Dan Snow's History Hit - Best of 2020 Part One

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

A compilation of the best podcasts of 2020. Part one highlights historians talking about history.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's that time of the year, everyone, where we look back over the hundreds of podcasts that we broadcast this year.

And we bring you a few highlights. Bring you a couple of my favourite bits of the year. All your favourite bits. Thank you to everyone who's got in touch on social media. Let us know what you enjoyed. This is our 2020 best of. I mean, obviously, it's been a heck of a year, but it hasn't been unprecedented. We've seen echoes, hints, clues, rhythms and patterns before. Pandemic disease, economic dislocation, extreme weather related to climate change, contested elections, populism, the battle between nativism and internationalism. We've all seen it before.

And this year, the experts who came on the podcast were able to remind us of that, shed light, add context to what's going on at the moment. And they also, of course, came on to amuse and entertain us as well. We've had amazing veterans. We've had politicians. We've had remarkable historians. We've had all sorts. And they've got wisdom for us and every single episode had wisdom I learned something as I've said many times on this podcast it is the most remarkable thing that I've ever done I get to sit every week most days with incredible historians writers veterans activists and I just get to listen to them talk I cannot believe I make a living out of this and I do thanks to all of them talk. I cannot believe I make a living out of this,

and I do. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you want to do more than this, if you want to watch, if you want to watch the world's best history channel, we've launched it. It's called History Hit TV. You go over to History Hit TV. We've got the Boxing Day sale on at the moment, so use the code JANUARY, and you get a month for free, and then 80% off your first three months after that. So please head over to historyhit.tv. And I do hope you'll join us at our live tour next year, next October. We're live, in person, post-vaccine. We're going to be having fun. Check it out, go to historyhit.com. But in the meantime, everyone, here's our best of. Enjoy.

I wanted to make the first episode of this year in review all about history itself. Because we've lived through such a tumultuous year, I've ended up having a lot of really impressive historians on the podcast and talking about history itself, because history has been dragged into the battle, whether it's around climate, racial justice, pandemic disease, Britain's relationship with the continent, or the American Republic. History has been used and abused by all sides. And it felt like an important year for historians, whether we're talking about the role of slavery in the British economy, of failed reconstruction after the US Civil War, or about Britain's place in the world and perceptions of that. And the first one of those fantastic historians that we're going to hear now is Priya Satya. She's a US historian of the British Empire. She is the Raymond Spruance

Professor of International History at Stanford University, an historic name there for her professorship. And she gave me this, quite frankly, brilliant summary of the history of history. Let's have a listen. We've always been telling stories about our past, right? Every civilization does it and every civilization has always done it. But the way we do it, the purpose of doing it shifts over time. So if you look at Herodotus, it's a history and he's considered the father of history, but there's fable mixed in there. Sometimes God intervenes directly in the world. Thucydides is different. Well, he's sort of taken as the father of modern history, I guess you could say, in the sense that he's trying to tell a story without God intervening in the world. in the world, where human events just build on each other. But those two works didn't necessarily shape how history was written, you know, since then, right? Those works are lost, they're

rediscovered, they're translated, they have different influences in different parts of the world. But what happens is in the Enlightenment, these philosophers in Europe are trying to think of a way to understand history where it has meaning and purpose. Because if history, if human events don't have meaning and purpose, then you're just stuck looking at the horrible human condition, right? And the horrible things that humans always do. And you have to just hope that in the afterlife, there will be some meaning. So they're trying to think, okay, we behave horribly, we are human, but perhaps we can imagine this in earthly time having some kind of meaning or purpose, right? And that's the way we can understand how a good God allows evil intervene directly in the world, but he exercises a kind of providential care so that we know that we shouldn't panic.

We shouldn't even object when we see something that seems evil occurring, because it may be that in the long run, it has a very productive effect. And so this new way of thinking about history in the 18th century, the argument I make in the book is that it changes sort of everyday ethical thought for first people in Europe who are coming up with these ideas, but then it's sort of exported all over the world. So I asked Priya what she thought the point of history was. Trump supporters say they're on the right side of history. And critics of Trump say they're on the right side of history. And the point is, like, no one ever thinks they're on the wrong side of history. Right? So you can't

really sit around waiting for history to judge. And I think it's more important to listen to what historians today are saying about to explain how we got here, and then use your ordinary, more, you know, transcendent, non-time-based ethical idioms to figure out what's the right thing to do. Like, pay attention to the present and not wait for that future judgment. As you all know, asking the world's best historians about the biggest questions, the biggest challenges that face our world today is the best thing for me about doing this podcast. And historians don't come much bigger or the topics more important than Margaret Macmillan, a legend, who's also my aunt, talking about her huge new book on war. Why is war proof so alluring?

Well, I know it is a mystery, I think. But when you also think of the cost of war, not just those who fight, but the innocent bystanders, the civilians who get caught up in war and often get killed or held hostage or made into slaves. I think policymakers have tended to think often that war is a weapon they can use to achieve a particular end. There's a lot of talk about controlled wars. And we see this even today, you know, when the occupation forces, the invasion and occupation forces went into Iraq in the second Iraq war, I think they thought they could topple Saddam Hussein and solve all problems. And so I think there is a temptation to think, you know,

if we just apply force in the right way, scientifically, I mean, I hate that term surgical strike, the idea that you can somehow use violence to achieve a very neat and tidy end is a very alluring one. I think the other thing about war is that it does have an attraction. And if you go to any bookshop, you'll see literally rows of books on war and very few rows on peace. I mean, it's just not a subject that people find as exciting. And there've always been those who thought that war brings out the noblest side of people, that you are prepared to work with others, die for others. And so I think there is that allure of war. And I think it still is there a bit in societies that war is somehow something noble.

And so I think we get a number of reasons why people want to fight and why societies think that war can be useful. I think, you know, the rational thing for me is to try and avoid war if you possibly can. But as the British discovered in 1939, you can't always avoid it. Is there confirmation bias? Do you think policymakers, politicians look at Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and think, yeah, I'm definitely like those guys, not like Napoleon III or Adolf Hitler, or the far, far greater number of people that have sought to roll the iron dice and have paid for it with their life and the destruction of all they hold dear. I like the phrase confirmation

bias because I think we all do this. We all look for examples which suit us. And history, of course, has hundreds, thousands of examples. And you can search through history and find an example to prove almost anything you want. And I think those who have power or aspire to power often like to think that they are like the great figures of the past that they can do great deeds you know Napoleon was impressed by Alexander the Great he wanted to be like Alexander the Great and then others came along and wanted to be like Napoleon and of course what we tend to forget if we're only looking for the great heroes of history is all those who came a cropper who did not succeed who damaged their own societies

and I think actually when you look at Napoleon, I don't buy the great adulation of Napoleon. He left France in a mess. He wasted hundreds of thousands of lives. He destroyed other cities and places in Europe. But I do think we tend, you know, if those who want to be powerful look at the past and say, ah, that's a very good example. I can be like that.

And perhaps they should remember those who didn't succeed. You mentioned earlier the allure. Does it show humans in our widest possible sense? I think it shows us, yes, I do. I think it shows us at our best and our worst. It can bring out the bestial, and we all know that dreadful things can happen in wars. I mean, one of the real problems in a war is you train people to kill, but then you need to keep them under control. And it's trying to keep under control people you have turned into, if you succeed, into efficient killers. I think that in a war, we also get things like comradeship, people willing to die for each other. We don't get an ordinary civilian life. And we're not usually put to that test. And what comes out so often to me in the war memoirs and the novels about war

is this sense that we have never known such comradeship before as we do when we're fighting together and we'll never know it again because you're simply in a different set of circumstances. And I suppose for a lot of us, I grew up in a peaceful world. I grew up since the Second World War. And I suppose we often wonder is what would we be like? Could we do it? Could we be as brave and just noble and look out for others as people will do in war? So no, it is, war is, I think, in many ways, a mystery. And I think it's very hard to explain. And I think it does encompass great varieties of human experience from the best to the worst. If war has been back on the agenda this year, either because of actual fighting that's broken out

or because of great power rivalry that's looked depressingly like tipping into war, this year has also seen a huge popular debate around history as statues have gone tumbling to the ground on both sides of the Atlantic, or in the case of Edward Colston in the UK, toppling into the sea. Dr Charlotte Riley is a lecturer at my local university, the University of Southampton,

and she gave me such a succinct pre-seed, explaining why histories aren't actually central to our importance of history, why it's literally the job of historians to rewrite history, whatever politicians may say to the contrary. We're recording this when statues are being pulled down in Britain, elsewhere in the world, in America, in Belgium, and people are saying you're erasing history by pulling down statues. Does pulling down a statue represent a threat to how we remember or interrogate the past? I don't think it does at all, for a lot of reasons, basically. I think, firstly, you know, the statues fundamentally aren't history, and that sounds like a silly thing to say, but they are relics or remnants of the past. They're things that are old, essentially, is what they are. And historians and history is not necessarily about just cataloguing

and chronolocating everything that happened, like this kind of huge mass of events and people and things so I think firstly you know the idea that we can't change anything otherwise we're somehow threatening or damaging history is a really weird reading of what history is we change things all the time right we tear down buildings all the time we cut down 200 year old trees which you can't just re-erect or put into a museum all the time and we don't worry about kind of destroying history then or erasing history and we don't think that those things fundamentally are part of history or historical so I don't think statues exist in the space that they would have to kind of conceptually for that to be true. And also presumably those statues weren't put up with

the intention of providing kind of some sort of historical narrative right that those statues are monuments to usually men by a group of their own fans. Yeah statues fundamentally are celebratory I mean I was going to say pretty much always but I actually can't think of a single example of a statue that's been erected to kind of criticise someone. I think they're always celebratory. They're put up in their own historical moment. The Colston statue in particular, the one that was pulled down, you know, Colston had been dead for a long time

when this statue was erected. The statue's put up in 1895. So they're part of a particular moment. They're not necessarily supposed to last forever anyway, but they're certainly not supposed to give a lesson from history or give any kind of factual information at all, really. As you say, they're fan items, they're celebratory. And then let's come on to your central point, which is so funny, is that people are worried about rewriting history, when that's literally what you historians do for a living.

That's the whole point of research and writing. Exactly. The alternative reality where we don't rewrite history is a kind of history based on some enormous shared spreadsheet where we each tick off the topic that we have finished. History is a kind of collective project of chronicling and once it's done, it's done and you kind of move on to the next topic. and even thinking about it for like a moment shows that

that's not the case and the fact that there can be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books about the reformation or hundreds and hundreds of books about the labour party which is the topic that i write about a lot obviously it's all about reinterpretation right this is what we do all the time. We're always rewriting history. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth,

explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I asked another legend, Natalie Zemond-Davis, the same question. She has held professorships all over the world. She's currently professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto in Canada. I talked to her earlier this year, and I was so glad to hear that she was as excited as ever to talk about her work. She's 91 years old now and going strong.

It's a combination of one's own excitement and curiosity about a quest. It's something that to you seems intriguing and worth studying, but that you hope can make a difference to the way people think about their own time, the way they think about the possibilities in their own time, the way they might think about cruelty or generosity, about justice or injustice, that it doesn't determine your ideas on those big problems and big themes, but hopefully it can help. I do think that historians, and I think of the wide range of them, are writing texts that could matter. I do think those texts are out there.

I think of work that has been done by Mark Mazower, Balkans in World War II. I think of work that has been done by Margaret MacMillan on World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. I can think of many examples of excellent historians who have given us resources to look at the current situations. In some of my own work, I hope that writing that I have done most recently on Muslims and a 16th century Muslim who tried to explain his world of Islam to Europeans, a man named Leo Afrikanis, I hope that the perspective in that book could help people not familiar with Islam about the range of sensibilities and thought in the world of Islam and is seen in the past as well as today. Whether it has had an impact

is another matter. Who our readers are, who those who see us on podcasts or listen to us or on television, it's a very wide group. And the people that I hear from, I know do take these ideas seriously. It does affect the way in which they perceive the world in which they live. I do think that it's made a difference, for instance, in some of the dialogue on matters of immigration. The political discourse, I think, is enriched when people have drawn upon historical examples to show the range of possibilities, enriching possibilities, economic possibilities, cultural possibilities, that come from a country that knows how to welcome immigrants and showing the range of immigrant lives. Whether this is determining in the consequences, political consequences, as opposed to affecting a small number of people, I'll just say, I hope so. I hope it helps. In a wider sense, what did some of these brilliant historians think the purpose of history is? Let's hear from Charlotte Riley again. I think it's

important to point out that everything has a past. Although something I shout on Twitter a lot is that there are no lessons from history. And I don't mean that people shouldn't listen to historians, obviously, because I don't want to do myself out of a job. But I think it's really important. One thing historians can do is stop people from making facile comparisons with the past or stop people trying to use the past as a kind of flow diagram as to what's going to happen next. Right. Historians don't like making predictions and they should try to resist mapping past events onto things that are happening now and saying, well, you know, this happened last time. So this is what we should do this time. And I think kind of very facile comparisons between people are often unhelpful, because comparisons flatten difference. On one hand, you get lots of comparisons between Trump and fascist leaders,

for example. And in some ways, that can be quite helpful in getting people to think about language or imagery or whatever. But on the other hand, it can be very unhelpful in kind of flattening the differences and getting rid of context and stripping events and people and topics of context. And I think historians really believe in context, they really believe actually that things are shaped by the particular moment in which they exist. So in some ways, it's quite important to sort of stop people from trying to just point at things from the past and say, this definitely shows what's going to happen. Historians can kind of pop up. A while ago, where the Marshall Plan kept coming up in politics, and my PhD was about the Marshall Plan. So every so often, someone mentioned the Marshall Plan,

and I kind of pop up and go, actually, it's quite complicated and would try and give some kind of context or whatever. So you end up being kind of historian on call. You kind of jump in and go, no, it didn't really work like that. Or maybe I feel like historians just spend a lot of time going, it's actually kind of a bit more complicated than that, actually. That's our motto as a profession. Completely agree. The only point, I guess, lessons from history is it does strike me that

when Trump began on his real aggressive mission to delegitimize the press or in the opening stage of the pandemic, it was historians that were often going, yeah, it's not like last time. I'm not saying it's like last time, but just so you know, we've sort of seen this kind of thing before and it's pretty bad to do that so that's a role that you and your colleagues can perform i think so and i think it's very useful to have historians saying like just so you know this hasn't always gone well in the past there was a good example when the daily mail headline that we talked about the enemies of

the people around brexit and it had the judges and a lot of historians at that point was like we've actually heard this language before and it's not great this is fascist this is a fascist trope it's very important that we name it for what it is and I think that's definitely true and I also think historians can be quite voice of hope as well you don't always have to be the kind of incredibly depressing person who turns up and says actually this didn't go well in the past I saw some stuff about kind of protest movements and how long protest't go well in the past i saw some stuff about kind of protest movements and how long protest movements have taken in the past to affect change the fact that the montgomery bus boycott had to go on for a really long time before that led to change that

you know lots of kind of independence campaigns decolonization efforts or like nationalist campaigns to gain independence it takes a while right it takes a long time and so historians were kind of coming and talking about the black Lives Matter movement and saying, like, don't get discouraged if this doesn't happen straight away. Like history shows us sometimes you need to be doing this stuff for a long time and it can be exhausting, but that's what works often. So I think you can sometimes be a message of kind of hope. Here is Harvard professor, the mighty Jill Lepore. I think it's interesting having spent some time with the Simulmatics Corporation and seeing the kind of great shuddering that the academy does upon realizing how implicated social science has been in the US

campaign in Vietnam. You know, the support that academic historians and more other kinds of social scientists gave to this immoral war leads American historians and not other kinds of social scientists gave to this immoral war leads American historians and not so much the social science fields that were involved to really pull out of public life, to say, you know, it's indefensible to be part of public life, to engage in conversations about policy and what's going on in the world today, because the next thing you know, we'll all be complicit in another Vietnam. And so there's this incredible retreat of intellectuals from public life in the U.S. at the end of the 1960s.

I understand that. I can see how that came to pass. I probably would have made the same call. But I do think that public discourse really, really, really needs informed historians who are scholars, whose work is countable to evidence, who are engaged in the method of a humanistic discipline, and who are not toadies and flax and frauds, which is a lot of what you see standing up and offering accounts of the past. So I think historians need to be, not all of us, but more of us than currently do, need to be willing to bring their work to a wider public or to do their best to try to and to not demand that the public come to them, but to figure out a way to go to the public.

And I asked Priya Satya the same question. We had the Iraq War in 2003 in which thousands of American historians wrote a petition through the American Historical Association saying, let's not do this. This is not a good idea. You know, there's no abdication of responsibility. It's just that the government and US government didn't like that opinion and didn't listen to that opinion. And the same thing with, you know, things like, you know, gun control, anything that, you know, immigration, whatever raises a kind of historical question, you'll always find historians speaking about it. The question is whether they're heated

or not. What's the job of historian today? What's your job? To teach, to explain how we got here, to participate in conversations about the past, wherever they happen, in public debate, in conversations about how to address the past going forward. So memorialization, reparations, restitution, apologies, that whole set of conversations, but also to continue what we're doing when we talk about questions of gun control, immigration. So all that stuff, continue doing that work that we are already doing. But I don't think that we should be waiting for historians in the future to figure out what we're doing now But I don't think that we should be waiting for historians to, in the future, to figure out what we're doing now. I think people should read more history. And I think,

you know, historians are not abdicating any responsibility, but there are areas where we could, I hate to use this phrase, but sort of lean in more, you know, and recognize that there are historians who are telling us what the past was like, but popular culture is so full of so many other forms of storytelling about the past, whether it's Netflix shows or pageants and commemorative events, everyone's own personal memories or passed down traditions. I mean, there's like this just vast pool of culture that's grounded in stories about the past. And I really do think these new conversations we're having about memorialisations and reparations are just one

way where we're forcing a reckoning with the past in a big kind of popular culture way. I really think that's a productive direction. Talking to those extraordinary historians was a true highlight of 2020 for me. It only could have been better if I'd actually been lucky enough to meet them in the flesh and articulate my fandom to their face rather than across Zoom. But let's leave the last word to another brilliant woman who I did in fact meet. I went to visit her on her 100th birthday and asked her if she had any tips. Her name's Christine Lamb. She has lived through a lot of history.

She served in the Second World War. She's written history books herself as well. Her reply was brilliantly succinct. Now that you're 100, what advice have you got for people that seek to have a life of adventure like you've had? Plenty to drink, to start. And what else would I say? I think keep busy, keep enjoying yourself, find something to do.

I mean, the moment I've taken up painting, which I love, I've got a really lovely Russian girl who gives me lessons every week. That's fun. And all sorts of things are fun. Play bridge. I mean, not necessarily bridge, but something that you enjoy. I don't know, I find i'm always busy doing something hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if

you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favor it's for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Thank you. audiobooks are sold.