Knowing History

ALTHOUGH YOU MIGHT NEVER know it from reading the essays on this website, my favorite class in high school, and the one which benefitted me the most over my life, was typing. Without learning how to type, college, grad school, and my subsequent career would have been nearly impossible. In graduate school, my favorite class was "historiography", the study of how history is written, how information is gathered and research done. The historians themselves are also studied, as graduate students in history examine the lives, motivations, and experiences of many of the great historians throughout history, learning how we have managed to accumulate the vast treasure trove of history knowledge that we have, limited, ultimately, though it is. As much history as we have and know, we would love to have and know more, trust me. One of my favorite words within the historical profession refers to my least favorite kind of history: "hagiography". This term originally referred to biographies of Catholic saints, or any ecclesiastical person, and was almost always written from a respectful, even venerating point of view. How else would one treat the life of a saint? Over the centuries, the word "hagiography" has evolved in its meaning, as have nearly all words, and is now often used to refer to any history, whether a biography, national history, or history of a group of people or a certain period of time, which is written from a perspective of admiration, with total and complete respect and veneration for the subject matter. In most cases, the respect and veneration accorded the subject matter by the author is considered excessive, inappropriate, or entirely misplaced, and critics are always ready and able to clearly delineate the reasons why the subject matter should be treated with far less respect. Thus the term "hagiographic" has taken on a negative denotation. Some of the most hagiographic history ever written has appeared in American history textbooks, and forced down the throats of public school students, for centuries, ever wince the advent of these United States. American history hagiography has been so blatantly dishonest - and that's what true hagiography boils down to, distortion, dishonesty - that in recent years a movement has been gaining momentum to dispense with the blatant lies and exaggerations of America's greatness, and just tell the truth, which in the case of American history, is often not only not pretty, but downright ugly, if not vicious and cruel. The rejection of hagiographic American history has predictably aroused the ire of many a patriotic conservative, to whom the glorified but innacurate account of American history is far preferable, and far more comforting. When I was in school, in the sixties and seventies, the extermination of millions of native Americans was glossed over, and described as "westward expansion", and "the conquest of the wilderness". slavery was almost altogether ignored as a mere sideshow, an inconvenience, a small aberration if even that. Every nation on Earth wants to believe the best about itself, and wants to teach its children to believe in national greatness. The problem with this attitude is,, history becomes nothing but patriotism, and historical writing nothing but hagiography. Finally, in our age in which information is available as never before, and all poorly written history can be challenged by any historian, we are starting to understand that there is no substitute for truth, that fake history can always be weeded out and discredited, and that it therefore serves no lasting purpose to hide our own historical ugliness from ourselves. Painful as this process of honest awareness can be, in the long run, its worth the effort, as truth is always worth the effort.