Stories About the Past I 2024

Thank you for joining me for this lecture. Stories about the past. This is part one. My name is Mark Brandon. I'm a history professor at the University of New York in Prague. I've been teaching modern American, European, and world history for over 20 years. This is the book I published recently, "The Perils of Race Thinking." It's about the history of the United States and Central Europe in the interwar period.

I want to say a few things about what I think are some serious misconceptions about history. First of all, my students come to my classes, and I think they have some very bad misunderstandings about the historical discipline and how it works. And I think it probably hurts their grades. Secondly, I think that misunderstanding or misconceptions about history are very seriously poisoning our public discourse.

The misconception, if I can explain it, is something like this: History is this list of facts, and they're certain, and everybody agrees upon them. And all you have to do is memorize and learn them because they're true and they're unchanging. Of course, that's followed by this presumption that because history is a list of facts that everybody agrees upon, it's this very safe armory of weapons that you can use in a political discussion to to win an argument. You can use historical facts that everybody agrees upon, and you'll decisively win in a political argument. Maybe in the pub.

And maybe if I continue to describe this misconception a little bit, there's this idea that there's the objective true history found somewhere in some sacred book, and it never changes. And but there are these evil people, these revisionists. I've been called a revisionist, by the way, and they change history with their subjective personal interpretations, and that's bad. I think this reflects a serious misunderstanding of what historians do.

Now, I want to say, when we're in a heated political discussion, almost none of us ever quote facts from the discipline of physics, do we? Maybe some of you do, but most of us don't. And the reason is, most of us are smart enough to know that we have no idea what the hell physicists do. And I want people to respect history a little bit, too. Uh, a lot of people don't really know what historians do.

Now, I do want to say, I I think I I want history to be approachable. I am I like amateur historians. I like do-it-yourself history. I think all my students should study history for themselves. So I think it's more accessible than physics. But I also think, well, the best way to do this is just to try to explain to you what historians do. Where do those supposedly certain facts come from? How do we get what people think of as historical facts? And so I'm just going to tell you, and then you can see what you think.

First of all, I, and I've thought about this a lot. I've had lots of discussions and arguments with my friends. I think historians are storytellers. We tell stories, and we like to tell good stories. And so right away, that is a subjective decision. When you, when you choose which story you want to tell, you say, "I want to write about this," and "I don't want to write about this." That's your personal subjective decision. And I think the best thing historians can do is tell a good story that is interesting, and yes, maybe entertaining, and also meaningful. I think that's important for as many people as possible.

When you go to graduate school as a historian, you're always told the first historian was this Greek guy named Herodotus, and he wrote a book called "The Persian Wars." Maybe that's a little bit Eurocentric, but okay, let's go with it. Let's just think for a minute, why did Herodotus tell the story of the Persian Wars? And I'm not going to get into all the details about the Persian Wars, but just look at the map. Persia was a massive, rich, powerful empire with a huge army. Look how tiny Greece is. The Persian Wars is the story of the little Greeks, who didn't even like each other very much, unifying and coming together, brothers in arms, and fighting off two massive invasions from the Persians. And we like those kinds of stories. That's a really good story. It's not a story about some boring peasant who lived a completely unknown and uninteresting life on a farm outside of Athens. No, it's about something that's interesting to a lot of people. And as a historian, my feeling is, you always choose what you're going to write about, and that's always a subjective choice. So you might as well choose something interesting that people are going to like and be entertained by. Why not? And good for you if you can have a New York Times bestseller. It's really, really hard to do. If you can write that well and entertain that many people, good for you. That's a good historian.

Anyway, I could go on at length about that, but I wanted to say something else about this. Remember my main argument? I want to argue against that idea that history is just this list of objective facts. And so I'm trying to say, look, historians choose what stories they want to tell. They're storytellers. They can't escape that. That's what we are.

Well, let me try to give a counter-example. So, just imagine you wanted to try to write a history of World War II and just list all the facts that happened without any commentary or interpretation. I tried to do it when I was about 11 years old. I got some history books out. I said, "I'm going to write the history of World War II, and I'm going to start with day one, all the facts, just the facts." I never finished. And now that I'm much older, I know that nobody ever will finish such a book. They'll never get through day one. And the reason is that an infinite number of things happened on day one, or at least practically speaking, an infinite number of things happened. You could never list them all. You have to choose which ones you think are important and which ones you don't think are important. And by the way, here's another thing to make it complicated: it's an interpretive, subjective decision when you decide which day is day one of World War II. If you're in China in Manchuria, it might be 1931. If you're in Czechoslovakia, it might be 1938. If you're in the United States, it might be 1941. It depends on what you think is important. Historians always choose which stories they want to tell. So why not tell an interesting, entertaining story? I think meaningful is also important. And why not just recognize that that's a subjective choice?

I always tell my students, facts are infinite. There's an infinite number of facts. You always choose the ones that you think are important, and that's a subjective choice. Now, I know, because I've walked through this in discussions with students many times, I know what I think I know what people are thinking next. So, is it all just made up? What's the difference between a historian and just, uh, somebody who writes detective fiction novels? Do historians just make everything up? And the answer is no.

So, follow, let's go back along the, follow the line of argument. Historians are storytellers. We tell stories. In that sense, we're like a novelist. But we don't just go down into the cellar and make up a fiction story, science fiction. You just don't make it up. Historians are storytellers, but we have special rules that we have to follow when we tell our stories. And here's the rules: The stories have to be built on the critical examination of primary sources. And it's going to get fun because there's tons of problems with primary sources that I want to talk about. But so we tell stories, and the stories have to be pieced together based on the critical examination of primary sources.

What are primary sources? It could be a complicated discussion, but for today's lecture, let's just make it simple. They are written sources that, they might not always be written, but let's just go with that. They're written sources that come from the period that you are studying. So if you're studying World War I, there are sources written between 1914 and 1918. They might look like this. If you study modern history, which I like, there's a lot of published books. You can download the PDFs online. This is "The Eva." This is a book written in the 1920s by the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk. I bought it at a secondhand bookstore in the Czech Republic. They also might look like these that I have displayed for you. I just pulled these out of my files. These are really nice. By the way, I should say, these are archival sources, which if you really want to study history, you're probably going to end up in an archive. But I'll just say, I've seen any historian has seen, has seen this. This is really nice handwriting, by the way. This is very nice manuscript. You should see something. It gives you an example of what primary sources look like. Usually, the more primary they get, the harder they are to understand and read. Anyway, so now you know what they are.

And another thing, and this is maybe the most important thing of the whole lecture that you have to know: All the only way to answer historical questions is by studying primary sources. All historical questions have to be answered by primary sources. This is an old Latin phrase that goes back to the Renaissance: "Ad fontes," back to the sources. Always have to go to the most original sources. So if, if you're studying physics, right, you get a list of axioms that you work with. Or math. In history, the primary starting point, the primary rule is, all historical questions have to be answered in primary sources.

So, and I've had this discussion with students a lot. You might have theories about history that you think make good sense to you. Let me, I tried, I could think of lots of examples. I tried to think of a good one. Earlier in my career, I was very interested in the question, why did people in the Middle Ages, all the way up until maybe the Enlightenment, why did everybody believe in the supernatural? From the most uneducated peasant up to the most important university professor, they all believed in witches, they all believed in magic, they all believed in the supernatural. I don't want to get into it. Well, why? I think a lot of people would say, well, it's because the Roman Catholic Church used a kind of propaganda to brainwash them all. And look, that's a very viable hypothesis. You'd get away with saying that in a room full of professors. It's kind of a smart interpretation. It doesn't matter. In history, you have to find primary, you have to use primary sources to make an argument for that hypothesis. So that Catholic Church, we're very influenced. Well, I won't, I could go on about that. But the Catholic Church brainwashed people, and that's why they believed in the supernatural and miracles and witches and all of that. So that's a very smart hypothesis. I think probably it's, to some extent, true. But it doesn't matter. You have to go into an archive somewhere and illustrate that somehow using primary sources. And I promise you, that's going to get way more complicated than you think. Because there's tons of literature on it. It's going to get much more complicated than you realize.

So, it, what I'm saying here is, it doesn't matter if you have what you think is a common-sense theory that answers your questions about history. It doesn't matter for the historian. The only way to answer that question, "Why did people believe in the supernatural?" is you have to make an argument based on primary sources. By the way, it doesn't matter what other, in the end, it doesn't matter what authorities say about it either. It doesn't matter what other historians say, say about it. You should read what they say and be interested, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is what the argument you can make based on the primary sources.

Now, I spent a long time on that, and believe me, I could go on. But I hope you see that the idea of history is a list of facts. I hope that's starting to get really complicated for you. Historians tell stories. They tell stories based on primary sources. All historical questions have to be answered with arguments based on primary sources. Maybe that's the best way to say it. And then once you realize that, then you start to see all the incredible problems with primary sources. There's tons of them. I can only give you a few.

First of all, if you study ancient history, there's simply not enough. There's too few. There's too little. I could give lots of examples, but if you've ever studied anything in ancient history, we know there are things that are referred to in ancient texts, but we can't, and so we know they existed, but that, but you can't verify it because there's not enough sources. They don't exist. Maybe I'll put it like this: way over thousands of years, it's kind of a histor, it's kind of an accident. Some things survive. Obviously, some things were destroyed by fire, or, um, sources disintegrated over time, they were destroyed. Um, new things are discovered. New caches of primary sources are discovered in the sand sometimes. And so that means, let's say, we're always wondering what was there that we don't know about. And we always have to live with that. Anyway, I could talk about that for a long time and probably give better examples, but I'm more interested in modern history.

So, the printing press was invented in 1450, and by 1500, you know, the printing presses are maybe not on every continent, but they're all over the place. By around 1500, and there's cheap paper. And I could talk about this for a long time, too. But any historian knows that now there's too many sources. And then you move into the modern age, and in the 19th century, everybody had a printing press. And so, or the historian, practically speaking, we're talking about archives that are just stuffed full of data, those facts, right? And anybody that's honest that's ever been to a big archive will tell you, there are things in there that nobody has ever seen. And who knows what they are? They might, you might have to rewrite the textbook if somebody actually found some of the documents in there.

And so I'll tell you something about that, a little secret. Is like, I don't like when historians pretend to be objective. Because nobody ever goes to, let's say it another way, when you're a historian and you have two weeks in the archive, you always go there looking for something. You don't waste your time there. You're looking for something. And this is what people talk about. It's called confirmation bias, right? Like we, as humans, always seem to find the evidence we're looking for to prove our point, don't we?

Now, um, well, let me add something to that, too, that you should know that I think historians talk about and know about. When you have masses of information like an archive, somebody arranged all of that. And when they arranged it, what they did, I've talked to archives, I know it, like they, it's people discuss it and argue over it. What you do is you organize the material and you say, "This is important," and "This is not." And there, you can't avoid doing that. And so when you go to the archive, you don't look at every document. You get a list, a catalog of what's in the archive. And the way that's organized influences things that you look at. By the way, I would just add, that's exactly what happens with internet searches. They are not neutral. They are biased and subjective. Somebody, somehow, through an algorithm, organizes what is thought to be important and what is thought not to be important. And by the way, AI does this on steroids. Somebody somewhere, or something, is organizing the information so that what you see is what they, or it, thinks is important. Anyway, I could go on forever.

But the next problem we have, I have to be a little quicker, don't I? Is evaluating sources. And this, this is a lot of what historians do, and it gets really complicated. So, the very most fundamental level, you can't just believe everything you read. People lie. People lie in publications. People lie in private correspondence. And lying is really complicated because people don't always lie. They say what they think is true based on the evidence that they have, but it turns out to be wrong. They're misinformed. People contradict each other. If sources, different sources, just because you find it in, it's all, it's exciting to go in the archive and read manuscripts, private correspondence to people, and you, but it doesn't mean you believe it. You have to somehow critically evaluate it. And that's incredibly complicated as well. And I won't even, and I just want to introduce you to it and let you know about the problem.

And then understanding the sources. So if you really go on a quest to answer a historical question, you have to go all the way to the primary sources. And some of those are going to be easy, like a book like this one that I showed you. Some of them are going to be really hard, like the manuscripts that I've shown you. And you're going to run into foreign languages. And, um, you're going to run into destroyed manuscripts that, or burned in a fire, or manuscripts that, there's a big hole in the middle of it, and you can't read part of it. I have a, a friend who's an archivist, and I, I remember looking in a manuscript from the 16th century, and I remember him looking at it like this. And look, a professional archivist trying to figure out what the manuscript says because the handwriting is hard to read. And then you're not only using sometimes exotic languages, but exotic dialects. So that the people who speak those languages don't even understand some of the phrases. And then you're also, when you look at sources, you're jumping into a different culture that's gone. People are dead, and they have all kinds of code words and jokes and innuendos that, and they talk about things that we don't know anything about and don't make any sense to us. It's like anthropology. It's an exotic culture that you don't know. And so, and then you have the problem of two historians can read the same source and come to different conclusions. Even with published sources, let alone manuscripts.

I just want to introduce you, right? I said the physicist, we don't know what the hell physicists do. And I'm trying to tell you, people don't know what the hell historians do. Do they? This is how you get your facts that you think are so certain. So primary sources. Let me just recapitulate. Historians tell stories. They're not any kind of stories. They're stories based on, they have to be based on the critical examination of primary sources. All historical questions have to be answered by primary sources. Primary sources are full of problems and ambiguity and places for error and confirmation bias and mistakes. And that's how you get those things that you think are such certain historical facts. That's the way, that's the story behind it.

Now, there's secondary sources. What are secondary sources? Secondary sources are basically historians telling stories based on primary sources. These are the books you buy about history. They're historians telling stories based on the critical examination of primary sources. Some are very good. So I want to start there. This is an old book. I'm kind of embarrassed I never read it. A friend told me about it. "Battle Cry of Freedom." It's about the American Civil War. Can't put it down. It's a wonderful history book. You should read it. From the 1980s. I love the works of Eric Hobsbawm. "Age of Extremes." But he wrote many great books. I love Eric Hobsbawm. Great writer, great historian. I love the work of Fran De Waal. On, I like Frank De Waal as a person. I don't know, on podcasts. This book's very well written, very interesting about a topic most of us miss. Great Famine. There's a trilogy on, uh, Mao's Communist China to blow your mind. It's great history.

Secondary sources. These are mostly professional historians who tell us stories by piecing together and critically examining the primary sources. Some are very good. Um, and I'll recommend them. Some are dreadfully boring. And I've literally thrown some of them across the room in anger. I want to be fair to my historical colleagues. Just think about how hard it is. And I don't want to be a complainer, but all those things that I just told you, you have to have all those skills. And that's a lot of work. It takes a lot of very precise, detail-oriented thinking. And the kind of people that can do that are a lot of times not the kind of people who can write beautiful prose. To put all of that together, fantastic historical research plus exciting, captivating prose. That's art. That really is art. To put it together in a story that is interesting for and meaningful to as many people as possible. That becomes a New York Times bestseller, like books by, uh, Brockman. That's an art. And by the way, I do believe history is an art that requires a lot of creativity. And I respect and admire those historians that can do it. And I don't like the historians that complain, "Nobody ever listens to me." Um, I haven't written a New York Times bestseller, so I'm at the bottom end. But I'm not jealous. I'm respectful of the historians that are able to do that. Good for them. They deserve to be famous and make lots of money because it's a, it's magic. It's an art.

Anyway, next we get to textbooks. I think we're done with. Oh, I need to say one more thing about secondary sources. Historical questions cannot be answered by secondary sources. Historical questions are answered by primary sources. They're not answered. You don't get the answer by reading a good secondary source. It's not the final answer. And I need to tell you this: historians in the secondary sources, they disagree with each other strongly. They sometimes, they read exactly the same primary sources and disagree about them. You need to know that. It's not a list of certain facts. It's arguments based on primary sources about which different historians disagree strongly, sometimes about very fundamental things.

Now we can move on to textbooks. Notice something with textbooks. We're now two steps away from primary sources. So the way you answer historical questions is primary sources. You take a step further away, and you read secondary sources. And now you go one step further away, and you're in textbooks. And that's important to understand because of the irony of how, and also university classes, like the kind I teach. It's important to understand that because of the irony about how people think of textbooks in university classes. People think of the textbook as the authoritative answer, as the end of the quest, right? You're in an argument, and you look it up in the textbook and get the answer, and that's the end. You've got the wrong idea of textbooks and classes, too. What the professor said, textbooks and the classes you take in university are the beginning, not the end. They're where you start the quest.

And you know, textbooks usually are written by a bunch of historians who write secondary sources. So a lot of times they're telling you about current trends in historical interpretation. So they're about the secondary sources. So the textbooks have a bibliography, and they take you to the secondary sources. And the secondary sources have a bibliography, and they take you to the archive. And that's where you answer your questions. I don't even know for sure why we need textbooks anymore because we have the internet. In fact, a lot of text, what you can probably find for free on the internet. And I'm okay with that. I know probably a lot of, I know this will shock probably a lot of professional academics, but I'm a fan of Wikipedia. I go to Wikipedia all the time because I know what it is. It's the beginning place. It's not that I use it for authoritative answers. I don't know if authoritative answers really exist. Anyway, but it's a place where I read about it. I'm skeptical. I go down to the bibliography and I follow the links. And sometimes I end up with primary sources. You can, that can happen from Wikipedia. So I'm not against it.

I also want to say, I really like textbooks. I know that sounds like it contradicts what I just said, but there's some great textbooks. I actually think some of my favorite textbooks are old. I love this one. I used it a lot when I started teaching. "The History of Europe." I think it's from originally from 1949. It's got wonderful maps. You can see I've outlined things and used them. It's a, it's a reference. You look things up there. You look at the maps. It's organized as an outline. There's a great index. That's to me what textbooks and also the internet are for. Some of them are great. And university classes, like the kind I teach, there's starting points where we try to break things down and make them simple and introduce you to some of the arguments for it against. But it's never the answer to win an argument. I don't know if you can ever really win an argument. I think people should concentrate less on that and just presenting arguments for what they think and seeing what other people think. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So textbooks and university classes are not. We can just recapitulate here. All historical questions have to be answered in primary sources. Secondary sources are historians telling us a story based on their critical examination of the primary sources. Textbooks are the farthest removed from the possible answer to the question. They're the farthest away you can get from it. They're not the authoritative answer. They're the place you go when you know nothing and you'd like to start. And then you follow the chains, or in modern, follow the bibliographies, or in modern terminology, follow the links. We'll probably take you off the internet to an archive in the end. But I think you get the point.

Okay, I hope that I've demolished that naive belief that history is this list of indisputable facts. Now you know, hopefully, where the facts come from, so-called facts. So, in the end, I don't believe there's. Students always ask me when they write their papers, they always say, "Do you want my subjective personal opinion?" And I always say, "Well, there's nothing else. What else is there?" There's no such, nobody ever wrote any history without their own subjective interpretation. It doesn't exist. The minute you choose your topic, you immediately said, "I think this is important," and "I think this is not important." Out of the infinity of things you could have written about, you chose this and not this. And that's your subjective choice. That's not neutral. And by the way, I think there's absolutely no way to never escape that problem. I think what we should do is embrace it.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me. Some of you may still be skeptical. You may still think there must be some objective historical facts. Maybe the most objective thing you could think of is the date. We put it on everything, right? Now it's 2024. You just, we all accept it's just 2024. You can't question that. It's just an objective fact. You know it's not. Have you ever thought about why it's 2024? Well, it's because some monks in the Middle Ages decided that all of history should be organized around the birth of Jesus. And so year zero should be the year that they thought Jesus was born. And in English, we use BC, "Before Christ," AD, "Anno Domini," basically "After Christ." And all of history, for all of us, whether you like it or not, whether you're Muslim or Chinese or communist, all of history is organized around the birth of Jesus. And you acknowledge a Christian interpretation of history every time you write the date on a piece of paper.

And now you probably think, "Well, but that's no big deal. He's just being silly." Well, I can show you examples of times in history when it was a big deal. There have been arguments about what should year one be. And I think now you know, there's a lot of possibilities. It could be, for Muslims, it could be the Christian year 622. But let's get really revolutionary. The French Revolution. There were people in the French Revolution. By the, any book you pick up, any secondary source you pick up on the French Revolution, you'll see the historians talking about Year One. It's 1792, the founding of the French Republic. Why is that? Because they, some of the people in the French Revolution, it's complicated, but they wanted to throw out, they were offended by the fact that all of history was organized around a Christian interpretation, and they wanted to throw that out and get rid of it. And they wanted history to be organized to, uh, the founding of their Republic. So they said, "This is the new Year One." And they also reorganized all the months and all the days because they didn't want it to be Christian. And that's not the only time. The Bolsheviks did it in 1917. And by the way, you probably know there's also a difference between the Orthodox calendar and the Latin calendar, which is a different thing, it's older. But the Bolsheviks said, "Year One is the year of the Bolshevik Revolution," because we don't, we seriously don't want to accept a Christian interpretation of history. A lot of you are probably Christian. Not Christian. Why do you accept the Christian interpretation of history? 1975, the Khmer Rouge. Year One is 1975.

So even something as plain and simple and obvious as the date that you think is, it's just an objective fact, it's not an objective fact. It's actually the result of something very important and serious, the Christian view of history that dominates us, in some ways, to this day. It's almost inescapable. And some people are very upset about that. Anyway, my point isn't to argue against the Christian interpretation of history. It's to make the point about the subjectivity of everything that you think is so objective.

Anyway, I want to finish here because I've thought about this a lot, and I hope I don't get too technical here for you. But I've thought about this a lot because it happens periodically. These controversies about history flare up in public discourse. Notice people get really upset when somebody questions what are considered to be the indisputable facts of history. People get certain things. People get really angry. People just want history to be one way and not the other way. And they're terrified of somebody who comes along and questions it. And I kind of understand why. And so I have kind of a big explanation for this. It gets kind of political. But historical writing periodically is the center of incredibly vitriolic disputes. And so why is that?

Um, I think people have a longing for certainty. I read, I love the essay by Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless." Havel was a famous dissident in communist Czechoslovakia. He wrote under, uh, in a totalitarian state. He later became the first president of the Czech Republic. The essay is about a lot of things. I'm going to just pick about one. There's one piece of it that I'm going to use here. And he says, you know, people have a longing for certainty. And I kind of, and maybe it's innate, I don't know. But I think it's maybe almost universal. We, and I think it's not bad. It makes it drives us to ask questions and try to answer them. And again, this could get really complicated. I'm trying to keep it simple. But, and it has a lot to do with history. People have a longing to be certain. They want certain facts in history, and they don't want to let go of them, and they don't want them to be challenged. And they get really angry. And I think it comes from fear, honestly. But people get really, really angry when you challenge what they consider to be certain facts of history. And so, and, and I don't think that's all. I'm not, I want to say I kind of understand it, too. I think it's, I don't like to say human nature, but it's ubiquitous in human history, let's say that. We long for certainty.

And so the question is, how do we deal with that? I, I have my own subjective opinion about how to deal with that. I think one way's right, the other way is, one way is better, and one way is worse. And I think Havel, you know, remember, he's writing in the totalitarian communist bloc. I've lived in the post-communist countries for the last 20 years, so I'm interested in it. And he says, well, what that totalitarian system does for people is that it satisfies their longing for certainty. Like going to church, he says, and reciting rituals. You might think it's dumb, but it also makes a lot of people feel good. And by the way, I kind of understand that. I'm not totally critical of that. It makes people feel good.

So when it comes to history, and the way history is written in totalitarian and authoritarian societies is really interesting. There has to be one right, orthodox way to say it. And so you can give certainty to people. And you do it in an authoritarian, let's say, communist bloc countries, you do it by having elite experts. They all have the right degrees, and they went to the right universities, and they're approved to tell you what's true and what's not. And if you really want certainty, and I think history itself shows this, you have political power that stands behind the experts. So a certain group of approved historians tells you what's true and what's not. They approve certain books and articles and disapprove others. And if you think about the world in which Havel lived, it was pretty civil. Like, you, if you were a historian and you challenged the narrative, you lost your job, and you had to be a truck driver. But hidden behind that, of course, is police power, political power. You really did see that in the 1950s, let's say, before Stalin died, or the 1940s. Then it was raw power. But by the 1970s, there's political power that stands behind that. Well, you lose your job because behind that there's a political party that controls the country, and ultimately, they have the guns. That's ultimately why it happens. You don't see all of that. It's not that raw violence, but it is in some regimes. But it's political power that stands behind an elite group of experts who decide what's true and what's false.

I'm going on too long about this, but so I've worked my whole life in post, in the post-communist Czech Republic, and I have a lot of students that say, "I hated history. It's just memorization." That's what it is. When you have the truth, and you have the orthodox interpretation of history, and it's just true, and you can't question it, all there is to do is memorize it. And when you write a paper, you just cite the authorities, you don't question them. Is that, that's all you have. Like, what's there to talk about in this world? There's, there's dissidents like Havel. Havel wasn't a historian, but there were some dissident historians as well. They're labeled usually in the communist world, they're called fascists, and shut up. The power is used to do that. People have a good feeling because they open the history textbook, and it's all true. I also feel that that's arrogance. Some of these will make more sense when I talk about open society. But I feel it produces an incredibly arrogant view of history. Completely ignores all the subjectivity that goes into all the decisions that are made about what's true and what's false. And it's a world in which there's only answers. There's no questions. It's really quite boring, by the way.

I would say, like, I feel like Christian fundamentalism works on a very similar way, in a very similar way, right? We have all the answers. So what's there to discuss? And in fact, asking questions is kind of not permitted. Why would you ask questions? You already have the truth. I'm going on too long, and I need to end. But I'll just say, I find it very difficult to have conversations with people who already have, think they know all the truth. They have all the facts. Those people don't really want to have a conversation with you. Why would there be a conversation if you already know all the facts? What's there to discuss? And so it's very hard to have any kind of discussion in that sort of world.

Anyway, that longing for certainty, that's one way to answer it. And by the way, it kind of works. I'm sorry to say, for a lot of people, it's, it kind of works. I don't think it works in the long run. And I don't think I'll explain why here, but I think in the long run, it's a trap that leads people to make terrible mistakes.

Now, I've thought a lot about historical writing and historical facts and historical narrative. You can see I've thought a lot about it. So I want to do a contrast here, but also notice I put these arrows here. I actually think it's a scale. I think I don't think historians writing in communist bloc countries, let's put it this way, I don't think all critical thought was always blocked out. I think sometimes it made it through in various ways. And I think not all, I think some societies lean toward authoritarianism, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're like the communist bloc countries or Nazi Germany. And I think on the other side, I like Karl Popper, but I like his word, "open societies." I really like that. I think that's the best way to describe it. I would say, for the most part, that's the world I grew up in and came up in as a historian. I do think at times there's kind of authoritarianism there. I do think there's an elite class, even in the world of history. We kind of take them as reliable. Some of them I think deserve their position, some of them don't. I don't think they're all authoritarians. I don't want to say that. I get, I showed you some books that I think are, I think those are great elite authorities on their subjects. But there's a kind of authoritarianism even in open societies. You'll have historians will say, "I never heard of that guy. He works at a community college." Yeah, that's that's snobbish authoritarianism. But I think there's a difference. As you move toward the open society, and I have to be fair, this is the world I think I mostly came up in, even the most snobbish, snobbish elites, well, I don't want to say that, but most of, even the most, even the elites, and some of them are great historians, they know they have a sense that they will not be believed just because of who they are, right? Like you have to make arguments, and you have to be reflective, and you have to do critical research. In other words, to make a contrast, history is not just memorization. It's critical research. And whenever you do critical research, whenever you go "ad fontes," back to the primary sources, you can always get, it's dangerous, you can always get different answers every time you go back. And also, in the world that I came up in, there were always dangerous challengers to the mainline narrative. That's always been true. I think with the internet, it's more maybe provocative, but it's always been true. There's always been the historian that nobody ever heard of for years that comes out and writes a brilliant book that challenges. Usually outsiders tend to challenge the narrative, the people who haven't made a great income their whole lives and nobody ever heard of. These days, the internet promotes that. I'm all for podcast historians. Why shouldn't they? They have expressed their ideas. They might be interesting. I actually think, and there's, I think some philosophy and research that illustrates this, sometimes being an outsider promotes creativity and critical thinking. It's kind of different when, well, I won't elaborate on that anymore. But I'm all for the podcast, the oddball podcast guy. I don't like being, um, a challenger and an outsider doesn't make you right. You might be a complete nut job, but it doesn't rule you out either. And so I think in the open society, I think that's good for history and historical interpretation. I think that, I already said this, I think that already means there will be competing interpretations of history. I think that's the world I grew up in. I had wonderful, I had a history class once where it was about the American Revolutionary War, and the professor, one week came in and gave a lecture arguing for one hypothesis, and the next week he came in and gave a lecture arguing for the opposite hypothesis. It was brilliant. We used to have textbooks that presented opposing views. One essay says one view, and then you get the other, the next essay is the opposite. And sometimes it was really great. There were three opposing views. Imagine that. Two could be an infinity of opposing views. A lot of people don't like that. For people that are, my personal view is really insecure, they need a certain narrative that can't change. But in an open society, I think it's inevitable that in history, you're going to always have competing narratives. As I said, every time you go back to the sources, anything can happen. Anything can happen.

I think, and by the way, I am biased, and I have a personal opinion about this. I definitely lean very much toward open societies. I think that produces good, stimulating, interesting history. I do think in the end, it cures your longing for certainty more than the phony reputation of ritualistic orthodoxy. But it also produces humility as opposed to arrogance. I think the people that think they have all the answers and that it's all solved, that's incredibly arrogant. Like you said, you can't have a conversation with such a person. You must, must approach history. I think all scholars should be back with a sense of humility, and we're endlessly asking questions. I personally love that there's no, in a totalitarian or authoritarian world, there's no reason to ask any questions. There's no reason to study anything because you have all the answers. You just memorize them. And ultimately, it's boring and unsatisfying. I've seen thousands of thousands of students that are the products of that kind of, you know, now we're a long time after communism in Central Europe, but it's boring. And that's what so many people say to me, "History is boring." Well, of course it's boring. It's, I hate to say it, it's kind of like church. Like church can be great, I think actually, but it's not interesting to have all the answers because good scholarship is based on asking questions. In history, questions about primary sources.

I'm over time, and I need to finish. But I'll say this because I started. I've thought a lot about this, and I've thought about it in terms of historical writing. And again, I'll come back to what I was saying. People long for certainty. And I kind of understand that. And that's why they get so upset when somebody questions what they think are the certain facts of history. I hope after this lecture, though, you can see why I think those certain facts of history are impossible. I hope you see where they come from. Now, when you really see what a historian does, all historians, all historical questions have to be answered in primary sources. And when you see all the problems that come from that, you start to see that there can be, my personal view is, there in historical argumentation, I don't think there's any such thing as certainty. And I know that's disturbing for people.

But let me end with this. I agree. I'm very influenced by the thinking of Karl Popper, by the way. This is what I've experienced personally, and maybe it'll help you because I do think uncertainty is a problem for us. I do think, I don't think you can just, I don't think I can walk away and just say, "Well, well, you have to live with uncertainty." I don't think I can do that. So let me explain my experience. It doesn't happen too often anymore. But when you're in a discussion and you have two people that are really humble and not arrogant and really willing to have a discussion, and person A says, "I think this. This is what I think. I don't know for certain, but this is what I think. And then they say, and here's three to five reasons why I think that." And you listen to it and you think, "Wow, this is really convincing." And then you have person B, and again, it's a humble person who really wants to have a discussion. And person B says, "I disagree with person A. Here's what I think. Here's three to five reasons why I think it." And then I think, "Wow, person B really had a good argument." And I'm, I don't know the answer, do I? But I'll tell you, I have never walked out of a discussion like that knowing less than I did when I came in. In other words, the end result of that is not me being dumber, right? I don't have absolute certainty from God what's the answer. But I know a hell of a lot more than I did at the beginning. I have a foundation. I have something. I know a bunch of facts, if you want to call them that, that each person presented. And I know what the different arguments are. I can see the weaknesses and the strengths of each one. And I'm infinitely stronger than what I was, than I was at the beginning. I've never ever walked out of a situation like that. In situations like that are unfortunately increasingly rare. I've never walked out of a situation like that feeling like I know less than I did at the beginning. I always know more, and I always feel stronger, intellectually stronger.

So I want to really encourage you not to fall for the absolutes of authoritarian answer. It's a quick fix. It'll make you feel good like a drug. It's not the real thing. You, I know, I like, I said, I can't just walk away and say, "Oh, you have to be uncertain." Okay, your longing for certainty is a good thing in a way. But you know, in another way, you don't have to feel absolutely certain about anything. You'll feel better if you can listen to a conversation and hear each side and weigh the supposed facts on both sides, weigh their strengths and weaknesses, and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each argument. That's what I want for my students. That's why I give this lecture about history called "Stories About the Past." Historians, in the end, we just tell you stories about the past. Hopefully, now you know something about the art of doing that. Thank you for your attention.