History has been a study and an avocation all my life. It’s a passion. Some of my earliest thoughts were about history. Where did we come from? What were the first cities like? Ancient Egypt was especially tantalising to me. I asked my mother soon after I started the first grade, “When are we getting to world history?” I was frustrated: the school was getting a rather late start in academics. That was my opinion.

 

When a history professor pitched his programme to me in my first year at university, I proved an easy sell. My original avocation still held me in thrall, no matter how much of a distraction adolescence had been. In the intervening years, I had moved on from Egypt: through the classical ancient histories and into the Middle Ages. In my subsequent studies, I settled on Renaissance and Reformation history, and I went on to write a forgettable honour’s thesis on Petrarch’s concept of history.

 

What have I gained from it all? This is a mercenary world, and the question is unavoidable. What is the dollar value of that degree, the study, those hours spent reading history? Believe me, I understand. I understand where history stands in the hierarchy of values in our society. My father was an engineer who used to mock the humanities. Now I teach in a business programme. What is the payoff, the ROI?

 

I will answer in one way that will satisfy none of the needs of a capitalist’s soul. And then I will answer in a way that might just give him a moment’s pause.

 

First, I’ll say that, here, nearer the end of all my reading than the beginning, I feel like it takes a lifetime of reading and re-reading to begin to have perspective on the immensity of the human project. I won’t make any claims of mastery over the subject. In a sense, that is what keeps my ardour alive. I have never ceased to enjoy thinking about it, discussing it, and writing about it, always a beginner and always an enthusiast.

 

I use the word “perspective” with intention. Perspective is a result of reading history. It can also be said to be a value in reading history, meaning a reason to read history. One step further, it can also be a way to read history. In teacher’s language, the way is to read actively. I tell my language students to read with a dictionary handy and to use it. Similarly, one needn’t read history passively; follow every branching detail or thought. For convenience, we conceive of stories as lines, but in fact they are webs, networks, or branching structures. History is no different; history is a story.

 

We are uniquely positioned, in the age of the internet, to understand this latter point. When we browse, we follow links. Think of every history text as hypertext, every name, date, place, and event a link. A productive session of study is a series of digressions. Some of us resist the urge to digress because we’re indoctrinated to think it demonstrates a lack of concentration. In fact, it is real engagement. Some of us resist digressions because we’re lazy. But the product of that is lazy history. Do you get irritated when your children interrupt you? Take a minute to consider their curiosity, and then consider the state of your own curiosity.

 

I do get it: to the impatient capitalist, wisdom and understanding fall under the rubric of “nice qualities”, which has a subheading, “so what?” I need to offer something more. Is there any way to package this perspective to the restless and the avaricious. No, probably not, but I might just inch us up the ladder of capitalist values from “so what?” to “hmm, interesting”.

 

First, a digression: is history fact? Much is made these days of the anti-factual climate we increasingly inhabit. Fact-checkers are working overtime, and in the face of increasing apathy. History is definitely one of the favoured categories of the fact-checkers, especially when dealing with the likes of Donald Trump. The implication is that history is a privileged discipline in that tarnished, old, fact-based reality that millions of citizens of the twenty-first century have found such a disappointment. But is history really fact?

 

If a politician is motivated for some reason to say that Hannibal crossed the Alps in 118 BC (rather than 218 BC,) he can be easily fact-checked, because dates clearly fall in the column of facts. But imagine he says that the Carthaginians were the Russians of their day. It’s a crass, emotion-based assertion, and obvious to most of us as empty rhetoric. But how is it we know that, and how do we check it? We cannot counter with fact. It’s an interpretation, and it must be countered with interpretation.

 

Context and depth of knowledge are required for interpretation. The politician in my example brings context, but a mismatching context; e.g., Cold War context vs ancient Roman. To successfully counter his conscious and intentional misinterpretation requires bringing the correct context to bear and then explaining it. It also requires the audience to have context. The propagandist counts on that being a difficult combination, and frankly being just too much work.

 

How do we rebuild context in the general milieu? It takes readers, and it takes writers. Remember that perspective is a method. A reader shouldn’t approach a biography, for example, as a train ride. On a train, there is one track, and one would prefer that the train stays on that one track all the way to the destination. That doesn’t work in reading. The destination encompasses all the territory in between. The journey is context, and is essential to comprehension. One ought to ride a few divergent routes, window-side, eyes wide open. Too many biographies are single-destination rails,

academics talking to other academics. Lay readers will space out and remember little. There’s too much detail. There’s little to link new knowledge to old.

 

Thus we come to the delivery systems. It could well be that proper histories are a civic enterprise, and perspective a key civic virtue. Modern readers know titbits about many things, few things deeply. Their attention spans are short. Assuming books still have a future, they should be written in such a way that they reflect the vagaries of enthusiasm, digging among details and then roaming the hills around the topic in order to scout the terrain. Excitement leads one far and wide in search of significance. And well it should be so. Perspective should be a method for the writer.

 

The reader fascinated by Hannibal probably also needs to be exposed to Caesar and Scipio, Roman military tactics, and the roles of Sicily and Spain in Rome’s growing empire. The links should be natural. They ought to carry the reader forward simply on the power of their interest. Closing the book, the reader ought to feel comfortable that a new level of understanding has been reached, a kind of primitive navigation system, if you will, for a whole region in time, an environment that wasn’t familiar before. It’s not enough to know the milestones in Hannibal’s life; significance is derived from the geography and the stakes and the trajectories of empire before and after.

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“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell used to say in championing the everyday hero, and I think it’s a fair bit of advice for the everyday, amateur scholar. We ought to every one of us have our humble ambitions as scholars, whatever the market value. And we ought to pursue them with whimsy, with liberty, and as though we had all the time in the world to follow every branching path.

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We shouldn’t be rattled by the noise of our time; we should trust in the sturdiness of facts. We should simply cultivate the habit of sharing truth, and with something of joy we felt in discovering it.