Poetry is proof that anything can be interpreted for meaning.

history

In a way, history is like a giant game of telephone.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, “Telephone” is a game usually for a large group of people to sit in a circle and whisper a message into the adjacent person’s ear.  The message travels from the beginning of the circle in a given direction until the last person says the message out loud and compares it with the original.

Back in the day (that is, waaaay back in the day of the ancient eras), people passed down their history through scribes, oral stories, and the like.  There’s no doubt that their conception of the past was a little less-than-accurate, similar to how we can sometimes get a phrase out of “Telephone” that is the farthest thing from the original phrase.  But luckily, thanks to the value of tradition that has held strong for almost all civilizations for the past tens of thousands of years, generation gaps probably didn’t play as much of a part in the loss of accuracy in those stories.

What I mean by that is, suppose we had the technology today, but lacked the sense to record our history for the past hundred years.  Our only source is through storytellers, whose profession is literally to remember stories of the past from their predecessors and pass it on to their successors.  Nowadays, the generation gap is a very real thing–the speed that technology advances far surpasses the speed that humans live and die.  Because of this, we would have no conception of things such as “silent films,” “telegraphs,” and the like simply because (assume for a moment) we have no archives of such things.  But this quick-paced technological advancement and consequent generation gap played no part in the past few thousand years, and so in the ancient eras, the difference between your life and your great-great-great grandfathers life was probably minimal.  Therefore, it was easier to understand what your great-great-great grandfathers life was, and easier to retain accuracy in the story you tell to your posterity.

But going back to the world of today, when new phones, Macs, etc. are coming out day by day and your grandpa still things “Mac” is the name of your neighbor’s dog–the “generation gap” problem with our game of telephone arises, BUT we now have more accurate forms of recording history–photography, films, books, and so on–that make up for that.

So it’s relatively easy to talk about history in the past few decades.  Now what about anything before that?  Where do we confirm the accuracy of textbooks about thousands of years ago, where the generation gap is far too wide to find or trust storytellers, and our only primary resource are age-old documents recently unearthed?  When historians play telephone with their ancestors, how do they retain accuracy?  Who’s interpretation of the past is it to believe?

They play another game.  To them, history is both “Telephone” and a jigsaw puzzle.  Like scientists, they theorize, test the theory, reevaluate their theory.  That is, they compare their interpretation of the past with what has already been established, and rework that interpretation (or the one they are comparing to) so that the two fit.  They examine every implication that a piece of history may have in terms of influence on the past, present, and future of that point in time.  And when our past has been established, we analyze it, analyze human interactions–because really, history is just the study of human interactions (I’ll get to that one day)–and see how what we’ve learned applies to us now so we can learn and apply it in the future.  So when people say history’s a dead subject that only dwells in the past–well, that’s far from it.  And besides, who doesn’t like a good game?