The History of History Books

We historians used to make up meaningful stories. Now we just write true ones.

— Reinhardt Friedrich Freiherr von Teufel

Elizabeth Ranke, nearly BA, is 21 years old. She's white, bright and, though awfully ambitious, polite. Her family lives in a smart suburb of a large city on the East Coast of the United States. Her father is a professor in the humanities at a mid-level college and her mother is a lawyer in a small downtown firm. She has one younger brother, Martin, and no further additions to the clan are planned. The family self-identifies as "middle class," but the Rankes rest comfortably in the top 10% of Americans in terms of wealth and the top 2% in terms of educational attainment. They always vote Democratic and know few people who don't. Elizabeth attended a top-ranked public high school, where she was an excellent student. Upon graduation, she matriculated at a "very selective" school, Twiddletwaddle College, in another city on the East Coast. She's a history major and will take her degree — with highest honors — next May. She works hard and has high expectations. Now, in her penultimate semester, she's thinking about graduate school. She wants to write a history book.

As we'll see, she will. But before we follow her from BA to PhD to published historian, we should pause to note that both Elizabeth's aspirations and the artifact she wants to produce are, historically speaking, rather novel. To us, historians and history books are just part of the early twenty-first-century American scenery. Like interstate highways, McDonald's, and MTV, the two have just "always" been there. That's probably what Elizabeth thinks at this stage in her career. Her parents know about historians and history books; her grandparents knew about historians and history books; and her great-grandparents, well, she doesn't really know much about them, but it seems reasonable to suppose they did as well. But the fact of the matter is that hers is not a very reasonable supposition at all. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the time when her great-grandparents would have been coming of age, historians and history books were rather unusual. For it was only then that the institutional machinery that produces historians and history books was being established in the United States. Had Elizabeth been in her great-grandmother's shoes, she almost certainly wouldn't have wanted to become a historian or to write a history book. Almost no one did or could.

This is not to say, of course, that prior to 1900 there were no historians or history books. Though it would be too much to claim that Herodotus is a household name (would that it were so), many college graduates will be able to say that he was a Greek historian who lived a very long time ago, probably in Greece. Some few of them may even be able to propose that he wrote a history book called, appropriately enough, The Histories. Though this dim recollection is only half-right, it's not all wrong. And importantly for our purposes it's right enough for us to be sure that people we would call "historians" were writing true stories about the past we would call "histories" long before we were born.

The act of writing history, and therefore "the historian" and "the history" in their generic senses, are not new. But the profession "historian" and what we're calling a "history book" are new. They were the product of a very specific time, place, and set of circumstances. This is important to bear firmly in mind, because the first step in comprehending the artifact called "history book" is the understanding that history books are not everywhere, always, and of necessity, but rather here, now, and contingent. This is what Elizabeth, still a novice in the trade, doesn't see and neither do most people who read history books. The truth, however, is that historians and history books are not to be found in most of the human past; until very recently, historians and history books were not to be found in most places on the globe, and it is entirely possible to conceive of a here-and-now present in which neither professional historians nor history books find any place. If Elizabeth were reborn at random in time and space, chances are overwhelming that she wouldn't want to be a historian or write history books. She probably wouldn't even know what these things were. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine an alternative — and not entirely impossible — reality located exactly when and where she was born though without historians or history books.

That, fortunately for me and my colleagues, is not what happened. Though it's very difficult to pinpoint the exact historical origins of anything (human events, alas, don't really work like that), it's not too much to say that Germans invented the modern historian and history book in the mid-nineteenth century. More accurately, they invented the modern research university. The word "research" is the important one here. Universities had existed in Europe for about 800 years when the Germans broke ground. But they were first and foremost religious institutions designed to teach novices (and not very many of them) about, well, religion. Naturally they taught other things — mostly, it seems, Aristotle — but Christianity infused them all. Since the truth of Christianity (and, for that matter, of Aristotle) was manifest, there was no real need to go digging around for new knowledge, and in most places such endeavors were actively discouraged. Some brave folks did research, and we know their names well, perhaps too well: Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and so on. They were exceptions. The rule was learning old stuff by rote. What else was required when everything worth learning had already been revealed in the Holy Scripture or received from Aristotle?

By the early nineteenth century, however, a number of important, powerful people in Europe began to believe that finding out new things might just be a good thing. They'd seen some new things in action — calculus, steam engines, morphine — and thought that having more of them around would be (as we would say) "in the national interest." The Germans were the first among them. They took the university "brand" and, under it, built a machine designed to make researchers and research instead of copiers and copies. The cogs and widgets of this machine included several key items, all of which are ubiquitous today where researchers and research are produced. First, money. The Germans realized that scholars have a hard time living on coin collected from callow, broke, and often drunk students. It's hard to write history books when you have to run a collection agency on the side. And, besides, most bookish types lack the muscle to collect anything but term papers. So the Germans, believing that it was important to fund teaching and research (an odd and novel thought in itself), made professors a line item...