History along the Trail

Harpers Ferry National Historic Park is located, essentially, in a bowl. The town (which includes both the national parks and 300 private residences) is surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains. If you're feeling adventurous, you can't go wrong with Maryland Heights. Its a roughly 1/2 to 2 hour hike to the top of the hill, and much of it is fairly steep. At the top (or at the overlook if you don't want to go the entire way up) you can see beautiful views of the surrounding areas and be satisfied that you gave yourself a decent workout. In addition, throughout the hike you get the chance to see and hike around the remains of fortifications built by the Union forces stationed on this hill during the civil war. Even more helpful, there are numerous waysides that detail the efforts of union troops to build these defenses and how they dragged the cannons up themselves because the ground was too steep for the horses.
Valley Green is another excellent of where trails and history meet. Running along the Wissahickon Creek, this park has numerous signs that detail this areas rich history, be it the covered bridge, the remains of a mill, or a sign explaining the saga of the Delaware Indians that inhabited this Valley prior to European settlement. Visitors to this park include, hikers, bikers, and walkers, but what seems to unite them is that the signs draw them away from there walk, curious to learn just a little about those who walked this ground before them. They might not have come to the park expecting to learn something, but they leave, hopefully, a little more knowledgeable about the past... if they stop. Of course, some folks will ignore such packets of information, but it's certainly helpful that such nuggets of information are at least available to the average visitor.
For too many people, history is something that is contained in books and museums. The 19th century might well have been in Narnia for the way that many people conceptualize it. But history didn't take place in some far distant land, it took place all around us (the building I'm currently typing in survived both John Brown's raid and the Civil War). The difficultly is to return the people of the past to the places where they acted in a way that is meaningful to the average person.
 The waysides on Maryland Heights do an excellent job with this, as its easy for the hiker to sympathize with the soldiers who were tasked with charting up the cannons to the top of the mountain. Waysides at battlefield trails that point out the distance between the two armies (and thus the distance soldiers had to charge) are also quite effective. Gettysburg and Culloden battlefields in particular are both very effective at this. By contrast, if I'm going for a run in Valley Green, its somewhat difficult for me to emphasize with the owner of a flour-mill, since I'm engaged in an entirely different task. A more meaningful wayside along the same stretch of trail details the efforts of the CCC to build the trail during the great depression. In this case, I'm not performing anything resembling trail maintenance on my run, I can appreciate the work of those who built the trail, there is a clear connection as I'm literally standing on the results of their efforts. One needs to only stare and imagine the sounds of battle in order to understand the challenges facing the soldiers. Its not enough to simply state information, as any park ranger will tell you, it needs to be meaningful for the visitor in order to make it stick. When done right, waysides along hiking/ running trail can be an excellent way to make this meaningful interpretation happen.

Why History?

I tend to get these questions quite often. Why study history? Why does it matter? Don't you realize that you probably won't ever be able to find a job with a history degree? I'm going to address the first two in this blog post (check back with me in five years about the third, but hopefully this post will give you an idea of why I'm not terribly worried about my career). While I'm certainly not an expert on history, I have loved the subject since I was nine and recently completed a degree in it, so, at the least, I have a pretty clear idea of why I chose history. Quite simply, history has value. Value in a external sense, and value in a personal/ internal sense

. 

Imagine you took a walk into a forest. Its a beautiful day, the path is clear, and you're well-prepared with water and trail mix in your backpack. You get to the middle of the forest, and suddenly you lose your memory. You don't remember how you got into the forest, you don't remember where you're going, and you don't even remember the stuff you've packed in your backpack. Nothing else has changed, and in many ways you are still set for a successful hike, but you're now missing the essential component to your survival, your memory. In much the same way,  a society without history has no idea of how it got to the present day, and consequently is much more likely to thrown off track as it moves towards the future. This is the value of history in the external sense. The actions of those who came before us shaped the world we live in today, and if were are to understand the 21st century, we need to understand the centuries that came before. Turn on any cable news program and the saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it" is bound to come up. However, knowing your history is not as easy as it may seem.

There is often the temptation to see history as a simple series of neatly recorded facts laid out in a book, all wrapped up in a neat little bow. What a lot of folks don't realize though is that the history books we read in school are the result of countless hours of research into primary sources (there's also, unfortunately, a lot of bureaucratic input that occurs as well, but that's a subject for another post). These sources include: chronicles, letters, transcripts, images, records, proclamations, oral accounts, pieces of graffiti, and numerous other pieces of information. The historian's task is to shift through all of this  and attempt make sense of it, which is no easy task. Often times the accounts of events we have are contradictory (there are at least four accounts of the first battle of the French and Indian War, all of them presenting a different sequence of events). Oftentimes, these sources can be in different languages, some of which are no longer spoken. The historian must attempt to identify any biases in the source, determine the intentions of the individual who created it, weigh its trustworthiness, and determine how much weight to give it. Most importantly, a good historian will attempt to keep their own biases in check. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has biases which we can never fully remove, but we can attempt to keep them in check. 

It's for this reason that two good historians can disagree. Some aspects of history everyone agrees with: the British surrendered at Yorktown, John Adams served as Washington's vice-president, and the Holocaust happened, but because of the uncertain nature of many primary sources two historians can look at the same document and come away with very different conclusions. For example, I was once in class about the later years of the Roman Empire. We were examining a document where a Frankish chief declares himself king over his people. He wears a purple robe, and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor is present at the ceremony. Another student in the class took this to mean that the Western Roman Empire still existed, as the king was paying homage to Roman traditions and his coronation only had legitimacy because of the presence of the Eastern Emperor. By contrast, I took it as a sign that the Western Roman Empire had effectively fallen at this point, since, in my view, the wearing of purple and the presence of a foreign king showed that this Frankish ruler saw himself as the successor to the Western Empire and an equal with the east (in much the same way as Russian Tsars portrayed themselves as heirs to the Byzantine Empire after the Turks conquered Constantinople). Who was right? Well, in this case it really does depend on the opinions of the individual reading the article. The decline and fall of Rome was a gradual event, the date most historians use is a convenient placeholder, but any serious Roman scholar will admit that the actual moment when the empire "fell' will continue to be debated for some time. Until someone figures out how to time travel to the past, we'll never know for sure how the folks who were there saw this event. 

In that sense, the historian is less of a reporter and more like a detective. He must shift through the information, while keeping in mind the information that is not available to him. For much of history, most people could not write, so many of those stories are lost. Similarly, countless numbers of documents and artifacts have been destroyed over the centuries by war, censorship, and environmental forces. In some cases (such as the Saxon invasion of Briton) the historian will have only one or two written sources from which to try and understand the past. We will never know how exactly the people who lived before us thought and what their true intentions were, so for the most part there will be some stumbling around in the forest that is the present day. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. After all, if you are lost in the forest and have a least a dim idea of how you got there, you are still in a better spot than if you remembered nothing. That's is why we study external history, there will never be a perfect, clear view of the past, but we can get, at the least, a workable idea. And that, good reader, is infinitely better than nothing.

External history provides insights about the world, internal history provides us insights about ourselves. More so than external history, internal history is the story of people, individuals who are living in very different circumstances then we are, but who nevertheless feel the same emotions as ourselves. They loved, the lost, they grew, they changed, some were ambitious, some were modest, but all were human, just the same as you and me. At its best, internal history allows us to examine the lives of those who came before as window into our own personalities. One of the stories I tell on tours is of a woman named Millie. Millie was a slave in the 1850s and the only information we have about her comes from a letter in which her new owner notes that she has a bad cough. On first glance, the conclusion might be that Millie is sick, but historians have posited that perhaps she was actually faking her cough and engaging in a form of resistance. If she could convince her new master that she was sick, perhaps she would be sent back to her family the reasoning goes. It's a quiet form of resistance, and its not going to end the institution of slavery, but for Millie, her coughing was an attempt to return to her family, the people who loved her. Contrast that with Nat Turner, who attempted to end the institution of slavery with weapons. The internal value of history is that it allows people to ask "what would I have done in that situation?" and oftentimes this question will require a lot of thinking. In this way, the stories of the past help us gain insight about ourselves that we might not otherwise realize. 

I've described how external and internal history are supposed to work, but naturally the two can be badly misconstrued. While two historians might disagree about a document, others will actually twist history to suit their own ends. The best example of this is probably Holocaust denial. Individuals, with their own political ends, will state that the Nazi's mass murder of the Jews never happened, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Oftentimes, they will say that they are simply challenging traditional interpretations, when, in reality they are actually ignoring the overwhelming evidence. There is a difference between looking at sources and facts in a different way, and outright denying their existence. Typically, such "historians" won't cite much, instead relying on twisted logic and their own feelings to guide them. Their feelings, rather then the historical sources, are what dictate their views.

The use of internal history can also face problems, particularly from simplification. I often have children ask me whether the uniform I'm wearing makes me a bad guy or a good guy. Of course, that's the way children think, but you'd be surprised how many adults approach history with a moral absolutist perspective. Either a historical person is good (that is, they have no faults), or bad. Now, in history there are some folks who most people would consider to be "monsters" (Hitler, Leopold II for example), and in those folks it is quite hard to find any redeeming characteristics. However, you will probably never find a "good" historical figure, an individual with no faults. Rather the majority of folks have a mixture of good and bad qualities and that affects their actions, which is the same of people today. That doesn't mean that we should write them off as villains and be done with them, their moral complexity makes them human and thus offers much more to learn about ourselves than a perfect individual would. Too often however, people wish to see history as a struggle between good and bad, when the reality is much more complex. History isn't Star Wars or Lord of the Rings with evil and good clearly marked out, its a larges mixture of characters who you will often agree with sometimes and disagree with in others. History is a human story, and humans aren't perfect.

History has a lot to teach us both about ourselves and world we live in, but history itself is a never ending detective story that requires careful research, disciplined logic, and a large measure of self-control. Oftentimes, these three factors are not apparent in today's discussions which harms our ability to really learn from the past. That is why I study history. Its value, in many ways, remains unappreciated and is prone to be twisted. The world needs to understand its past, and as long as that's the case, there will always be a role for history and the historian.