing after another.

 

I was tempted to add repetition or rhyme, tragedy or farce, and one damned thing after another to the subjects of history from these three of my favorite quotes about it – although I kind of do for one thing after another in my first entry. Speaking of which…

 

 

(1) CHRONOLOGY (TIME)

 

 

It may be basic but chronology – placing events, people, and places in time – is the foundation of history, its skeleton or bare bones.

It can lapse into, as Toynbee quipped, just one damned thing after another – rote repetition of dates, or as Toynbee intended it as criticism, historians who simply seek to chronicle history rather than analyze it.

But it’s hard to analyze history if you don’t chronicle it first – that is, place it in time or in chronological sequence. It’s hard to identify the themes of history – cycles and pattern, plot and rhythm, cause and effect, or in the famous phrase of Toynbee, challenge and response – if you don’t have it in chronological sequence first.

 

 

(2) GEOGRAPHY (SPACE)

 

 

History is as much a matter of placing things in space as it is in time – geography as much as chronology.

I’m not just talking physical geography, the geography of “natural features such as landforms, climates, soils, water, and ecosystems” – although that is surprisingly significant as a recurring factor in history.

I’m talking human geography, the interaction of physical geography with humanity – “human societies, cultures, economies, and political systems, and how they interact with the environment”. You can write whole global histories essentially of human geography, as Felipe Fernandez-Armesto did in “Civilizations: Culture, Ambition and the Transformation of Nature”.

Just to illustrate geography as a subject of history, one need only think of the prevalence of maps in history, extending to entire historical narratives depicted through the medium of a historical atlas or map animation.

 

 

(3) PHILOSOPHY (MIND)

 

 

“History is philosophy teaching by examples.”

The third dimension of history – after placing things in space and time, history is a matter of placing them…in mind.

That is, placing them in thematic narrative – history for which the central theme is identifying, well, the themes of history, its cycles and patterns, its plot and rhythm. History never repeats but sometimes it rhymes.

“History is an academic discipline which uses a narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effect. Historians debate the nature of history as an end in itself, and its usefulness in giving perspective on the problems of the present.”

Ultimately thematic narratives involve philosophy, particularly political philosophy or ideology, as a subject of history – or history as a subject of philosophy.

When it comes to philosophy and history, I have a soft spot for one of the big three classical philosophers, Aristotle, in his “Poetics” proposing “the superiority of poetry over history because poetry speaks of what ought or must be true rather than merely what is true.”

 

 

(4) DEMOGRAPHICS (PEOPLE)

 

“Birth, and copulation, and death

That’s all the facts when you come down to brass tacks”

 

Well that along with numbers and movement of people and populations. Historical nations or states mostly seem fleeting crystallizations among amorphous tribal migrations until overwhelmed by one invasion or another. History also seems to flow to tides of fertility and mortality.

Of course, actually doing demographics for historical periods or populations tends to be highly approximate estimates – indeed, even for our own with all our censuses and other instruments of demographics.

 

 

(5) ECONOMICS (MONEY)

 

“Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God… but they all worship money.”

You could say that history is basically just economics with the first states based on grain agriculture and writing originating as their ledgers or records, ultimately giving rise to written history.

That is only more so with the development of money – indeed, it’s striking how often money in the form of coins is literally an important historical source – and even more so with modern industrialization, coinciding with economics itself as a field of study.

Of course, most pre-modern historical states seem to have only the most rudimentary grasp of economics, such as the Roman Empire and the constant debasement of its currency, and achieving economic growth only through higher population or sacking other states.

Historian Arnold Toynbee “made the case for combining economics and history in his study of the Industrial Revolution” – “I believe economics today is much too dissociated from history…We see abstract propositions in a new light when studying them in relation to historical facts. Propositions become more vivid and truthful…The habits of mind it instils are even more valuable than the knowledge of principles it gives. Without these habits, the mass of their materials can overwhelm students of historical facts.”

Like demographics, however, actually doing economics for historical periods or states tends to be highly approximate estimates.

 

 

(6) ARCHAEOLOGY

 

“You call this archaeology?”

Arguably the archetypal subject of history, although sadly almost entirely unlike its most famous cinematic version, Indiana Jones – fewer Arks of the Covenant or Holy Grails and more painstakingly putting together pieces of pottery. Also, it is as much the province of prehistory as well as history – or even more so since by definition prehistory precedes written records, extending all the way back to the origin of homins.

Where history tends towards the study of written records, archaeology is the study of physical remains or ruins, recovered from or in the locations that preserved them, typically subterranean or underground.

“Archaeology…is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes”.

As such, archaeology supplements history nicely, confirming historical records, or even supplants it altogether, where historical records are deficient or entirely absent.

In looking up archaeology for this entry, I was amused to find out that the first archaeology and archaeologist are now themselves archaeological – Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, discovering and analyzing in 550 BC the foundation deposit of Naram-Sin, ruler of the Akkadian Empire, from 2200 BC.

 

 

(7) ANTHROPOLOGY

 

“Anthropology is a very important field of study.”

“(Laughs) I’m pretty sure someone’s named all the different spiders…”

“That’s arachnology!”

“(Laughs even more) I know – equally huge waste of time.”

 

The cruel jibes of Archer at anthropology aside, you can argue for it as a subject of history to rival archaeology – or vice versa, history as a specialized subset of anthropology.

“Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity…concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past”. The overlap with history is obvious, particularly when it comes to the past.

 

 

(8) SOCIOLOGY

 

From anthropology to sociology – the latter seems as much a subject of history to rival the former, or vice versa, history seems as much a specialized subset of sociology as of anthropology.

After all, a description of sociology is almost identical to that of anthropology, except with social used as recurring adjective – “Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, huma social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life”.

 

(9) PSYCHOLOGY

 

History is just psychology writ large, isn’t it?

The only question is whether it is Freudian or Jungian…

I mean, some of Freud’s books read not so much as individual psychology but collective or historical psychology, most notably Civilization and Its Discontents. Einstein even corresponded with Freud as to the psychological explanation for war. Jung’s concepts are arguably even more so for collective rather than individual psychology – he even coined the collective unconscious as one of his central concepts.

You can take that further by proposing the “psychology” of nations and states, as some historians seem to lapse into doing, or even of entire cultures and civilizations as Oswald Spengler did.

And then there’s historical movements and periods as psychological states. I’ve always had a fascination for mass hysteria in history – and they don’t call it the Great Depression for nothing!

It prompts to mind the (science) fictional psychohistory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, capable of predicting future events down to their precise timing, through mathematics and statistical analysis applied to collective human psychology on a social scale.

Interesting, psychohistory is proposed as a real life field of study – “blending psychology and history to analyze unconscious motives in historical events”.

On the other hand, in the absence of any clinical or formal assessment, psychoanalysis of historical figures can only be estimations or projections, even for those figures with extensive biographical documentation.

 

 

(10) ECOLOGY

 

Arguably a permutation of geography as a subject of history (and vice versa) or placing things in space as well as time – history as a matter of placing things in nature or the natural world.

Alternatively styled as environmental history – “the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa”.

For me, the most interesting aspect of ecology as a subject in history is “the environment as an active agent in history, not just a passive stage, studying phenomena like natural disasters, climate change, and resource depletion”.

And the environment can be an active agent in history, indeed – for example, Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome proposes that Rome fell from climate and pandemic, adversaries entirely different and far more destructive than Rome’s human adversaries to which the fall is usually attributed.

“The subject matter of environmental history can be divided into three main components” – the first as nature itself and its change over time or impact on humans, the second as the human use of and impact on nature, and the third as how people think about nature over time, “the way attitudes, beliefs and values influence interaction with nature, especially in the form of myths, religion and science”.