An observation about the dangers of contemporary histories.

 

 Saddled British donkeys, turn of the prior century, waiting for a hack.

I've noted this before, but it's a dangerous matter, when writing history, to rely too heavily on the first hand observations of those close to events.  Indeed, I've sent it out here, in a slightly different form:

 Holscher's Seventh Law of History.  No accurate history can be written until 60 years have passed since the event.

A really thorough history of  an event cannot be written close in time to the event.  Indeed, several decades must pass from the event's occurrence before an accurate history can be written.

That may sound shocking (although at least historian Ladislas Farago noted this in the introduction to his early biography of George S. Patton; Patton:  Ordeal and  Triumph) but its true.  Close in time to an event, authors tend to be too much men of their own times with their views colored by the context of those times. Such influences tend to remain at least as long as twenty years after an event occurs.  Direct participants in an event have a stake in what occurred, which also tend to inform and color their views.

Beyond that, however, and very significantly, authors who write close in time to an event, including those who participated in it, tend to simply accept certain conditions as the norm, and therefore diminish their importance int their writings or omit them entirely.  Conversely, they tend to emphasize things that were new or novel, for the same reasons.  Given that, early written records tend to overplay the new and omit the routine, so that later readers assume the new was the normal and they don't even consider the routine.

Take for example the often written about story of the German army during World War Two.  Only more informed historians realize that most of the German army was no more mechanized during World War Two than it was during World War One.  Fewer yet realize that a fair number of German soldiers remained horse mounted during World War Two for one reason or another.  Period writers had little reason to emphasize this, however, as it really wasn't novel at all at the time, and not very dramatic either, and reflected similar conditions in many armies.

This doesn't mean that early works and first hand recollections aren't valuable.  Rather, it means that a person cannot base his final view on those early works, however.  It also provides the answer as to why later historical works on a frequently addressed topic are not only valuable, but necessary.  Rick Atkinson's and Max Hasting's recent works on World War Two, for example, really place the conflict in context in all sorts of ways for the very first time.  The plethora of new books on the First World War that were at first regarded as revisionist are in fact corrective, and likewise the war is coming into accurate focus for the first time.

 

 Cavalryman, Ft. Riley Kansas, 1942.

I don't mean to rehash myself, and goodness knows I don't need to, as I blabber here enough.  But this is something that occurs to me again and again, in terms of writing history.  Contemporary accounts of things are naturally geared towards the dramatic and unusual, not the routine and normal.

News accounts from World War Two emphasized the mechanized nature of the German army, as mechanization was new and spectacular.  The fact that most of the German forces weren't mechanized wasn't interesting to contemporary journalist, as that was the long historical norm.  You can't expect, really, the average journalist to write that most of the German troops he was viewing were walking, or that the Germans deployed cavalry in France.  You'd have expected the Germans to do that, as every army would have done that.

For that matter, you wouldn't get too excited, if you were writing about farms, noting that men were in their fields plowing with horses in the 1940s.  Men had always done that, so it was hardly worth noting.  That there were new tractors and automated implements would be more interesting.

If you are writing about daily living today, you probably don't write about how many ink pens, or pencils, you have in the house.  Computers are still new enough, even now, that they're the exciting thing. That the old writing tools are around, probably doesn't interest you that much.  But they are.

The point generally is that, when looking at history in any context, you have to recall that the mundane and normal of the times often goes unrecorded, the weird unusual and spectacular does. But that colors our view of what was written about any one time, and often the mundane and normal of the past is what would interest us now.