Christopher Rush

My father, the librarian, has a degree in history.  I grew up playing historical board games with him, simulating various battles, but apparently not as often as he would have wished.  He sold his extensive collection to help my brother pay for his schooling, but recently we have resumed collecting and playing a number of the older and more recently published wargames, as much as his arthritic fingers and my schedule will allow.  He also never hesitated to get me books from any historian that caught my fancy, such as Tuchman, Ambrose, Catton, and even Toynbee.  My mother, the violist, was a concert musician, musical librarian, educator, and now master gardener, who made sure we went to orchestral concerts and learned a smattering of musical history.  Growing up I was also raised on classic comedy team movies (Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Hope and Crosby – how many nine-year-olds can say they received Animal Crackers on VHS for their birthday?) and music of the ’60s and ’70s, mainly the Beatles and Beach Boys.  The past has played a significant developmental role in my life, far more than current events, in understanding what is important and whence we came.

Growing up as a Christian in a Christian home, too, the Biblical past has also shaped my understanding of history, with the cross of Christ perhaps the most significant event of the past that still shapes and informs (or should) contemporary life and social direction.  For twenty-plus years as a classical, Christian educator, of course, it was impossible to get away from “His-Story” talk about God’s providential directing of history, which is one of those truths that seems to lose its impact after much repetition.  But it is still true, nonetheless.

History, then, is a product of divine guidance as well as the meaningful actions of free individuals (to an extent, not to get sidetracked in the tall grass of freedom of the will at this point).  I tend to side with the camp that individuals can play a role in shaping the directions of communities, even on a grand scale.  Surely some of that comes from my theological understanding; some of that comes from my affinity for Babylon 5, the greatest television show of all time, that, too, purports individuals matter, not just the vagaries of time or the whims of the impersonal force of “history.”  I do not give credence to the thought that if there had not been an Abraham Lincoln, “history” would have created one because of the exigencies and foment of the period.  The debate among these and other views of history is demonstrated in a very interesting episode of B5, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars.”  About one hundred years after the main storyline, various historians in the episode debate whether the events that we have seen actually happened or whether the main cast actually was significant in them or not.  The last living crewmember of the events arrives to put them in their place.

A minor factor that has shaped my understanding of “history” in recent years has been the DC Heath Problems in European Civilization series, which collates contemporary and secondary writings about a person or event without much commentary.  The book that struck me the most (I have not read them all) was the issue on Cromwell.  The further in time away from Cromwell the historians’ writings got, the more favorable the attitude toward Cromwell became.  This is somewhat opposed to the biographies of G. Washington I have read – the further away from the Revolutionary period the biographies are, the more human, the more fallible Washington seems to get.  Not that I ever thought historians are perfect, of course, but it raised my awareness of the difficulty of writing good histories (“good” meaning some sort of combination of “true” and “engaging”).  Years ago I read AJP Taylor on World War Two, not one of his more famous works, I believe, and his summary of America’s involvement was something to the effect that Britain won the war and a few weeks afterward America showed up late and took all the credit.  That was not the perspective I got from Jack Benny and Fibber McGee.  History must be a tricky business.

The gospels tell the same events from different perspectives.  Do they “disagree”?  Can they disagree without contradicting each other?  They are all inspired, even in their distinctions.  Catton and Foote are not inspired, but they disagree, yet both are valuable.  The past is worth knowing not because it can teach us about ourselves or any other external reason but simply because it exists and is true and is intrinsically worth knowing.  I spent some time this summer trying to teach that to my son with some Marx Brothers and Bob Hope movies – we are off to a decent start.  It boggles my mind that Goodreads keeps asking me to rate books that came out this year, as if I have had time yet to get caught up on every Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock, and C. J. Cherryh, how do I have time to read books that came out in my lifetime?  History is what God and the people He cares about have done, what they have made, and what they care about.  It is not all pleasurable, but it is worth knowing … we just have to keep Obi-wan’s caution in mind, “from a certain point of view.”