Episode 29: History

Historie je jako nikdy nekončící oceán, kde se všechno živé i neživé mísí a naráží do sebe, ztrácí a zase objevuje a nakonec z toho vzniká jeden velký proud, o kterém píší učebnice dějepisu. Může se historie opakovat? Jak je to s těmi "starými, dobrými časy", je v pořádku si minulost romantizovat a hořekovat nad přítomnosti? Proč je dobré si zdroje ověřovat, mít oči dokořán a nevěřit všemu na první dobrou? S britským historikem Paulem Bavillem zmíníme i zásadní historické momenty jako bylo vynalezení knihtisku; hnutí sufražetek, díky kterému dnes ženy mají volební právo; nebo přistání na Měsíci, ke kterému došlo jen 66 let poté, co bratři Wrightové postavili první motorové letadlo, které uletělo 36 metrů.

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:32

Thank you very much for tuning in to this very new episode. My guest for today is Paul Bavil. Hi, paul Hi.

Speaker 3 0:41

Paul, very well, thank you Sitting in my surprisingly warm part of the UK for the moment.

Speaker 2 0:47

So whereabouts are you?

Speaker 3 0:49

So I'm in what would be described as a lovely Roman settlement called Castleford, which, if anybody has been up there, it really is now the place where charity shops go to die. It is one of the more run down areas of West Yorkshire. Charity shops go to die. It is one of the more run-down areas of west yorkshire, um, but it was kind of a very, very strategic point during the occupation from the roman empire, uh, you know, two thousand so years ago, uh. But yeah, it's really quite a lot of roman history around here, or at least a lot of blue plaques that describe roman history that you can no longer see.

Speaker 2 1:22

So, for those of you who haven't noticed, paul is a historian and also a presenter of a podcast called History Rage, and he has been examining history for over 20 years. Wow, I'm sure that this session is going to be very interesting and informing, and everything else.

Speaker 3 1:43

I hope so, Because one of our kind of unofficial taglines for History Rage is that we are history for people who don't know they like history. So if you're listening out there and you don't like history, you're wrong and I'll probably explain why.

Speaker 2 1:57

Okay, so how could we define history?

Speaker 3 2:00

Okay. So history and I'll grant you, I am biased here, but history is probably one of the most important subjects that we not only have but that we will ever have. Because what is history? History is the grand, detailed story of how we got where we are as a society, as a people, as a culture, as a planet. It's not particularly ordered, it's not kind of well spelled out and everything like that, but it is, at its core, a record. Everything we have done as human beings, everything, everything we've done, everything we've suffered, everything we've achieved, everything we've believed, how we've interacted with other societies, other cultures, our own society, what we thought, it is all there. That is what history is.

Speaker 2 2:50

And so what's history's main purpose?

Speaker 3 2:53

Okay. So history's main purpose kind of feeds in from that, then, because it is teaching us how we got where we are, but it is also, really importantly, teaching us what worked, what didn't work, what caused more problems than it created, what and this is really important when you're looking at things like current modern political decisions, it's like have we done anything like this before? And what happened? And how did people react? React, and why did people react like that? And are there? Is that highlighting dangers of us going down a particular path?

Speaker 3 3:32

That is the purpose of history it is. It is there to detail everything we did right, everything we did wrong, every life we improved, every life we harmed, and you've got a written record there of what's already been tried and what happened with it. And from there we determine do we try that again? If we don't try that again because it went spectacularly wrong, well, history gives us the opportunity to examine why it went spectacularly wrong, and then we can start to come up with ideas of what do we do that avoids that outcome, or how do we make that better? Or why didn't that invention work? Or why, when we came to do this thing, was it so commercially unviable that we. We couldn't carry on. Do we have a better way of doing it now?

Speaker 2 4:21

so I just wanted to say, because you've already mentioned, that there is no particular order and if we think of humankind and all the chaos and turmoil that happens every day in every corner of the world, so how can historians turn this chaos into some sort of narrative that has order? There needs to be some order, right Okay?

Speaker 3 4:45

Now let's say you say chaos, you say there is no order. Now I challenge that, because what are we all measuring as we go through our lives? There's one absolute constant for everybody is time. We have a measurement, you have a chronological order of things happening so we can know that in 1752, a particular law was passed and then from there, well, this rage of crime started and these people were hanged for it, and so forth and go. We've got an order.

Speaker 3 5:20

So when you're dealing with an awful lot of these various sources and things like that, you are looking at what are they writing about? Do we know when it happened? Okay, when what happened? You place that into your timeline, and you are. When you build that timeline, then, first of all, you've got the building of the timeline of facts. So you know when that thing happened, or when that person was born, or when they did that particular thing, or when they stood up in parliament and made that speech, something like that. So you start off first of all by just gathering and assembling all those facts into the timeline, and that can be I hate to use the word multiple timelines, because that sounds like we're starting to get into the realms of a marvel movie. But what you've got then is you've got a timeline of what one person's doing, you've got a timeline of what another person's doing and you've got a timeline of what the next group of people are doing and then you can see where those paths cross and how are they interacting with each other and and what are they doing from there.

Speaker 3 6:19

I did this when I was researching um, I was actually researching the women's suffrage movement in the uk back sort of 1910 through to 1914. Do a surprising fact here one in four people arrested for suffrager outrages was male. So when we found this from a source I found that from a source that was the arrest list for the time of the suffragette amnesty and what that gave me was all the dates of all the trials and who they were, everybody that was down to like five, six hundred people over the course of it arrested About four hundred and thirty that you could actually name. Some people gave false names, some people were just unknown. But from there I picked out then there are 109 men that were arrested for suffrage outages.

Speaker 3 7:09

So then you start to build all your timelines so you see what you know alfred allen is doing and where he's going, and you can track this through things like british newspaper archive. You can track that through um library registers, directories. You can build your picture of this person and from that you follow what they're doing. Now he may at some point land on what they call Black Friday, which is a very major protest that took place in 1910.

Speaker 3 7:41

And at that point what you find is that a lot of your timelines come together because a lot of your people are all taking part in that protest, and then you can expand that out. So, in terms of an order, we have already got one, and then it's trying to expand that order into that much kind of bigger picture, and then just fleshing that out with detail after detail after detail, until you have got and I do actually hate to use the term narrative it will crop up later on, you know because narrative suggests that somebody's actually putting their spin on what's going on, which to an extent we are. But but what you, what you've got then is a, is a wider collection of facts which is then coming together to almost report what happened so what would be the three most important historical events according to you?

Speaker 2 8:31

okay? So that's a tough one.

Speaker 3 8:34

It is a tough one and I was struggling to work out whether I'm going with british history, social history, world history or or anything else, but I have managed to come down to three and a few of these. The history community may want to tar and feather me and burn me at the stick, but but here is what I think are really the most kind of significant and important, and not necessarily for what they initially appear to be. So first I'm going to go with is the Black Death. So you know the Black Death. The Black Death, basically bubonic plague, sweeps in, pretty much kills one third of medieval Europe. Think about that. One third of the people in the whole of Europe at the time are killed by a single disease. We've not really had an outbreak of anything that has come close to what the Black Death does, but once it passes it has a really, really dramatic impact on European society because it pretty much gets rid of serfdom, because if you think of the strata of society that's probably going to succumb to the plague more than any other, it's going to be the lower end of society. So you've got your serfs and your churls, what we might call the peasants, but the lower classes are going to get hit by that in a much bigger way, and it does, it wipes out a considerable amount of them, to the point where, if you are a landowner and you are wanting your land farming, suddenly there is a massive shortage of people who can do that. So they then start to be able to demand higher wages because they can go and take their labor elsewhere, which they couldn't have done before because there was just no vacancies and the serfdom rules applied. And you are looking now at a situation where these people actual workers actually have some power to decide where they want to go and work and therefore it has a massive overhaul in not so much workers' rights, because you still really have, you know, the sort of rights that we might look at today. But suddenly you have this thing of okay, well, you're paying me, you know, three pence a day to work your field, but that guy over there that's, you know, a two mile walk away he's paying me twice that, so I'm going to go and work there. And you ended up with the workforce there having that power in a way that they just hadn't had before. So that, I think, is number one, which is really dramatic change.

Speaker 3 11:20

Number two, on the subject of dramatic changes as well, and also in terms of like power of the people, I would say the invention of the printing press. What that gives us is that is, that's freedom of information, right there, you know, that is information reaching the people. And once you've got the printing press, that is, you can start to mass produce this information or this propaganda or whatever it is you want to say. You can distribute it, you can circulate it, and so with this we start to see the birth of like trade union movements, protests, particularly protests that don't involve turning up in the centre of London with a whole load of weapons and killing people. So you can start to circulate everything that you think about the government, and then from that we get this gives us satire. So you get like the print shop windows of London that start to have all the political cartoons in them because you can print these out cheaply.

Speaker 3 12:22

You start to get protest leaflets, but also you've got, coming from the other side, all these amazing posters and artworks that we see in the Second World War all around, not just London, but all around the UK and I would say pretty much all around the rest of the world. That comes as a result of the printing press, and without the printing press, then that concept, we wouldn't have the internet. The internet is the next massive leap, um in that, that is, that is almost the world's information at your fingertips and the fact that you can interact with it and you can contribute to it as well. Um, and it's only a short step there to go. Hello, podcasts, because without that, without that spread and that desire for information, for learning, for entertainment, we wouldn't be doing what we're sat here doing now yay, and number three number three right, I struggled on this one and I'll be waiting for everybody to come and tell me it was fake.

Speaker 3 13:28

But for moon landing 1969, we landed on another celestial body just the first time ever that we've done. That is staggering enough, you know, to develop that level of technology where we can send three guys attached to what is effectively a missile, launch them beyond the atmosphere. They can navigate Christ knows how many miles, land on what is. Yeah, we call it a moon, but let's be honest, it's the first time that we've landed people on a different planet. You know, the golden age of sail may have discovered America, but hell, we landed on the moon.

Speaker 3 14:10

And what's even more staggering about that is that we did that just over 60 years after developing powered flight. You know, the Wright brothers take off from the ground and land and I think they flew something like about 30 meters and 60 years later we sent three guys to a different planet. Is it is just absolutely earth shattering, you know. And in years to come we're out and potentially working with other planets. That all started there. I I have a feeling that in you know, in a hundred years time there will be historians that are treating those three astronauts in the same way that we treat the right brothers now and so are you afraid that people are going to say that it's all fake and Photoshop?

Speaker 3 14:58

No, I get that all the damn time. Anyway, one of our history rage episodes was for God's sake, the moon landings were real and they all came out of the woodwork for that.

Speaker 2 15:09

Oh, brilliant. And so what is the greatest flop or failure in history according to you?

Questioning Historical Narratives and Romanticizing Past

Speaker 3 15:18

I would think anybody who tries to invade russia is. It's never worked the mongols couldn't do it, crusaders couldn't do it, napoleon couldn't do it, nazis couldn't do it. I don't like russia, but actually mounting a land, invasion of it, has just never seemed to have never seemed to have worked, and it's probably one of the one of the classic, classic military blunders and so there is a famous quote that says history is written by the victors.

Speaker 2 15:47

So can we believe it then? Can we believe those who control the narrative, your favorite word, narrative?

Speaker 3 15:54

now there's the thing, you see, because, um, I'm going to challenge that on a couple of points, really, because they say history is written by the winners. It's that often belted out phrase, but it isn't. History might be wildly publicized by the winners, but history is written by everybody. You know. So, you, if you look at, if you look at any great conflict or any great like coming together or differences of opinion, you, you, both sides are there. You know, if we, if we take czech history, we can see both sides of the 30 years war. We know what all the protestants were doing and going on about and they're thinking. We know that all the Protestants were doing and going on about and thinking. We know that all the Catholics were thinking. We know the plots on each side. It's very much that one side wins, that one side loses, that, but the losing side, we still know its history, which kind of proves the point that history is not just written by the winners.

Speaker 3 16:55

The trouble I say with narratives is that no, actually you can't believe them. You shouldn't believe them. You shouldn't believe anything in history at all, straight, at, face value. Everything should be checked out, everything. Even Wikipedia cites sources and that's not really known as a great historical source, but when it states a fact, it knows where it comes from. So by knowing what those things are and where those things come from and where that information comes from, you get a much better understanding of then of either a is it true? Or b what is what? What are the thoughts and maybe the prejudices and the biases of those particular people? I take, for example, when I was talking earlier about the suffragette movement. Now you can take something like a primary source that is written at the time OK, and you know it would be very reasonable to think OK, that was written at the time. Therefore, it must be an accurate record of everything that's happening. Okay. But if what you're using as a primary source is the Suffragette monthly newsletter, you're probably getting a very, very one-sided view of what's going on there, and the Suffragette newsletter will tell you what they think Parliament is thinking or what they want their wider movement to think that Parliament is thinking. So you have to then balance that by looking at something like Hansard, which is a record of all the parliamentary debates, and seeing what comes up in there, and it is important for everything in history, just as it's important for everything in science and politics and culture and everything like that, that you just don't take anything at face value. You have to go and expand, if you. Well, I'll give you a class example from the suffragette newsletter.

Speaker 3 18:46

Okay, very famous death of Emily Wilding Davison. Now we have questions on this because if you read the suffragette newsletter, emily Wilding Davison throws herself under the King's horse and kills herself protesting for women to vote. Throws herself under the king's horse and kills herself protesting for women to vote. Now the thing is we know, we know what she was carrying with her at the time because we can tell from things like coroner reports, hospital admission reports and things like that that they documented she had a return train ticket. Now somebody who has a return train ticket in their pocket and a restaurant booking for later in the evening is not somebody who is planning to kill herself at that race.

Speaker 3 19:23

So what the suffragettes are telling us? They're spinning it into the narrative that they want because they want a martyr. So they're going to rightly celebrate their martyr and what she did required courage. But she didn't set out to kill herself. On the evidence that we've got, we don't actually know what was going through her mind because she didn't actually declare that, but it's a great example there of where the narrative is actually moving somewhat away from the facts and you shouldn't necessarily believe it without checking further facts out. So no, you shouldn't believe the narrative at all, even if it looks blindingly obvious, because in amongst those facts are going to be opinions, guesses, emotions, all of which change those stories.

Speaker 2 20:11

Mm-hmm. Okay, and so can history repeat itself, or is that virtually impossible?

Speaker 3 20:18

So I mean, yes, it can, from the point of view that if you do exactly the same stuff, you are quite likely to get exactly the same result. So we do always say that, you know, we, we need to guard against history repeating itself. And you know there are, there are certain styles of government that you might not want to put back in again, because that can happen. But you, we've seen what, you know, the fascist government did or the Nazi government did in Germany, and what the fascist government did in Italy, what the communist government did in Russia, but that's not necessarily a reason why somebody else couldn't put communists into power, and it work, for example.

Speaker 3 20:58

But history can repeat itself. It's rare I think that it does 100, because each time that crops up you're dealing with different people, different technologies, a different world. But I think the fundamental lessons of history and the fundamental lessons of human nature is can make things a little predictable, to the point where, if we go down that road, you know we'll, we all know what happens if we launch a nuclear weapon at somebody. You know we've all seen what happened at hiroshima. Now, if you do that, history is going to repeat itself, possibly on a bigger scale, but then immediately, history is going to change, because at the time that they dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima nobody else had one. So in that case it was war ending. Next case might not be.

Speaker 2 21:45

Yeah, we don't want that. Yeah, and so what do you think of the popular cliches such as good old days or good old times? So is it okay to romanticize history? Why are you laughing? Were things ever better than they're now?

Exploring the Importance of History

Speaker 3 22:03

Yes or no is basically the. You know, people are going to romanticize history. There are areas of history that are absolutely romantic, and people want to cling to the good things that have happened, because we know we're capable of them, you know. So we embrace science and art and things like that and like, okay, well, when you know, back when, let's say back when the great artists were producing great works of art, like the last supper and you know day michelangelo's, david and so forth you know there's good and bad in that though. Yeah, we're producing these great works of art. Wouldn't it be great if we kept producing works of art like that? But who's patronising those works of art? It's the church, and the church are not doing some particularly nice things at the time, and we don't want to go down that route Today. We might sit there and moan that we don't have the same sort of community spirit that was in east london during the war, but, on the flip side, we don't have to shelter in tube stations from bombs there.

Speaker 3 23:04

There are so, so many examples where and people are always going to cling to the past, and I think, to an extent, people should look at the past and go right, did we do that well? Did we do that badly? There are, there are things there. There are things that we have done well, uh, in the past. There are things that we've done spectacularly badly. And if we want to look at the good old days, then focus in and think right, we did that that worked. Can it be improved? You know so, everything that we look at with these rose-tinted ideas of the good old days usually has its dark half with it that we just don't want back. You know so we can't just look at the good old days.

Speaker 3 23:45

Um, and that that's why I was laughing, I said. The other reason that I was laughing as well is that, um, just near to where I live, is like a very old victorian musical. Uh, that used to have a. Uh, it used to have a special night called the good old days, where everybody would go along in victorian costume to. I haven't, I haven't been. I was too young to go when it was in its heyday, but it is still on and I'm determined to go at some point.

Speaker 2 24:07

I just want to get the right, correct collection of victorian clothing to do so yeah right costume that's yeah oh, and so there's so many historical fields you know, such as political, economical or social history, so are there some that could be considered more significant, possibly, than others?

Speaker 3 24:28

I don't think so, because they all change the world in their own particular way. And again, if we're going to come back to history as being something that we look into the past and learn from it, then what's the important history to learn is going to change depending on what you're looking to get out of it, you know. So you can look at the decisions. You can look in political history, the decisions of great prime ministers and things like that, and think, okay, well, I'm going to learn from those. Or you can look back in social history and see things like the suffragette movement and protests and the formation of trade unions and the invention of the printing press and how that changes the world and whether that's a good thing.

Speaker 3 25:11

Military history If we have to fight another war, how do we win it? Should we win it? Should we win it? You know where is it. Can we use history to get an idea of where the next major conflict is either going to start or is it going to end, or how it's going to end? So I think, dependent on what each individual person is looking to get out of history, they're going to find some that are more important to them than others and that those will then cross over.

Speaker 3 25:36

I wouldn't say that there's anything. There is any particular field that's more important than any other. I tend to think that we're going to learn more, probably, from the more modern periods of history than we may learn from, say, ancient Greek. But you know, great historians like Tom Holland are going to disagree with me on that, because he's built a career on ancient Greece. But no one particular field. I think that style of military historian that obsesses itself about buttons on Russian uniforms in 1813, we can probably just discount that. But no, overall, there is no period of history that I think is more important, just as there is no field of science that is more important.

Speaker 2 26:24

Yeah, makes sense. And so, with the recent global success of Oppenheimer the movie, it seems like we're still very much drawn to stories about historical figures that shaped our present, possibly. So who would you like to watch a movie about? Who is not getting enough attention?

Speaker 3 26:44

I'm very big into people who don't necessarily get all the limelight the that they should do. Um, so one major figure that I think I would like to see a movie about or a miniseries about actually A miniseries would probably be better is Mary Queen of Scots, because it's just all we know about Mary Queen of Scots is the early starts of our rules and then how she gets executed for plots and we don't know anything about the in-between. And I think a good, actual sixpart netflix series on the life of mary queen of scotts would be quite fascinating, because in between that imprisonment and execution and her subsequent removal from the throne there is a whole load of like plot intrigue that the first political assassination in the world with a firearm happens as a result of Mary's Queen of Scots imprisonment in Linlithgow in Scotland and you know again, that's world changing First political assassination with a concealed firearm. That just gives us not only that, but that gives us our first gun laws, because Elizabeth I outlaws wheel lock pistols, first gun laws, because elizabeth first outlaws wheel lock pistols and that that kind of period is so interesting and just totally untouched. And then the other is a lady from second world war. I absolutely love this story and she. She needs a movie made about her because she's an SOE agent and she was a 28-year-old telephonist but she spoke fluent French and she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and then got recruited into the Special Operations Executive.

Speaker 3 28:29

She was a lady called Pearl Witherington. She's sadly no longer with us, but she was going town to town as a uh, as a courier, I mean disguised as a cosmetic saleswoman, going door to door. What she was actually doing was she was running an entire resistance network in france. She's 28 years old, this woman from oxford, and she became one of the one Reich's most wanted women. They had something like a 250,000 Reichmark bounty on her head and they sent quite a division after her and they cornered her and her resistance cell and there was a massive battle and about 40 out of 1,500 survived. She ended up spending three days lying in a ditch in a cornfield just hiding out from the germans, and when she, when she got away from that, she could have gone home, but she didn't. She stayed on.

Speaker 3 29:28

She rebuilt her resistance network again and on the night before D-Day, soe blew up more trains than the Allies had managed to successfully bomb in three months. And they did that in one night with women like her. She was the best shot in SOE, but she said that she wouldn't carry a gun because she felt that a woman's place was to bring life into the world and not to take life out of it. So she did all this without firing a shot in anger.

Speaker 3 30:03

And when at the end of the war and this is the, this is the bit I realized we're at the end of the war, uh, they awarded her, or they they gave her a civilian mbe award and she declined this because she said I haven't done a several bloody thing this whole war. And eventually they gave her a military mbe. But the thing that really annoyed her was that they didn't give her airborne wings her parachute qualification. In order to get this, you have to do five parachute jumps, and she had done three training jumps and then jumped into normandy, so she'd only done four jumps. So the RAF wouldn't give her a parachute qualification. They actually awarded it to her.

Speaker 3 30:39

I think it was in 2005 when they finally relented and gave it to her, and there was a beautiful interview with her in the Daily Telegraph where she was holding up her airborne wings and just said well, this is what you could achieve with 65 years of moaning to anybody who'll listen. But she was. I mean, she was the only woman to lead a resistance cell in SOE. Yeah, and she doesn't really appear in any any of the war films or anything. Pearl Witherington, for me, is absolutely fascinating and never really crops up.

Speaker 2 31:09

Okay, so film material right there. And so very last question, Paul why is it good to learn and talk about history?

Speaker 3 31:18

Well, first of all, history is, as I've said, we've said repeatedly, history is important and if you're learning about it and you're talking about it and you're examining it and then you're debating it, then you're getting away from that narrative element and you're getting closer to the truth, because, at its core, history is the quest for the truth. But why it's good to learn about it? I mean, just think of every great story that you can, that you can think of. Okay, its roots are in history. You know those, those stories have been, those stories have been told before. So you've, if you want it and you find it entertaining, it's in history. You can get political intrigue, you can get assassinations, you can get great romances, you can get world-changing inventions, scientists, discoveries, exploration, pirates it's all there. Whatever you find entertaining is in history and you can find those stories and find new ones and find that they are true. That is absolutely magical agreed.

Speaker 2 32:28

Well, paul. Thank you very, very much. This has been an amazingly explanatory educational enlight session. Thank you so much for your time. You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me on, and thank you to everyone who's listened to this episode as well, and I'll see you next time. Bye. Thank you.