TestLectureTranscript

Preliminaries

Good morning. It's about ten past the half hour so it's time to begin.

Welcome to History 186.

Let me just start with a quick note on the audio. You've managed to catch me at the end of a nasty cold. The end of a bad cold is better than the beginning, but by consequence the audio is going to be a little scratchier today than it will ordinarily be.

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A more consequential issue with the audio that I wanted to be all aware of at the beginning is that this semester's lectures are being podcast which means that they're available for distribution via iTunes. Probably most of you know what podcasting lectures involves.

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This is really good insofar and makes what we're doing in the classroom available to anybody outside of the classroom who's interested to listen in. The only downside of podcasting as I see it is that it makes it easy for all of you who ought to be in the classroom to sit at home on a cold morning like this and listen to the lecture remotely.

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I would really prefer if you didn't. I don't have any mechanism enforce your attendance in the lectures. But I hope that you will not use the podcasting as a you know opportunity to avoid coming to lectures tempting as that might be when the weather is at frigid as it is today. It's all of what 50 degrees outside which is much colder than were accustomed to even in northern California.

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Introductory Anecdote: Nixon and Zhou Enlai

This is a history class. It's a class in contemporary history↗. But it is a history class. I'm a historian and as such I would like to start the class with an historical anecdote

So I'm going to take you back to May 1972. Richard Nixon↗ has landed in China↗ the first American president ever to visit the People's Republic.

He meets, besides meeting with Chairman Mao↗, with Premier Zhou Enlai↗ the effective Prime Minister of China.

Nixon, as those of you know anything about him may know, was a really socially awkward and inept personality in some respects. He found it very difficult to make small talk. But he had been told by his advisors that Zhou Enlai was really interested in French history. So Nixon said, as you might in that situation, what do you think about the French Revolution↗? Zhou famously replied, "it's too soon to tell".

This anecdote is a suitable place to begin a history of recent world affairs. Zhou Enlai's reply might warn us against passing premature historical judgments. It's too soon to tell.

The episode I would suggest is cautionary in a different direction. It ought to caution us to get our facts right. Because Zhou Enlai was not referring to the French Revolution which you think of when we talk about the French Revolution (the Revolution of 1789) he was, according to Nixon's translator, referring to the revolution of 1968↗.

So, besides cautioning us to avoid premature historical judgments, this episode might also remind us that when we do history it's important to get the history correct.

Why Study History?

Nonetheless, the question that Zhou Enlai raised, when is it too soon to tell, is an important one. Should historians study recent events? What business do we have studying the history of contemporary world politics, or world economics? Why not favor alternative disciplinary approaches? What do historians have to tell us? What do you have to learn from me that you might not learn about it in some other disciplinary context?

Why not takes a class in economics↗ or sociology↗ or political science↗? Are these disciplines that not offer some superior insight into the workings of the contemporary world? What might history offer that these approaches do not?

To answer this question we're going to have to raise some really fundamental questions? What is history, and what is the historian's role? And perhaps most important for all of you what do we learn from history?

Is there any point in studying it? Is it just a random succession of facts and personalities? Or is there some larger purpose to the study of the past?

You know many philosophers and thinkers and historians have posed this question in the past. What is history? We might turn to some of the great canonical figures for answers.

Elbert Hubbard

Let's start first of all with Elbert Hubbard↗, an American radical and writer, famously described history as just one damn thing after another.

This is one perspective on the past. It's just stuff that happens. Without any rhyme or reason or you know connection among events.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx↗, one of the most celebrated and influential philosophers of history of all time, had a perspective on history which is about the exact opposite of Elbert Hubbard's. For Marx history had a very clear logic. You all know what that logic is, right? What's the logic of history for Marx?

That's right. The logic of history for Marx is a logic of class struggle leading ultimately to the creation of a communist↗ society -- a profoundly influential historical concept.

Thomas Macaulay

But there have been other influential historical concepts. Perhaps articulated somewhat less forthrightly than Marx.

Take another British 19th century historical figure: Thomas Macaulay↗. Macaulay was one of the great Whig↗ historians. His view of history was that history represented an inexorable march of progress -- the steady march of reform even justice.

Determinism and Randomness

The kind of historical determinism that figures like Marx and Macaulay favored, a determinism that sees history as having an ulterior logic, a direction, a purpose, has in some ways fallen out of favor with professional historians. We're much less inclined today to see all history as ultimately being reducible to the history of class struggle or to the history of Whiggish political reform than we might have been several generations ago.

But that doesn't mean that history is just one damn thing after another. We ought to be conscience of the ways in which history shapes us. How does history constrain our choices in the present? This is a question that historians have at some fundamental level to grapple with.

Pólya's urn

To think about this it may be useful to reflect upon a sort of mathematical problem: Pólya's urn↗ problem.