This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun.#

Jacques mentions all the historical societies, museums, antiques, and "preservations" of the modern culture and supposed that this means "our collective mind must be steeped in history and insatiable for more." [pg. 50]#

The conclusion is regrettably untrue. Our pastimes bespeak rather the collecting mania, antiquarian puttering, and the cultivation of nostalgia with bits and pieces of the past. None of these has anything to do with the uses and pleasures of history properly so called. This confusion of ideas was well illustrated when it was announced that the research vessel on which Marconi carried out his experiments with wireless and which had been destroyed in the last war, was to be "re-created." Marconi was said to have "lost a piece of his history." Somehow this absurdity passes muster; it is no longer obvious that Marconi's history cannot have been changed by any later event. The destruction affected only a memento whose "re-creation" is part of our history, not his. [pg. 50]

Barzun thinks that the idea of creating an extremely detailed "scientific" history is silly because history is about themes, events, and people not statistics.#

It was soon found that many kinds of document existed [of the statistical nature], so far untouched and worth exploiting-county archives, private contracts, children's books, record of matriculation at colleges and universities, the police blotter in big cities, gravestones in cemeteries-a whole world of commonplace papers and relics to be organized into meanings. Such documents told nothing important individually; they had to be classified and counted. Theirs was a mass meaning, and it brought one nearer to the life of the people; it satisfied democratic feelings. [pg. 51]

So one problem is that histories are no longer written a cohesive stories of plot and purpose, and another problem is that the public does not expect or admire true quality.#

Even if a fearless type should arise and produce a history for the public-a Prescott or Burckhardt, a Macaulay or John Richard Green, a Michelet or Mommsen-it is doubtful whether the public would greet the book with enthusiasm. Educated general readers have lost certain tastes and acquired others. In fiction, as in history, they no longer care for plot or even narrative. They want states of mine (mentalites), strange detail, analytic depth-which is why they relish psychobiography and biography in general, provided it bulges with "revealing details" and hostile opinions of the central figure. [pg. 54]

This begins in the way that history is presented in schools...#

In any case, school history is rarely taught attractively or thoroughly. It seem symptomatic that the excellent Landmark Series of history books for young people has been discontinued for lack of customers. And no wonder. Three years ago, as a consultant to a Commission on History Teaching subsidized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, I visited a number of elementary and high school classes in history in one New England state. The schools were clearly above average and history was given without dilution by "social studies." In both the seventh and the eleventh grades, the make-believe of "research" dominated. The thirteen-year-olds heard the teacher rattle off facts already written on the board about the Stamp Act and its sequel; then the class was loosed on a shelf of paperbacks, in which they were to find additional details to write down-but not in individual notebooks. This was team research, lying or sitting on the floor, one child serving as scribe and plying pencil over a scrap of paper flat on the carpet. [pg. 57]

And further...

Throughout, the principle seems to be: incoherence-bits and pieces, as in the outside world. Attention must be caught by the picturesque, and kept continually revived by some activity, even if that entails make-believe. When it is not filmstrips or field trips, the game of research is the standby. But even if the pupil can only fumble, is not research the way to learn what historians do? [pg. 58]

The problem of specialism leaks into history as well...#

In becoming specialists, historians have helped to breed specialist readers-people who read nothing but, say, Civil War military history or who go in for what is known as industrial archaeology-finding the sites of old foundries all over the county. The histories that sell are for these "buffs." In a book I once opened at random, my eye fell on a sentence that typifies the outlook: "The French Revolution was a disaster for dentistry." [pg. 59]

History needs to be recognized as an interesting and enlightening experience of fun.#

The nineteenth century took to history not for the good of the state, but for pleasure. We need to be reminded of this fact just as, in our study-ridden culture, we need to be reminded that works of art are for pleasure too. The pleasures of reading history are manifold: it exercises the imagination and furnishes it, discloses the nuances of the familiar within the unfamiliar, brings out the heroic in mankind side by side with the vile, tempers absolute partisanship by showing how few monsters of error there have been, and in all these ways induces a relative serenity. This composure is not to be taken for cynical indifference. Rather, it is a state of spirited pessimism like that generated by reading the great novels and epics. [pg. 61]

More on the goal of reading histories...#

Finally, it must be understood that "reading history" does not mean "covering" any particular region or period. To be sure, the wide the scope, the stronger the power of judgment becomes and the greater the sympathy and regard for what humanity has achieved in the teeth of its own defects. History is indeed what Ghibbon said it was-a long tale of crimes and follies. But it is more than that; it is also the the story of genius and daring and dumb, ox-like persistence-virtues without which mankind would not have got as far as discovering that living in caves was a good idea. Not just to know but to feel these truths is to confirm Burckhardt's dictum about the value of cultivating history: "not to be cleverer the next time, but wiser forever." [pg. 63]