Dig into this shit, mutherfucker. I've got two books to go. The 10th, Rousseau and Revolution, is the one that won the Pulitzer. It's also 965 pages, not including the index and appendices. I own Gore Vidal's copy of the books, but I do them as audiobooks. This allows me to digest them as I roll through homelessness and heat. And having burned through more than 8,000 pages of history, I can say two things: 1) they don't make you learn more than the broad strokes because the minutiae, in the end, doesn't fucking matter 2) history is nothing more than an endless expanse of humans being horrific to each other. Thanks to these books, I now hate the English, the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the Italians, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Romans, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Turks and have developed the suspicion that if there's a statue of you somewhere, it's been erected on a mountain of skulls.However, there's only so much one can take of things like The Dead Hand and Legacy of Ashes.
...as a background for terrific breakthroughs in human understanding of the world, themselves, and each other. I mean, you're saying history is terrible using a platform that has been developed by people from history. You will be history, just like every single human fucking being. Can't stand it when wise men like you tell everyone how terrible it all is. You wouldn't even be here were it not for you ancestors doing everything in their power to survive and prosper.history is nothing more than an endless expanse of humans being horrific to each other.
No. I will be forgotten. You will be forgotten, we will all be forgotten (mk, thenewgreen and b_b I'm not so sure). We are "a part of history" the way a drop of water is part of a rainstorm. It's the lightning bolts that crack the trees we learn about. The Durants make the point that nearly everyone who ever walked the earth was just getting by trying to lead a normal happy life and that the periods we don't learn a lot about are generally the happiest. But what we learn about? We learn about the tragedies and their architects. History is change and change is almost always cataclysmic for someone. Usually lots of someones. Who have already been forgotten by history.
I'll be forgotten, and I don't much care how long it takes. I recently read the Meditations, and about 50% of it is Aurelius reminding himself that he will be forgotten, and that postmortem remembrance is a pretty stupid thing to waste the present on. He pretty much says that too.History is change and change is almost always cataclysmic for someone.
Historians talk about this problem a lot, if you look into it. The history of families mostly-peacefully raising children who do the same-ish things as their parents isn't recorded in a lot of places. If you want 'positive' history, you need to study individual families. Personal example, I have a pretty detailed genealogy/family tree that goes back to Sweden in the late 1400's. What we know about the people who lived back then, and in all the years inbetween 1480 and now, is very little. We know they lived, had X number of children, of whom Y survived to adulthood. Sometimes we know what they did for a living for a large portion of their lives. When we're studying 'history' we are most often studying the short, painful periods of drastic change between one paradigm and another paradigm. The Dramatis Personae of history are almost all right and proper bastards because you have to be a right and proper bastard to start and/or end a war. Contented, peaceful, happy people do not dramatic change make.The world is a terrible, grim and painful place if all you choose to look at is suffering.
There are a few examples within the Durants' books where they say "King X was, by all accounts, a kind and generous man who presided over forty years of prosperity. We wish we could say more about him but the record of his accomplishments and failures is predictably spare, as with most great men who fought no wars. Fortunately for us, and unfortunate for the world, his throne was inherited by Y the Terrible, who will be the subject of the next several chapters."
I was thinking about this very sentiment this morning. My dad and I have had the fortune to take a few trips to see some amazing things together. Neither of us is getting any younger, so I've been getting the bug to plan the next adventure. This morning my dad sent me some youtube video about "the top 50 most beautiful places to see in the world" or some such nonsense... As I watched, I just got kinda sad... some of the locations were beautiful natural phenomena - like waterfalls in Iceland, and the arches in Southern Utah... but many of them were "Temple of XYZ" in Burma, and "Hall of the ABC" in China, etc. When you consider the Machu Picchus, the Great Walls, the Great Pyramids, Chichen Itza, and the others.... you realize the BILLIONS of slaves who lived and died only to work on the given project. There's a sense of guilt as I strut first-world ass across these "wonders". Maybe my dad and I will just go on a walk in the woods...if there's a statue of you somewhere, it's been erected on a mountain of skulls.
The massive architecture bothers me less. I think it's because of shots like this: Granted - those aren't slaves. But life passes so many by without a single testament to their time on earth and some small part of me is proud that there's a giant wastewater treatment plant that will no doubt outlive me and buried somewhere in its visitor center is a picture I'm standing in. The Great Wall killed millions in its building, so far as we know. But the Han dynasty killed millions anyway. Better to die building a wall, I figure.