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. I had moved on from Egypt: I loved the daring intellectualism of the Greeks; I enjoyed the mysticism and romance of the Middle Ages. In my subsequent studies, I settled on Renaissance and Reformation history, and I went on to write an 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 will 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. To begin, I say. Knowing there is more only feeds my ardour. It’s the obverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the more you know, the further you seem from knowing enough. What matters is, I have never stopped enjoying history, mulling it over, discussing it, and writing about it, always a beginner and always an enthusiast.

 

I have used the word “perspective” with intention. Perspective is a result of reading history. Is it value added, or is it the reason to read history? It doesn’t matter, because perspective accrues quite naturally, like dust on the bookshelf. But I want to take it further. Perspective can be a method.

 

I have had the pleasure to teach reading and study skills to adult students. One key strategy, perhaps the central one, is to read actively. That means to interact with the text, rather than passively moving from one word to the next, from start to finish, shrugging when the words do not signify. I tell students to read with a dictionary handy and to use it.

 

Similarly, one shouldn’t read history passively. For convenience, we conceive of stories as lines, but in fact they are webs, networks, or branching structures. Follow every branching detail or thought.

 

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 as a link. A productive session of study is a series of digressions. Some of us resist the urge to digress because we 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. Are you irritated by questions? Take a minute to consider the state of your curiosity.

 

To the impatient capitalist, wisdom and understanding fall under the rubric of “nice qualities”, which has a subheading, “so what?” Does perspective offer something more? Maybe there is a way to 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 one of the favoured categories of the fact-checkers, especially when dealing with the likes of Donald Trump. Does that place history among the privileged disciplines of that old and tarnished fact-based reality that millions of citizens of the twenty-first century have found such a disappointment?

 

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. That is obvious to most of us as empty rhetoric. But how is it that 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 applied to ancient Rome. To successfully counter his 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.

 

Context requires reading. And it requires perspective as a reading method.

 

Many people pick up a biography as a fun window into history. But there is a trap door about a third of the way into most biographies, a context trap that claims many readers, and leaves a trail of unfinished books on shelves. A biography is like a single-destination railway. No stops. There might be a prologue or a first chapter dedicated to context. But that is concentrated and often wrapped up too neatly. The reader receives some quick satisfaction, and afterward is dropped into a deep pool of detail. Engagement levels drop precipitously.

 

The publisher, by the way, is satisfied. The sale was made. The demand, as reported by the casual reader, has been met. This matter requires no more attention. Publishers who once were concerned about the state of knowledge are now occupied solely by the state of sales. This is what happens when everyone becomes a “consumer”; but that is another topic.

 

The joy of any train ride is the context, what you see out the windows. To reduce it to the destination printed out on the ticket is truly to starve the soul.

 

The destination encompasses all the territory in between. The journey is context, and context is essential to “arrival”. The traveller should be drawn to ride a few divergent routes, window-side, eyes wide open.

 

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.

​

“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.

​

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.