Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 24 minutes ago
As the French author Flaubert once said, ‘Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful’
Heritage is easy, history is hard. Heritage cherry picks from a past that has already been neatly sorted and uses what it fancies for whatever reason. In contrast, history is a methodical, sometimes lonely existence of reading, checking and double checking, of immersing yourself in the past and trying to empathise with the dead, of writing-up carefully and reaching qualified judgements scrupulously, whilst providing explicit, accurate references for everything written.
In this lesson I am going to complete the defence of traditional history I began in the last lesson by explaining that history is important because it is hard to do properly. It takes a lot of work. And that if historians didn’t exist there’d be no one stopping any of us from making it all up. And I also get to sing a bit of song by Billy Bragg.
As the French author Flaubert once said, ‘Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful’
Heritage is easy, history is hard. Heritage cherry picks from a past that has already been neatly sorted and uses what it fancies for whatever reason. In contrast, history is a methodical, sometimes lonely existence of reading, checking and double checking, of immersing yourself in the past and trying to empathise with the dead, of writing-up carefully and reaching qualified judgements scrupulously, whilst providing explicit, accurate references for everything written.
In this lesson I am going to complete the defence of traditional history I began in the last lesson by explaining that history is important because it is hard to do properly. It takes a lot of work. And that if historians didn’t exist there’d be no one stopping any of us from making it all up. And I also get to sing a bit of song by Billy Bragg.
