Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal

History provides us with an understanding of our place in time. The words of authors glide into topics that pull us into paragraphs of digression. These allow us to consider the character and nature of those women, men, and events that continue to influence our lives today.

There is a sense of mystery when opening a history book or a biography even when we are already familiar with the subject. The mystery of what new discovery we will make is what intrigues us about the past and how our present rests on the layers of characters and events. Good prose is essential to creating the atmosphere of a period. We are lured into chambers, some darkened by shadows of Faustian bargains, others are bright and airy as the Palace of Versailles, by the author’s prose. Tragedy always lurks like Colonel Mustard holding a candlestick in the library in a game of Clue. Historians and biographers are incapable of escaping the reality of human suffering even in the most romanticized attempts of revisionist telling of people and events.

Biographers and historians reveal their prejudice through the subjects they chose. G. M. Trevelyan writes, “No book, least of all a text-book, offers a short cut to historical truth. The truth is not grey, it is black and white in patches.” Authors imbue their work with personal philosophy. They are zealous in their conviction to test the evidence, and might easily twist contradictory detail, or press obstinate fact into ideological service for a fair representation of the past to prove a point.

Baruch Halpern, a professor of the humanities, observes, “Reconstructing the past has been compared to detective work (mostly of the fictional variety), to woodsmanship, (spotting a tiger in the bush), to writing pulp fiction, to psychoanalysis, and to various branches of the natural sciences. In one way or another, all these comparisons are apt: but in just the same measure, they are all deceptive. History, a form of observation, reconstruction, and representation of human events, is a distinctive enterprise.”

History and biography are concerned with change; the personal growth of a person, the events that shaped her or him, and the societal changes introduced through war, science, technology, and economic conditions, domestic and foreign policies, among other factors. People, regardless of the historic period, prefer the comfort of the familiar to changes. Agnes Repplier observes, “It almost seems as if two-thirds of mankind were hard at work improving away the happiness of the remaining third and bidding them at intervals to stop grumbling and appreciate the change.”

I am one of those people, a creature of habit, who prefers tradition. Someone once asked me what time period I would prefer to live in if I had a choice. He was rather startled when I replied the 19^th century, living in either New England or Tennessee, and teaching at a small college. Those were not idyllic days. They were turbulent, ripe with the issues that divided the nation, repressed Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and treated women as second-class citizens. I like to think I would have been more of a free thinker along the lines of Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglas.

Authoritarian figures, and their supporters, believe there is a perfect past. They want to control what and how people learn about their nation’s history. They create illusions to maintain power. Personal power is their agenda. They have a narrow range of interest. Culture— the arts and sciences, the pursuit of the liberal arts in education—is manipulated to maintain a façade of conservative values. Their self-contradictions and internal conflicts are worn on their sleeves. The many complexities and ambiguities people contend with in their daily lives are flippantly, and arrogantly brushed aside.

Leaders in this vein look for affirmation and affection. They want others to believe they are committed to truth, but truth is overshadowed by their needs and closed-mindedness, cruelty, lack of authenticity, and a false consciousness. In other words, truth is elastic.

Jason Stanely, an expert on authoritarianism, formerly at Yale University, now at the University of Toronto, writes, “If they don’t control the historical narrative, then they can’t create the kind of fake history that props up their politics.”

We live in a time, so it seems, when no good deed goes unpunished. The past cannot be reconstructed to fit the desires of the present. The present cannot be reconstructed to fit into the past. History offers us lessons that need to be heeded to improve the lives of all citizens. Biographies offer us lessons on moral fortitude. We learn from both personal past failures and successes.

The problems and issues of those human beings who lived before us are laid out in both history and biographies. The question is whether we are willing to open our hearts and minds to tackle the problems of tyrants, those authoritarian figures leading us down a path of destruction, or will we continue with our old habits, give the appearance of success, but fail and walk among the ruins?

History awaits our answer.