What makes People love history?
So that it becomes a passion,
Not a subject, nor hobby, nor interest,
Not a diversion, nor a pastime,
But a consuming passion instead.
I started to read the virtual edition
Of the History Workshop Journal,
A compendium of contributors
And historians, who recounted
The reasons, recollections, emotions,
And afternoon madeleine moments,
That all conspired, to conjure forth
A love of the study of the past:
A Passion for History.
I’ve added my own, too;
I wonder which of these apply to you?
For example …
The transformative book that showed you
That History wasn’t just a school subject
(Possibly your best – but why?)
Where you got things right or wrong,
And got marked and graded;
The book that became part of you,
Rather than something you tossed in your satchel;
The transformative book that wasn’t a text book,
With dull, deadly facts, tables, dates and statistics,
But a book that was elegantly written,
A book that made the past alive,
And relevant to whenever today might be,
A book that conjoined the then and the now,
Took you away from linear time,
And showed you that’s what History can do.
(E.P. Thompson first for me.)
The discovery that History could involve emotion,
Or an imaginative flight from linear logic,
It could help you hear voices, as it were,
Far from academe’s ivory towers,
And slip through Time’s wormholes.
Or it could be elsewhere or earlier in childhood,
The Christmas present of a history book,
Fairy stories, nursery rhymes,
Picture books,
The film on the telly,
Or Disney at the cinema,
The merchandising,
The spin-offs that turn a child into a reader,
The trip to the museum,
Family history,
A religious text,
A family bible,
The local war memorial,
Sunday tea at your gran’s,
Acting in the school play,
Displays in the school classroom,
Jackdaws,
The inspirational teacher,
Discovering that the history of a period
Could be studied through the literature of a period,
The discovery that fiction was not a separate subject;
Old maps and artefacts,
An old atlas,
Encyclopaedias,
Pictures and portraits on walls,
Collecting,
Ephemera,
The names of pubs,
Second hand shops and vintage shops,
Making your own museum,
Going beyond the empirical and documented,
With creative reimagining;
Politics,
Activism,
Migration,
Conversation,
Walking,
Landscape,
Cloudscape,
Seascape,
Riverscape,
Roofscape,
Music,
Dreaming,
Summer holidays,
Roaming,
Listening,
Remembering …
Googling …
I wonder which of these apply to you?
What would you add?
For …
What makes People love history?
So that it becomes a passion,
Not a subject, nor hobby, nor interest,
Not a diversion, nor a pastime,
But a consuming passion instead.