Classes

It occurs to me that a person reading this blog might mistake me for a classicist, that is, a scholar of Greco-Roman studies. While this is true in one sense, it is important to note that Classics is not my major field of study; it is rather my minor. My major area of concentration is history, with a focus specifically on Europe from 1871-1945. That being said, the layout of my classes means that I have exclusively classics classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and a mix of both classics and history on Wednesday. So, 60% (i.e. 3 of 5) of my classes are for Greco-Roman studies, 75% of my school week is exclusively Greco-Roman classes, and 100% of my school week involves classics in some way. Hence all the discussion of ancient Greece, my area of focus (within classics). So, I have two major areas of knowledge: Ancient Greece, and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. In terms of my preferred style of history, I like the traditional political/military events to be fleshed out with reference to social history; the history of the people. This way, one gets a fuller historical picture without abandoning traditional historiography to the black hole that is postmodernism (I call practitioners po-mos, and I am generally wary of them). To be fair, postmodernism had led to some interesting approaches to history, but I mistrust it for two reasons:

1) There is an inherent contradiction in a following that states that true history is essentially unknowable, but, at the same time, produces enormous ammounts of literature to seemingly achieve that very end, and

2) Postmodernism has no logical endpoint. With enough followers, it could take historiography so far from tradition that we'd be learning about the history of footnotes (there is actually already work on this), and the notion of equality among different types of fungii. Although I agree that traditional political/military history doesn't go far enough, I still think it's a hell of a lot more relevant to our lives than footnotes and fungus.

Yes, there is a lot more to the discipline of history than most people understand. Battles and dates are not the bread and butter of history, and even they have declined in importance in a way that few non-historians are even aware of. No, ever since Herodotos (the first historian from whom we have written accounts) in the 5th century BC, the purpose of history has not been memorization, but enquiry. Historians do not simply look at past events, they ask the questions 'how?' and 'why?' Even the term 'history' comes from the Greek ἱστορία (historia), meaning an enquiry. The good news is that, as long as the discipline is deemed worthy of teaching, it can produce new works forever. Even a single event, such as the French Revolution, is still being written about, as different interpretations emerge, despite the thousands of books that already exist.

I think I've gone on for long enough. More some other time.