I was sitting at my desk the other day asking myself why I felt so frustrated with the state of the world when it came to me. The answer is history. There is not enough history.
We live in a world of immediacy. Things happen one day and are gone the next. We see events through the prism of the disposable age. We are accustomed to our wishes being answered at the press of a button. In Britain for example, voters are disgruntled because our one-year-old government has not yet solved the migration problem or made our rivers clean and our prices low.
Well, of course not.
But this is not a piece about current politics. It’s a piece about the way we – and I blame the mainstream media as well as politicians – look at world events with a child’s eye, that ability to live in the present. If you are a child, that is wonderful but grown-ups need an awareness of context. The question is – are we losing that ability? Increasingly, we don’t bother to inquire about what happened twenty, fifty or a hundred years ago and ask the question as to how those events of yesteryear are impacting on us today. We don’t look at complexity. All too often, we see only good and bad – or sometimes something we call ‘evil’.
But, you might say, there are an increasing number of history podcasts and there are what you might call celebratory historians. People are interested in history. To which I would say that is true but all too often what we see and hear merely scratches the surface.
To really understand – or hope to understand – what has gone before, you need to dig deep. And that takes time and effort. This is what academic historians do. Throughout the universities, there are hundreds beavering away at ‘history’, but sadly, outside the academic world, their voices are rarely heard, their writings rarely read. These are the people, nevertheless, who cumulatively provide the bedrock on which the podcasters feed, usually in a selective and unnuanced manner.
I can’t help thinking that in part this invisibility is the historians’ fault. Perhaps the way we phrase our history is just too esoteric. Look at the titles of articles in academic historical journals, for example, as I do and you would be excused for turning the page. Take these titles chosen at random. These are the equivalent of headlines if you look at it in traditional media fashion. They should both inform and catch the eye. But they don’t.
‘Agency Attributions under a Normative Crisis: Corpus Analysis of Emerging Frameworks of Meaning during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poland’. That might be fascinating. It might throw important light on a recent global crisis. Its authors will have spent months or years looking into the issues around agency attributions in Poland. But I haven’t read it. Would you?
Or Constructing Old Age in Communist Bulgaria: Ideology, Policy and Science. This one is concise and fairly clear. But what does constructing old age mean? Move on.
I would plead guilty myself. I published an academic history based on my PhD thesis entitled Communing with the Enemy: Covert Operations, Christianity and Cold War Politics in Britain and the GDR. The first part is ok. Communing with the Enemy could almost be the title of a novel. But that latter part sounds very niche. In actual fact much of it documents Stasi manipulation of British/GDR relations and would make a good Cold War film.
Here is one, though, that turns out to be interesting though the title is not. The East and the West: Regional Deservingness and Migration Aspirations of Displaced Ukrainians Living in Poland and the Czech Republic ‘Deservingness’? That’s not a word much used.
But I read it because I thought it might have something important to say about the current situation in Ukraine. And it did!
It turns out that, in contrast to the welcome given by the British to Ukrainian refugees, Ukrainians themselves have mixed feelings about their fellow citizens who crossed into neighbouring countries as a result of the current conflict. Some refugees were deserving and some were not, they said in response to questions put by the authors of the article, two Czech and one Polish historians. Briefly, those from the eastern part of Ukraine, the part bordering Russia, were ‘deserving’. Those from the western part were not. The latter were viewed as economic migrants, not deserving of the financial support offered by host countries and since western Ukrainian refugees knew this, they often lied and said they came from the east.
‘In the host societies, the media generally refer to displaced persons from Ukraine as deserving assistance, while politicians, the public, and many organizations do not differentiate between the specific circumstances of displaced Ukrainians. In comparison, displaced persons living in the Czech Republic and Poland question the value of temporary protection for all Ukrainians,’ according to the authors.
This hard-headed response of Ukrainians themselves contrasts with the emotional response of the British media, egged on by Boris Johnson, and in turn the average British person.
I think this research is an example of how we so easily assume events are black and white, good or bad when, if you dig a little deeper, you will discover a more nuanced picture. In this case, the British – and others – see Ukrainians as a homogenous whole whereas Ukrainians themselves see and know there are differences. Different histories, different cultures, different languages.
The President of the Royal Historical Society, Lucy Noakes, recently wrote an article called Making the Case for History.
‘History is prominent and popular in UK public life. We read and debate history, watch programmes and listen to podcasts about the past, trace our ancestors, and visit sites of historical interest in greater numbers than ever. This is to be welcomed. However, it sits awkwardly with the current plight of history in many UK universities, where our discipline is often regarded as being of lesser importance than more overtly vocational or ‘useful’ subjects. Yet it’s in these same universities that we find those who teach and research history, within dedicated departments and other disciplinary centres, who are central to the creation of the public history many of us seek out and enjoy.’
The problem that Professor Noakes is addressing is that historians at the coalface are too busy doing the job, often in separate seams, to spend time promoting the work they do.
Another aspect of the problem was recently highlighted by the young Times journalist James Marriott (also writing on Substack https://jmarriott.substack.com/) who often makes his readers sit up with his different perspective on the world. He recently devoted a column to the importance of history in which he pointed out the peculiar 21st century tendency to see the past in terms of the present, to criticise our forebears as thought they lived with the moral certainties of today. There are no final answers in history, he wrote. ‘Our present and its certainties will turn out to be as temporary and provisional as those of the 18th century. A little historical humility is urgently in order.’
And here’s another point. If we are going to spend our taxes on rearming – and it looks as though we are – then it is vital that we have a better knowledge and understanding of history. Why? Because wars – and it is war we are talking about because that is sadly the natural progression from building up our weapons – are always justified on the basis of history. Unfortunately it is a history that is very often distorted in order to make the argument.
If we fail to understand that attitudes depend on history and geography and that, therefore, others do not necessarily share our opinions, we risk creating conflict where conflict does not need to exist.
Jirka, L., Kamionka, M., & Macková, L. (2025). The East and the West: Regional Deservingness and Migration Aspirations of Displaced Ukrainians Living in Poland and the Czech Republic. East European Politics and Societies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254251332662