The Long View

Journalism, or what people call "Main Stream Media" takes a real beating on this continent. There seems to be more effort expended in critiquing what gets said, shown or written than is put into the original product itself. 

I guess you can add me to the list, in a way. 

I just finished a lovely little book called "Are We Rome?" by former Atlantic editor Cullen Murphy. The book's subject is explained by the title, a 200 page romp through 2000-plus years of history. The caveats are many, but the essential point is clear. The United States has something to learn from the rise, decline and eventual disintegration of the Roman Empire.

I like to read history and I like it best when it tells a story and does so in clear, accessible language. Murphy's tome succeeds on both fronts. 

I won't get into the guts of his argument, read the book for that. What struck me as I was reading it was my growing gratitude that the writer was a journalist. He doesn't have a PhD in classics (as far as I know), I've read him mostly on US politics. He has an amateur's interest in antiquity and a curiosity about where his own country sits in the continuum of history. The result is a book that provides an entertaining Cole's notes version of Gibbon in parallel with a lament for current state of American politics. The narrative is punctuated by that journalistic standby: the telling detail. 

This is not academic history, and no doubt there are academic historians who would sniff at some mere magazine hack who dares to play in their sandbox and make money doing it. Think of the abuse Pierre Berton took from academic historians for the sin of popularity (and being a journalist doing popular history). But what this book has going for it is what all good history manages: there is a point behind the stories. He has something to say. 

My brother is a historian and I have always been struck by his ability to connect the dots. He draws things together into a coherent whole. Well-used deep knowledge does not get lost in the subjunctive, it brings clarity. (You can read some of his stuff here: http://theshtick.blogspot.com/) 

One of my favorite academic historians is Donald Creighton. He wrote a fabulous two-volume biography of Sir John A MacDonald, our first Prime Minister. It is very much a product of its time, the 1950s. The salacious bits, such as Sir John A's prodigious drinking, the fate of his first wife, take a back seat to his many qualities as a politician. But the books, all 800-plus pages of them, paint a picture of a man and a time and tell today's Canadians a lot about our national reflexes, why we are the way we are as a nation and as people. In fact, it was after reading Creighton that I came to understand some essential truths about the Canadian character that the passage of time and the evolution of the country have not yet erased. That is great history writing.

I am aware that an academic can devote an entire career to studying, say, the contents of a Roman latrine in northern Britain. And I suspect the work would be pretty interesting. But the real test would come from the writing that emerges from the research. It would, no doubt, adhere to academic conventions and advance its argument with detail after accrued detail. And if it is done especially well, it may tell us not just about where we've been, but how it relates to where we are. But will a general audience get it? Probably not. 

Which is too bad. If more historians had Murphy's, or Berton's (or my brother's) storytelling gifts, more history might be read. And perhaps the we would make fewer of the same mistakes, over and over again. Oh, and my brother's first job was as a reporter.