History Lessons

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In the meantime, the field of history is branching out in exciting new directions. The Internet has opened up a rich forum for all manner of historical material and debate, from massive photo and document archives such as those at the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov) to captivating blogs such as Cliopatria (hnn.us/blogs/2.html) and Steamboats Are Ruining Everything (www.steamthing.com). Institutions like the Holocaust Museum are bringing history alive in powerful ways that don't sacrifice accuracy for impact. And the historical sciences-geology, biology, paleoanthropology-are continually adding new information to the ancient story of humans on earth, thanks in part to new technology and methods.

Harvard history professor Daniel Lord Smail argues in his forthcoming book On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2007) that history should trace its subjects--humans--right back to their beginnings in the Stone Age, rather than focusing, as most historians do, on the period since the rise of civilization and dismissing what preceded it as 'prehistory.' This 'deep history,' he says, would be 'a seamless narrative that acknowledges the full chronology of the human past.'

It ought to be one hell of a story, and a blockbuster of a movie.

Want more? Read the rest of Utne Reader's September / October package on history:

• Can We Handle the Truth?
  America's selective memory and massacres long since forgotten
  by Howard Zinn, from the book A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
• Forgetting Hitler
  A growing number of young German Muslims lash out against Holocaust studies
  by Stacy Perman, from Guilt & Pleasure
• In the Trenches
  A powerful war poem teaches history--and humility
  by Patrick Hicks, from Florida Review

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