Character History

History is fun. It goes through stages. Right now I'm not talking about "real" history, the actual events and people that make up history, but rather the process of history writing. The way people write history goes through stages. After taking a historiography course at Graduate school a couple of years ago, this really came home to me. One of things we did was read through various kinds of history books from different ages and look at how these folks actually wrote about history. We read everything from Herodotus and Eusebius to Thomas Carlyle and Simon Schama. It was fun. But that's the geek in me talking. What was really fun was to see how the writing of history went through stages and evolved. It was also interesting to see why we don't write the really good history books that guys like Herodotus or Carlyle wrote any more.
We have, in our deeply scientific modernity, forgotten that character drives history. Who a person is, how they act, why the act, is all part of the historical process. We moderns turn up our noses at this because we have been deceived by the egalitarian notion of "Dead White Men." During the Enlightenment, history writing began to shift away from the actions of those who lived in history and began to focus more on economic and social causal factors for wars and such. That is not all bad, as a good reading of Thucydides will tell you. However, by the nineteenth century history writing had become scientific and (since character is not scientifically objective) this trend became the gospel according to Ranke.
Character is one of the most important things to history. You can learn all day long that things happened and all the cultural, economic, and social causes about them. But until you get inside the head of the man standing at the top of the hill ordering the bayonet charge and know what he believes is true, good, and beautiful, you will not really know the history of that moment. This came home to me again while reading Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels with my Modernity class. Shaara does an excellent job of reminding us just how important character is to history. His book, about the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) tells its story through the men who fought in the battle. He focuses on a select few (Joshua Chamberlain, James Longstreet, and Robert E. Lee) to really tell the story, but he does it in such a masterful way that it truly serves as a reminder about how important character is to history. Funny that a novelist reminded us of this.
I think that some historians are waking up to this notion. Donald Kagan's excellent work on the Peloponnesian War (which is a reworking of his five-volume scholarly work on the same subject) pays a great amount of attention to the character of Alcibiades and Cimon and Pericles. I think Thucydides would be proud of Kagan's work. I know I appreciate it.