You have to know the past
Sagan, C. E. (author and presenter). (1980) Episode 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue [Television series episode]. In Adrian Malone (Producer), Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service.
to understand the future
The easter holidays are upon us and students in the northern hemisphere are eyeing up the rapidly approaching exam season between May and June. Anxiety may be rising for staff and students as part of a race to complete core teaching and carve out time to refresh certain topics and focus on skills development. However, here at Past Explorers we’re excited and motivated to play our part in helping you be ready.
Over the last few years we’ve been busying away with a full slate of tuition programmes and have now carved out a (more) balanced schedule to lean more heavily into the production of resources to help students and dig in to other topics that catch our fancy here.
The plan for this summer is to get regular content up – three times a week here on the website as a minimum with other regular short content on our social media accounts at facebook (linked with instagram) and twitter/X:
- Stuart Britain 1603-1703
- Weimar & Nazi Germany 1918-1945
- The American Dream: Reality and Illusion 1945-1980
The theme for our focus into this summer is the rights which are challenged in different times and in different places. The concept of human rights as we understand it today is a relatively modern construct, but that does not mean centuries, indeed millenia of academic and political discourse hasn’t sought to define rights that are inalienable for the people of a nation. The idea of who were elligible for the protection of those rights has evolved greatly. Ancient Athens bestowed democratic rights on its citizens – but this forefather of modern democracy awarded that to only adult male Athenians who had completed military training. Slaves, freed slaves, children, women and foreign residents (traders for example) were all denied equal participation. It wasn’t until 1928 before universal suffrage was extended to all citizens over the age of 21 in Great Britain – male and female. When Magna Carta referred to widows, and orphaned land holders and put protections in place for them they were not referring to commoners but the landed political class. ‘People’ is a fluid term and has been used to include and exclude different groups over the centuries.
So why focus on these three topics? Stuart Britain is first and foremost my specialist topic having written two dissertations (BA, MA) on the topic and taught it for over a decade. My enthusiasm for the topic centers on my view of the 17th century as a period of dramatic change from the religion dominated medieval world to an increasing (in some parts of Europe) secularisation of the political realm. An explosion of innovation in culture and technology fuelled the achievements of people as diverse as Shakespeare (the origin of your GCSE nightmares), Edward Coke (reviving constitutional arguments against the crown), Isaac Newton (apples hurt when they fall from trees), Oliver Cromwell (Puritan, Republican), Christian Huygens (Pocket Watches!), Thomas Savery (steam pumps). In the middle of which is this grand and defining soap opera taking place between the nouveau riche seeking greater participation in the realm they are paying taxes towards and the traditional court elites who feared social breakdown from too much change too soon. Parliamentary democracy as we generally understand it today comes out of this tumult. The Bank of England emerges from it! Newspapers – mass media! The common pikeman has as much to say about the political future of the kingdom as any great nobel. The records we have from the time are equal parts titillatting (James I, Charles II), shocking and very relatable. One dimensional portraits of this cast of characters have long since been thrown away in academic circles and we will approach the struggle over rights – the kings, the churches, parliaments and heres a wild suggestion, the peoples rights, with consideration for the complexity of factors behind everyones positions.
In terms of Germany from the end of the misnamed ‘War to End all Wars’ between 1914-18, we will look to see how the worlds then youngest and in some ways most radical democracy set out to create a better future for itself while committing compromises that would undermine the very democracy it was supposed to support. While it is a ridiculous notion to suggest everybody in Germany supported National Socialism in the 1930s and 40s, it is equally ridiculous to suggest a nation of over 65,000,000 people went entirely unwillingly into the madness. So we will look at how some people had their rights removed, others were persuaded to enthusiastically give them up through either ideological conversion or pragmatism, others acquiesed fearfully and still others rebelled including a personal hero of mine in Sophie Scholl.
The third topic of focus, US CIVIL rights from the 1940s to the 1980s will see us look at the men, women, youths of all ethnicities in that melting pot of America and their struggle to deal with a problematic heritage that, as with Weimar, was built on multiple compromises which may have only ever been intended as temporary but which had provoked a civil war and then a regressive period in the South known as ‘Jim Crow’. As we will see issues existed at all geographical points in America, and the ways in which millions of people mobilised to advance a new image of their nation will both inspire for what it achieved but also frustrate due to the many issues which we can recognise in our societies today.
The purpose of the study of history in schools and colleges is not to teach someone what happened, because perception of that will change depending on your context (which is always changing), but to help you develop critical thinking skills that will aid you in life and work understanding different points of view, managing large projects (research!) and providing more sustained, justifications when debating something. You might use this website as a quick reference tool as we build it out. You may enjoy the narrative explorations that give you an overview of issues. However you use it, we hope you will keep coming back and recommend us to your fellow students and friends who dig the past.
It is all, our, story.
