history lessons

I have finally yielded to the combined forces of a lingering summer cold and the high humidity, and given up on gardening for the weekend.  Instead I am ensconced in a steamer chair on the veranda with a book and Our Ginger.  Heat and high humidity are a dreadful combination.  Goodness knows why people deliberately go on holiday to places where they can expect to encounter them.  I am fairly sure that my aching muscles and general lack of energy are due to a bug, and not the first signs of some serious illness, because the Systems Administrator has got the same thing, but with more sinus pain.  Actually the S.A. was almost relieved by the emergence of a head cold after days of lethargy, as demonstrating that it probably was a cold and not the onset of M.E..

The book is a life of Harry S. Truman, Man of the People, by Alonzo L. Hamby.  It was a present some time ago from the S.A., who was rather taken aback when we first met that anybody who was supposed to be educated could know quite so little history, and has been remedying the lack through a course of improving reading in the three decades since.  Since then I've got quite reasonable at the period from Elizabeth I to William and Mary, the industrial revolution, and the Victorian era onwards, though the dead Queen Anne is still a blank, and the four Georges an impressionistic jumble.

I like biography as a hook on which to hang a narrative.  However, I didn't really get into the Truman book the first time I tried.  I can't have been in the mood.  It is quite fat, at 640 pages excluding the index and notes, and quite hard work starting from the basis of not understanding how the American political system works.  I was inspired to give it another try after watching the TV mini-series about the Kennedys.  Second time around I'm hooked at two levels.  As a portrait of a human being doing one of the more extraordinary jobs in the world, that of US President, it is fascinating.  As a description of a slice of history at an important time in world affairs, covering the great depression, the end of WWII, the dropping of the bomb and the start of the cold war, from the viewpoint of the most powerful country in the world at that time, it is very interesting.  I won't try and summarise all 640 pages here.

Its publication predates the current upheavals by a decade and a half, as it came out in 1995, and so it is safe to draw comparisons between Hamby's analysis of the economic issues of the late 1940s and the current economic debate without any danger that the former was influenced by the latter.  I would never have guessed that the current economic and philosophical row about whether it is the role of government to manage and stimulate demand through central spending, debt financed if necessary, was already a fierce source of argument between US Democrats and Republicans over sixty years ago.  And analyses of the problems facing Obama make more sense now I've gleaned something about how the three-way power split between the President, the Senate and the House of Representatives works.

One of the silliest things ever said by any Labour minister was when Charles Clarke, while he was Secretary of State for Education, said that he didn't mind there being a few Medieval historians about, he just didn't see why the state should have to pay for them.  History is not just interesting for its own sake, or vaguely useful as an adjunct to the tourist and leisure heritage industry.  It helps us understand and put into context the things that are happening now.

In contrast we watched part one of BBC2's new three parter on The Normans last night, and were jolly disappointed.  Altogether too many arty shots of pigeons flying about and the presenter striding uncharismatically through winter trees, and virtually nothing on how Norman society operated or developed after they had arrived from Scandinavia in what is now Normandy.  And too many mismatches between the period the programme covered, largely pre 1000AD, and the pictures of luscious high Medieval architecture from two or three hundred years later.  That's why I largely end up sticking with books.  I think I must be missing all these really good series on art and history on the telly, and then when I watch one I don't like it.