What's wrong with the history books I read?

[Mouthwash]

They don't seem to give anything but the most superficial glance. For instance: A Short History of Byzantium. What is it about? Mainly, the emperors. And also, patriarchs. And stuff they were involved in.

All the explanations in the book are naked assertions without substance. They could very well be true, but how does that benefit me? The author drops lines about how this emperor could "feel that Iconoclasm was almost exhausted" to explain his shift away from it, or a remark about how the empire was "doing well" at this time or another (then going back to an endless turnover of coups, intrigue, and consorts of "startling beauty").

Important things outside of the central government are only highlighted if they seem important after the fact. I literally had no idea how the empire's command structure worked until reading about an Armenian general deliberately losing a battle in order to take the throne.

Even after the parade of historical figures, I don't have any idea of what the Byzantine empire actually was. No insight into politics, trade, the army, culture, or foreign relations except where the author deems it relevant to the emperors or to contingent historical events. I'm not a "daily life in small Byzantine towns is what really matters" person, but I'd like to actually know the empire I'm reading about.

So that's a good example of why my attempts at reading pop history have failed to give me any benefit. But the more scholarly books (like Barb Migrations) are immediately off-putting because the authors usually have a bone to pick with other schools of thought and spend page after page arguing against their ideas instead of telling me about the history. It's as if they're more concerned with converting students who have been educated with the opposing viewpoint.

 

[Gori the Grey]

You need to read histories written in the 50s

 

[Dachs]

They don't seem to give anything but the most superficial glance. For instance: A Short History of Byzantium. What is it about? Mainly, the emperors. And also, patriarchs. And stuff they were involved in.

All the explanations in the book are naked assertions without substance. They could very well be true, but how does that benefit me? The author drops lines about how this emperor could "feel that Iconoclasm was almost exhausted" to explain his shift away from it, or a remark about how the empire was "doing well" at this time or another (then going back to an endless turnover of coups, intrigue, and consorts of "startling beauty").

Important things outside of the central government are only highlighted if they seem important after the fact. I literally had no idea how the empire's command structure worked until reading about an Armenian general deliberately losing a battle in order to take the throne.

Even after the parade of historical figures, I don't have any idea of what the Byzantine empire actually was. No insight into politics, trade, the army, culture, or foreign relations except where the author deems it relevant to the emperors or to contingent historical events. I'm not a "daily life in small Byzantine towns is what really matters" person, but I'd like to actually know the empire I'm reading about.

Norwich's history is, in most ways, a condensation of the most well-known literary primary sources about the Byzantine Empire. As such, he rarely ventures outside them. Furthermore, he rarely questions them seriously, and doesn't use useful details contained in many of them to do any extended analysis of specific points. He doesn't try to address Byzantine state or Byzantine society in any meaningful way, because that would require doing more than epitomizing the sources. In his way, Norwich is a bit like the old classical historians people sometimes complain about, like Diodoros Sikeliotes. Some modern readers mock Diodoros for having mostly just abbreviated and compiled separate works by wordier, older historians, but that is really all that Norwich does in Short History (or in his three-volume series on the same subject). There is value in telling the stories related by Prokopios or Theophanes or Psellos or Leon the Deacon, but Norwich leaves the historian's job half done. He tries to put the Byzantine sources into language that modern readers would understand (although the books never reach the level of a direct, annotated translation), but he eliminates much useful detail (which might actually help you figure out how things worked in Byzantine life) and almost never goes beyond his sources (to explain directly to you how things worked in Byzantine life).

Academics are often parochial about books written by non-specialists, but Norwich's Short History is an excellent argument for why they are sometimes right to be parochial.

So that's a good example of why my attempts at reading pop history have failed to give me any benefit. But the more scholarly books (like Barb Migrations) are immediately off-putting because the authors usually have a bone to pick with other schools of thought and spend page after page arguing against their ideas instead of telling me about the history. It's as if they're more concerned with converting students who have been educated with the opposing viewpoint.

History is interpretation. The sources don't stand on their own. They weren't handed down from on high. History isn't a chronicle; in order for narrative histories to be coherent, they have to have a, well, narrative through-line, but they also have to argue why things happened in a certain way. The whys are almost always a matter of some dispute. Often, the historian is arguing against a view that is commonly held by popular readership, or even the majority of academic readership. In that case, she has to make it clear why she disagrees, so including the debate is necessary. If one imagines many academic books as being written primarily for a scholarly audience, the debate is the meaty part. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, why the book exists in the first place. Historians have been arguing with each other ever since the second historian ever said that the first historian ever was a liar. It's kind of their job.

Academics sometimes write for a general audience, but they almost always write to prove a point. For example, Halsall's Barbarian Migrations, as you mentioned, is primarily a textbook, aimed at graduate-level and above historians; despite including, among other things, a reference to Dave Chappelle, it is not really designed for a general audience. He has to engage with the historiography, because the position he takes is not the most commonly held one. He can't simply state it and not attempt to prove it. The situation isn't nearly as dire as you make it sound, of course. Barbarian Migrations includes a very clear narrative (it is still, in my opinion, one of the most complete narratives of the fourth and fifth centuries in a single volume), along with segments on thematic issues, and even in the parts of the book where he argues historiography (e.g. in the segment on hospitalitas) he does so while simultaneously informing the reader about what that actually is. Persuading a reader about the issues matters, because it affects the whys, and the whys are why the book exists. However, his Worlds of Arthur is designed for a more general audience. It's still meant to prove a point (in this case, about life, politics, and warfare in Britain after the end of the Roman Empire) but it mostly avoids the more complex academic debates. It has whys and persuasion, and the book cannot contain a narrative due to the nature of the sources and subject, but it's a significantly easier read.

 

[Mouthwash]

You need to read histories written in the 50s

A reason why might be helpful here?

History is interpretation. The sources don't stand on their own. They weren't handed down from on high. History isn't a chronicle; in order for narrative histories to be coherent, they have to have a, well, narrative through-line, but they also have to argue why things happened in a certain way. The whys are almost always a matter of some dispute. Often, the historian is arguing against a view that is commonly held by popular readership, or even the majority of academic readership. In that case, she has to make it clear why she disagrees, so including the debate is necessary. If one imagines many academic books as being written primarily for a scholarly audience, the debate is the meaty part. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, why the book exists in the first place. Historians have been arguing with each other ever since the second historian ever said that the first historian ever was a liar. It's kind of their job.

Academics sometimes write for a general audience, but they almost always write to prove a point. For example, Halsall's Barbarian Migrations, as you mentioned, is primarily a textbook, aimed at graduate-level and above historians; despite including, among other things, a reference to Dave Chappelle, it is not really designed for a general audience. He has to engage with the historiography, because the position he takes is not the most commonly held one. He can't simply state it and not attempt to prove it. The situation isn't nearly as dire as you make it sound, of course. Barbarian Migrations includes a very clear narrative (it is still, in my opinion, one of the most complete narratives of the fourth and fifth centuries in a single volume), along with segments on thematic issues, and even in the parts of the book where he argues historiography (e.g. in the segment on hospitalitas) he does so while simultaneously informing the reader about what that actually is. Persuading a reader about the issues matters, because it affects the whys, and the whys are why the book exists.

I understand that. But he practically gives a history of some of the the opposing theories' development and fall from favor, right off the bat. I couldn't get more than a few dozen pages in.

My problem is that I can't find a middle ground between focus on frivolities, and "spends half the time arguing historiography." Your own criticism of Norwich actually seems very much like the latter phenomenon, in that you seem to be criticizing things offstage, i.e. that I can't see and didn't know were relevant. There's middle ground between the two where the layman can actually learn things, but I haven't found it.

Do I just have to study it formally? Is actual work the key? I've never yet found a history book I would reread just because I wanted to, even though I like history and read lots of articles.

 

[Dachs]

I understand that. But he practically gives a history of some of the the opposing theories' development and fall from favor, right off the bat. I couldn't get more than a few dozen pages in.

My problem is that I can't find a middle ground between focus on frivolities, and "spends half the time arguing historiography." Your own criticism of Norwich actually seems very much like the latter phenomenon, in that you seem to be criticizing things offstage, i.e. that I can't see and didn't know were relevant. There's middle ground between the two where the layman can actually learn things, but I haven't found it.

Do I just have to study it formally? Is actual work the key? I've never yet found a history book I would reread just because I wanted to, even though I like history and read lots of articles.

Well, the fact that you didn't know that these things were problems in Norwich is kind of the problem. You can't know. Unless you scour the bibliography and track down the texts he cites like a hawk (assuming they have decent English translations, and some of them do not), you don't know what he's really telling you. And you certainly don't know what he isn't telling you. You don't know anything about modern scholarship because he explicitly ignores it (although he makes it clear that that's what he's doing, at least in the three-part series, and only if you read the introduction and pay attention to it), and because, if you are the general reader, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know that there have been massive amounts of work done on the Byzantine economy, the Byzantine military, Byzantine religion, Byzantine politics and ideology, Byzantine literature, and even Byzantine sexuality, all of which makes use of the same sources that Norwich uses but all of which goes far outside them to use sources of every provenance imaginable. All Norwich gives you is a view mostly of what happened to a small group of people in one city, without really explaining much of it, and without pointing out that that is, in fact, what he is doing.

Because you are a reasonably intelligent reader, you see holes in this, and you understand that there are things he isn't telling you, but he gives you no clue as to what these things are. That's the value of historians adding in those bits about arguing with other historians. Feel like something's just a bit off about one historian's argument? Read the work of the people on the other side (conveniently cited in easy reach), and see how they stack up to each other. Feel like something's off about Norwich's argument? Too bad, haha, time for you to do some research.

Unfortunately, using your own brainpower to figure out which historian is the most persuasive is a fair amount of work. Historians like it this way - at least, the good ones do. It means that you're capable of actually using that brainpower to develop critical thinking skills and question authority, rather than accept unquestioningly any truth that is told to you. Questioning established historical authority is one of the fundamental building blocks of the practice of history. Sometimes it can seem like that means that there's a yawning gap between the kinds of books you read in lower-level undergraduate courses (the high-school-style textbooks that tell you what happened, and very rarely why and how, without making it clear how the author arrived at this interpretation and what the facts are both for and against it) and the books you start reading in upper-level undergrad and graduate classes (the ones with lots of argument in them). Unfortunately, that's...kind of how it is? If history's to have any rigor at all, it's got to be founded on reasoned argument and debate. A historian who is laying out an argument in her book is obviously trying to sell you something. A historian who is not laying out an argument in her book has already sold it to you.

As before, I think you're vastly exaggerating the amount of engagement with the historiography that any reader actually needs for most texts. You're not reading Metahistory. Halsall spends a bit more time on historiography than some other texts, but the bulk of his pages are dedicated to proving his point by describing the way the Western Empire worked in the fourth century, the way it worked in the fifth century, and by building a narrative to describe how it got from point A to point B. I grant that the last two-thirds of the first chapter are dedicated to some stuff that might be a bit confusing for a first-time reader, but I don't think it's too much to ask to struggle through less than twenty pages of a very basic potted historiography so that he can explain why he is writing the book and why the book is different than all the other books. That seems fairly reasonable for any author to do. Otherwise, hell, why write another book on the fall of the Roman Empire? The tough part comes, I would say, rather later in the book, when he addresses hospitalitas. It's a historical concept in late antiquity that's pretty awkward because it's complicated - you have to be able to address a tortuously-argued and poorly-sourced Latin legal issue - but also extremely important because the solution to the debate is the foundation for how those barbarians even ended up living inside the Empire anyway. It's almost unavoidable but it makes for very dry reading. Halsall doesn't spend nearly the time that other authors do on the subject (e.g. Walter Goffart) and clearly tries to make it a bit more painless than it could be, but that is still some amount of pain. But, like I said, the bulk of the book is narrative and thematic history about topics that don't really tax (sorry, pun) the reader.

There are easier books about other subjects. There are also much harder books.

I would say that scholarly history on classical and medieval subjects can be harder because of the source issue. Often, historians do not only disagree on what is happening and what it meant but on what the primary sources are even saying. That adds extra layers of argumentation on and makes the subject more complicated for the beginner. Usually, with more modern history, historians mostly just disagree on interpretations rather than events or details. There are, of course, subtle signs for the specialist to notice. Two different historians might write two different histories of the Thirty Years' War with two different interpretations of what it was about, or why it mattered, or what have you, and they will focus on different events in that history in order to prove their point, perhaps omitting inconveniences or offering explanations of those inconveniences that do not pass muster with the other historian. There is no kind of history where the reader will be totally free of debate and argumentation in academic history.

History is complicated. It can be pretty tough to wrap your head around it. And it's a field where a lot of the books geared toward the moderately interested layman are badly and fundamentally outdated, deeply misleading, or outright lies. You don't need to be a top-flight philosopher to get through an academic history book, but you do need at least a little bit of fortitude, and you will be doing yourself a massive disservice if you simply want to be told what is the right answer.

 

[Mouthwash]

To be clear (because you said a lot of things up there), your recommendation is for me to finish up A Short History and then also read other basic histories of Byzantium to compare?

 

[Gori the Grey]

A reason why might be helpful here?

From my experience, that's when the field of history was writing the kind of books you seem to want to read. Historians--especially those who contributed to series, The Cambridge History of the World sort of thing--felt it was on them to treat all the aspects of the period they were assigned. But they weren't yet absorbed by their explicit petty arguments with other historians. (They were arguing with other historians, but they expected their reader to realize their points of difference with some great predecessor in the field, by virtue of having read that historian). They're not going to be as strong on social history, because that's a later development in the field, but even so, they often do give you the little factoids that let you balance "everyday life in [Byzantium]" with "the narrative of decisive events that shaped the civilization." They gave themselves permission to be magisterial (is the word I use for it) in the account they provide, in ways that more contemporary historians generally feel some reservations about doing.

 

[sophie]

You need to read histories written in the 50s

Ew don't do that.

50s history is just straight structuralism, which, while it had some really interesting things to say, and indeed is an essential element of current postmodern (or post-postmodern?) history, it is nevertheless far too prescriptivist and nomothetic to be taken seriously on its own in this day and age. It's history pre-Marxian revival, pre-Social History revival, pre-Linguistic Turn, pre-Foucault (and in particular the good parts of Foucault), pre-Habermas, pre-Derrida, pre-Lawrence Stone, pre-Ladurie, pre-Geertz, pre-some of the better parts of Arendt, pre-Heiko Oberman, etc.

Hell, it's even pre-some of the essential Lévi-Strauss works like Mythologiques, and "Myth and Meaning"

 

[Gori the Grey]

I would never recommend it to you, Owen. But I think it will give Mouthwash what he wants.

 

[sophie]

I would never recommend it to you, Owen. But I think it will give Mouthwash what he wants.

So your solution is to recommend bad history to him?

 

[Gori the Grey]

If that's what he asked for, yes!

 

[Mouthwash]

If that's what he asked for, yes!

 

[Gori the Grey]

Mouthwash, I'm truly trying to get you to the book on Byzantium that you say you'd like to read. And I truly think I know the way to get you there. So I'm going to poke around a bit, using my principle, and see if I can find a specific title to recommend. It will be a bad history book, by Owen's standards of what makes for a good history book. But some of his standards of what makes for a good history book are the very thing you said you don't want. Give my book a chance, if I'm able to find one for you, and see if I haven't discerned the kind of thing you're looking for. I'll read it too, if that gives you any satisfaction. I could use deeper knowledge of that civ.

 

[Marla_Singer]

From what I've understood, @Mouthwash was frustrated about the last book he read because instead of learning about what "is" Byzantium, he has read a succession of political intrigues and power games that basically existed in any place at any time. He ended up closing the book thinking that he doesn't really know better about Byzantium now than before reading it.

I'd be curious to know how this leads you to consider he's looking for "bad History", as I actually share a lot his feeling regarding History in general. In a nutshell, it feels to me about the same as if someone wanted to learn about the US and would be advised to watch "House of Cards" for this. I have nothing against that show, which is great, but it tells more about Human nature in power games in general than it does about America as a country.

 

[sophie]

I mean, I certainly feel like I'm reading that sort of history. But then, I'm also reading books exclusively talking about a specific subset of professions in a specific subset of Central European urban centers in a specific historical period.

You have to consider what it is you actually want, and whether that is actually feasible given the politics of publication and the extant historical record. You'll certainly find plenty of juicy and interesting things written about Epicurus, but at the end of the day the extent to which anybody is going to be able to talk about him in detail is limited because the whole of writings on him and his philosophy which we currently have is like, 30 pages long, most of which wasn't actually written by him at all. Then there's the political side to consider: historians don't get published by reputable Presses unless they engage with past literature on the subject. There is no point in writing a history unless it is going to provide something which engages with the historiographic discourse and advances the study of the topic. Unless your book does that in at least some respect, no respectable publisher is going to give you the time of day.

So unless you don't mind reading really trashy history, you're not going to find a history book that doesn't pay at least a modicum of lip service to the historiographic arena into which the book is entering. Moreover, a completely whitewashed "summary of historical events upon which everybody agrees with no interpretation or argument" simply does not exist. Because 1) Such an act is antithetical to history - even in the Platonic Rankian ideal of history wie es eigentlich gewesen you are advancing an argument about which historical materials are worth evaluating and which are irrelevant, misleading, or unnecessary and thus are capable of being discarded. And even then, 2) A universal agreement on "what actually happened" is broadly unfeasible, particularly, as Dachs noted earlier, when you get away from the Modern period (where you have such luxuries as diaries written intended to be read by nobody but the author themself, and memoranda, telegrams, and reports intended solely to relay information/developments) and into the Early Modern/Medieval/Ancient periods where: a) the historical record is extremely sparse, b) the relationship to and popular understanding of writing and literacy was vastly different, and c) you have to take into account things like indexicality and the political context behind why something was written. Good examples of the importance of this is in considering how a number of Medieval and ancient texts have been re-evaluated, and re-examined. For example: Ranke discarded Einhard's history of Charlemagne as Suetonian and therefore unfactual, however, today that history is considered quite essential to understanding Charlemagne and 9th Century Carolingian France/Scholasticism; Bede, by contrast, owing to the severe dearth of historical texts available detailing early Anglo-Saxon History, was considered something of an absolute authority on the events of that period, but now his text is examined less for what it can tell us about what may or may not have happened in the 5th and 6th centuries, and more for what it tells us about the 7th/8th century world in which Bede wrote and the sorts of texts he read and had access to. In this same vein, Roman historians like Caesar and Tacitus are considered less for their factual value (although that certainly still exists to some extent) and more for the meta-political and literary information they can reveal through the texts.

I think a big part of the problem you two are running into is that you are trying to find one singular text which is all things. History books don't work like that. Look at Strachan's First Volume of his history of World War I: 1200 pages just covering the political contexts of the respective European players in the lead-up to the war, the first 6-months of combat in Europe, and the African and Pacific theaters from 1914-1918. That's it. Tyerman's God's War is 1300 pages covering the whole of the Crusades, but it focuses almost exclusively on the political structures and motivations underlying the respective campaigns. If you want a book that tells you All of the Things in Great Detail you're looking at a project that is going to be like 15 1200-page tomes which will never (and perhaps indeed can never) be finished by a single person.

Point is, if what you're looking to find is cultural history, or social history, or intellectual history, then you need to go find books that treat with that subject specifically, rather than choosing a book that is intended as a broad survey and then complaining that it's a broad survey, or else choosing a book on political history and then complaining that it's only about political history. I mean hell, University of Chicago Press released a 400 page book just investigating portrayals and popular reactions to sodomy and the understanding of sexual and gender identity in the European Middle Ages. The stuff you want is out there; you just have to look for it.

 

[Marla_Singer]

You're right Owen. Probably the best advice that could be given to Mouthwash would be to first specify what he's truely looking for and then to do some broad research about it on the internet. That's generally a good way to find out books which are interesting to read. I remember having found a great book about the Age of discovery this way, simply by looking at references in some Wikipedia article. Google will also quickly point you to Google Books, which would then allow you to read some extracts.

I'm really no expert about Byzantium, but what is sure is that if I'd like to read about it, I would personally dig about its Greek/Platonician cultural heritage and how it made it fit with the Orthodox religion. I'd rather be curious about its economical structure as I portray it as a relatively wealthy power being at the crossroads of many major trade routes. The importance of Byzantium as a port and as the point connecting Europe to Asia, the control of the silk road which ended in Antioch. It would be interesting to know more about how it resisted to the Arabic raise as a superpower, and as a matter of fact how it wasn't totally cut out from the silk road at the time. And I'd be really curious about its legacy as well, not only in modern Greece but also in the succeeding Ottoman Empire. From what I've seen the Ottomans were heavily inspired about Byzantium in aspects such as philosophy and culture. This knowledge would actually help a lot to better understand the very specific relation between today's Greece and Turkey.

I don't know if that's what Mouthwash is looking for, but maybe that brainstorming will help him to find out.

 

[Mouthwash]

Owen and Dachs are pretty representative of the field, as far as I can tell.

 

[sophie]

If that's the case then it's a tragedy that there are no history books that are somewhere between a first very rough introduction to the chronology of a period and contemporary, argumentative research. Or rather, so few as I personally have read a handful of books that do just that. That being a few hundred pages that describes the evolution of the culture/institution/people/mindset of an empire/country/region through the events that happened over a particular period.

I'm a scientist by trade, if someone asks me for reading material on my research (Quantum Computers) I'm not going to tell them "Go to these scientific journals and read what they have to say, if you can't be bothered to do that then you deserve nothing more than a 2 page summary in the middle of The Economist". That's essentially what people in this thread are telling casual amateur historians to do. I'm really hoping that's just the personal opinion of those who have posted above me rather than the attitude of the field as the whole, because I struggle to think of a more arrogant, dismissive, and ivory-tower approach to take than that.

The comparison is rather that you are buying a textbook on Quantum physics and then complaining that the textbook only devotes 3 paragraphs to the subject of Quantum computing. Byzantine History comprises entire departments at major Medievalist universities like Toronto and Chicago. What I'm saying is that if you want to learn about Byzantine cultural or social history then read this, or this or this or this or this or this; don't read a book that bills itself on being a broad overview (particularly a broad overview that endeavors to tell all of Byzantine History in less than 500 pages) and then complain about it being a broad overview. That makes no sense.

 

[christos200]

Some books I would recommend:

A History of the Byzantine State and Society: This book by Warren Treadgold is a narrative of Byzantine history from 284 to 1461. It looks at both political/military history and broader developments in society.

Byzantium and the Crusades: An excellent book regarding the ideological conflict between the Byzantines and the Crusaders and the Byzantine foreign policy towards them.

Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies: Examines many different aspects of Byzantine civilization that you do not find often in more generic works: from literature to food to military technology and silk production. Highly recommended.

Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier: A narrative history of the Byzantine Balkans in the tenth to twelfth centuries and the imperial foreign policy in the region.

Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565 - 1204 : An excellent book for those interested in Byzantine warfare and its impact on Byzantine society.

 

[innonimatu]

Ew don't do that.

50s history is just straight structuralism, which, while it had some really interesting things to say, and indeed is an essential element of current postmodern (or post-postmodern?) history, it is nevertheless far too prescriptivist and nomothetic to be taken seriously on its own in this day and age. It's history pre-Marxian revival, pre-Social History revival, pre-Linguistic Turn, pre-Foucault (and in particular the good parts of Foucault), pre-Habermas, pre-Derrida, pre-Lawrence Stone, pre-Ladurie, pre-Geertz, pre-some of the better parts of Arendt, pre-Heiko Oberman, etc.

Hell, it's even pre-some of the essential Lévi-Strauss works like Mythologiques, and "Myth and Meaning"

I don't know that many works from the 50s, but it seems a tad unfair to dismiss them this way. The Annales were live and kicking already (or even, unfortunately, already dead - Marc Bloch), and anyone who read Braudel's 1949 introduction to The Mediterranean (though I read a later version of the work) can see that there were already historians acknowledging the complexity of any period of history. I think that some of the history published in the 50s did try to reach a wider public while still admitting (something new!) to the complexity of the subject matter. Wasn't it also the first epoch (that I can get books from, haven't picked many older ones) where people started doing "little academic histories" on themes less sexy than grand politics or less partisan than hagiographies?

Also, at least the Medieval and especially Early Modern periods do have ample documentation available. Especially in Europe where many bureaucratic states were already producing and piling up papers. I guess that is another reason why historians often discuss other historian's works: a lifetime is not enough for one to study the source material.