Andrew Roberts on how to write history
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History, a mosaic in the Library of Congress by Frederick Dielman
National Review recently published an excellent short piece by British historian Andrew Roberts entitled “How to Write History.” Roberts—an accomplished military historian who has written studies of Waterloo and the Second World War and, most recently, big fat biographies of Napoleon and Churchill—offers a surprisingly simple reminder of what makes good historical writing:
When our forefathers sat around the fire in their caves telling stories about the famous mastodon hunts of yesteryear, they found it easy to do, because their listeners always wanted to know the answer to the eternal question “What happened next?” When the veterans of the Trojan War enthralled their grandchildren, and the Vikings told their sagas of long-ago raids, they knew they had their audiences riveted because they could tell them the next stage of the story. Nobody ever asked them to tell the tale thematically or in modules or in a postmodernist format; they just wanted to know what happened next.
He goes on to write about mankind’s innate sense of story and chronology. At the beginning of every semester, when I explain to my students how I approach history and how I will present it, I point out that if I asked them “How did you get to class this morning?” they would almost certainly tell me a story—they could craft it instantly, in fact, without thinking about it. Telling stories comes naturally to us (one of the many ways in which we are subcreators) both as explanation and entertainment. Ideally as both.
But Roberts notes one other serious advantage to narrative history:
The chronological approach also has the great advantage over other ways of writing history in that it is true (something the postmodernists ignore, since they despise the concept of truth in history per se).
We explain ourselves chronologically because that is how we experience our lives and literally everything else.
The inside of history
Roberts goes on to address something I care very, very deeply about: “To try to immerse oneself in the mindset of the long-dead is easily the hardest part of the historian’s craft, and the most treacherous. The further one goes back in history, the harder it is.” I’ve written about this before here, here, here, and here, for starters.
Alas, Roberts gives one good example, and then missteps into stereotype:
Reach back much earlier than the Western Enlightenment and one must be good at theology, because educated people spent what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about God and how He should best be worshiped. Go back much further than the Renaissance, and people spent a good deal of their time simply being scared. Recall the very earliest moments of COVID-19 a year ago, when we didn’t know how lethal it was but a lot of people were starting to die. That was what it was like living in the Dark Ages all the time, only with a good deal less information.
This is hardly giving the medievals their due; anyone even casually acquainted with the literature—of any variety—of medieval people can’t help but think of the exuberance, the piety, the joy with which they embraced life. Even their horror or mourning, as in the accounts of the plague in the 14th century, have a gusto to them that stands in marked contrast to our own time. Modern people have proven a good deal gloomier, even with all their information. Food for thought.
But Roberts’s overall point stands. I strive every semester to get my students inside the departed people we study, “to immerse [them] in the mindset” of our subjects. Every semester I see some successes but also conclude discouraged. As it happens, the very last item I graded today was a paper heavily salted with social justice platitudes, that roundly condemned members of several long-gone societies for their racial prejudices and inequality, and that overlooked the manifest evidence to the contrary. So Roberts’s essay, and this point particularly, struck me especially hard. Roberts:
Trying to impose our mindset—let alone our values—upon the past is self-evidently ludicrous, however often it is tried and however well intentioned. There is no such thing, for example, as “the right side of history.” We might want people in the past to be more like us, but they resolutely refuse to be, and we must respect their right to be different.
To understand the dead is difficult work, but worthwhile. The work must continue. And in the meantime, I may save that paragraph to copy and paste into student feedback in the future.
Words, words, words
Roberts also indulges in one of my favorite pastimes—hating on specific words:
Any book with too great a reliance on the words “perhaps,” “maybe,” “possibly,” or—the worst—“probably” is usually one to approach with caution. When the great Oxford historian Martin Gilbert saw the word “probably” in a history essay, he would circle it in red and write in the margin “Probably not?”
Similarly, never, ever use the word “inevitable,” because nothing is inevitable in history. (Except, as my Cambridge professor Norman Stone used to say, for German military counter-attack.) Marxists and other determinists will disagree, but unless you are one of them, beware the word as profoundly philosophically unsound.
This is fun to read but also excellent advice. Watch out for probably and bayonet every inevitable you come across.
Conclusion
Roberts touches on several other big topics—conspiracy theories, tendentious monocausal explanations of history like the 1619 Project, and woke or intersectional history and its popularity in the academy—before bringing his essay back to its starting point: Answer the question What happened next? and you’ll be on your way to good history.
None of which, I should add, is to suggest that analysis or the deep dive into the archives, German-style, is irrelevant. Roberts is no stranger to the archive, having dug up previously unknown or unpublished sources for his history of the Second World War and having read every single one of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters for his biography of the man. But all of that was in the service of chronology, of keeping the pages turning and the reader asking that question.
To keep readers or students interested, to make your history true, it should be a story.
Addenda
You can read the entirety of Roberts’s essay, which appears in the December 17 print edition of National Review, at NRO here.
A few months ago I quoted a longish excerpt from Land of Hope, a one-volume narrative history of the United States by Wilfred McClay. (I am, in fact, still reading it, the Gilded Age having had its usual effect on me by killing my interest for a few months.) McClay makes similar and, as the introduction to a book rather than an essay, deeper arguments in the same vein. You can read that excerpt and my glosses on it here.
