Learning history in and out of school has never been easier, or more difficult. If the process of learning history is mostly about amassing a personal database of “facts” about the past, history teachers are in a lot of trouble. If you don’t believe me, pick up your smartphone and ask: “When did Alexander the Great die?” or “Who was the first emperor of the Han Dynasty?” The answers you get are basically correct, and probably more thorough than what you would expect from a student in a typical history class.
Not only can students and teachers outsource their memory of historical information to pocket-sized supercomputers, the amount of historical information is increasing by leaps and bounds. (I would say it increases exponentially, but I can’t say for sure that this is mathematically the case, and I wouldn’t want to irritate my more mathematically-inclined friends.) Part of the reason for this is that there is just more of the past than there used to be. To use myself as an example, there are more than thirty years’ worth of events, people, data, ideas — all the stuff that we study in history class – that have happened since I finished studying the subject in high school. But the more important reason that we have more history now than ever before is that professional historians – as well as amateur historians, journalists, and especially experts in other disciplines – are looking at the past in new and exciting ways and uncovering information that people didn’t look for before.
There are hundreds of examples of newly-discovered history, but two should be sufficient to illustrate. First, consider the history of climate. The Earth’s climate has existed as long as the Earth has, much longer than humanity has, and over that time it has changed, often drastically. You might have learned in school about how the end of the last Ice Age ushered in the first agricultural innovations and settlements, but did you learn about subsequent major climactic changes? And even if you did, learn about them, you probably didn’t study them in particularly great detail or consider how those of us living in the 21st century could know so much about conditions so long ago. But now, because of new scientific techniques we can know much more about temperatures and rainfall in the distant past. And, because currently climate change is such a pressing concern, historians and other scholars have chosen to look at that data to try to construct a narrative of the Earth’s climate over time. Science has added an entire dimension to the study of the past that we now need to consider.
Traditional historical methods (i.e. relying primarily on texts) have also increased the amount of information that can and should be studied. For example, when you were in school, what did you learn about LGBTQ history? Probably not a lot. Does this mean that there were no LGBTQ individuals in the past? Obviously it doesn’t mean that, but what it does mean is that, for the most part, historians weren’t looking for evidence of LGBTQ people, or when they found LGBQT narratives, they either didn’t recognize them, or didn’t think they were important enough to include in the histories they wanted to tell, or deliberately omitted them because of prejudice against LGBTQ communities and individuals. But now, hopefully, your history courses are recognizing that stories and other information by and about LGBTQ communities, as well as indigenous communities and other numerical minorities and otherwise marginalized groups, need to be included in order to provide a fuller picture of the past.
Given the fact (and I’ll have a lot more to say about “facts” in a later post) that there is simply more history to teach and learn, what is EPIC history trying to accomplish? One thing I’m not going to attempt is to add more historical information to what already exists; that’s the job of real historians and better writers than I. And as much as I appreciate the necessary addition of unacknowledged or deliberately obscured narratives, there are others better equipped to add to the corpus of what we should know. EPIC history, I hope, will provide students and teachers with a new set of tools for thinking about how to learn about history. It’s a framework, perhaps a methodology, maybe a strategy for helping us better make sense of the past so that we can understand the present.
EPIC is an acronym that I use to categorize different approaches to learning history. It stands for Economics, Politics, Ideology/Culture. The C also stands for Contextualization, which, for me is the key skill to understanding the past. So, if it helps you can think of the system as EPIC2 or even EPI/C2 , which looks cooler but is harder to say (EPI slash C-squared?) and definitely doesn’t work as a URL.
I chose EPIC as the mnemonic and the structuring element for learning history because most of the questions that students are required to answer in history classes can be categorized as related to either economics, politics or ideology and culture. Being able to categorize questions and the information required to answer them is one of the key skills needed to really understand the past as well as how to be a better student. A good percentage of the difficulty that students have in studying history involves not understanding what they are being asked, in particular what type of question is in front of them.
Most questions that teachers ask in history class are probably still about politics and government, particularly about rulers and what they did or did not do. A classic example might be something like: How did the reforms instated by Peter the Great (or Ashoka or Darius I or Kleisthenes or Han Wudi or, well, you get the picture) change the Russian state? Even if you recognize that this is a question about politics, you still have to know a great deal to answer it. You need to know that a reform is a change, usually intended to be a positive one. You have to understand that change means movement from one set of conditions at time 1 (t1) to a second set of conditions at time 2 (t2). Most important, though, and probably the aspect of the question that students understand least is to know what “the state” is. Understanding the “P” in EPIC should make it easier to recognize what type of question you are facing, and how to answer it.
Ideology and Culture encompass a lot of the parts of history that are often least taught, especially in more modern history courses. Ideology includes the religions, ethical systems and philosophies that people live by, what might be thought of as “Belief Systems,” or BS. I choose this abbreviation on purpose, not because I don’t think they are important, but because discussions of belief systems often involve the broadest generalizations that we find in history classes simply because it is impossible to know what any one person truly believes, much less the reasons why they hold these beliefs or how a belief influences a person’s behavior. And if it is almost impossible to determine an individual’s beliefs it is even more difficult to determine a belief system for an entire community. Yet history teachers ask students to do it all the time.
Consider this question, one that I have asked in hundreds of classes over the years: Why did Buddhism spread throughout India and beyond after the 6th century BCE? Buddhism is a religion/belief system that claims millions of adherents worldwide in many, many different incarnations. It is one of the few religions that can truly be considered universal; anyone can become a Buddhist. But that doesn’t mean it’s monolithic. Ask ten Buddhists what a Buddhist believes and you will get at least ten answers, depending upon where and who you are asking the question to. And even if you can get satisfactory answers, there is almost no way that these can encompass the entire set of ideas and beliefs of a “Buddhists.” Because Buddhism – and any other belief system – is an ideology held by individuals, it is impossible to know exactly, or even with anything approximating precision, what Buddhists in general believe. To answer the question of why people believe in Buddhist or any other ideas is doubly impossible. Well, it might not be impossible, but it is not actually all that important to understanding what happened in the past. For most students, and, frankly most people, it is enough to know what Buddhism is (broadly speaking), when and where it began as a religion, and how and when it spread to other places in the world.
Yet history teachers try to explain the roots of ideologies all the time. To take another example, if you have ever taken an American history class you were asked something about why the colonists turned against Britain and sought independence. If you can answer this question, your answer probably has something to do with “unfair taxes,” but if you stop to think about it, even if the British did place taxes on the colonists (they did) is it likely that every colonist felt that the taxes were unfair? And even if every colonist felt that the taxes were unfair, what is the probability that every (or even a significant majority) of colonists felt that the taxes were so egregious as to justify separation from Britain? (you can explore this more fully in the elaboration activity that I will post shortly).
The point is, that when it comes to understanding ideology, it’s very difficult to even say what people believe without making broad generalizations. It is even more difficult to say why people hold to particular beliefs, so when we do this we are forced into even more generalizations. This is not to say that all generalizations are bad, although some clearly are. If we are going to say anything about the past, some generalizations will be necessary, as I will discuss more fully in another post. We need to be careful when we use them, however, and always be mindful that no general statement about beliefs or culture will apply 100% to all members of the culture we are examining.
I have lumped culture in with ideology because often in history classes the two are intertwined. When we say that a society is patriarchal, for example, we are talking about both a set of beliefs about the roles of men and women, and the ways those beliefs are expressed, often through literature, or art and sometimes through architecture, as in cases where women were sequestered in special precincts of houses or palaces. A great example of ideology being expressed directly through art comes from ancient Rome, which had temples dedicated to important ideas like faith, security and courage. Especially when looking at ancient societies, cultural artifacts are one of the only ways that we can learn about ideology, so it is useful to think of I and C as closely interrelated.
If you have read this far you have noticed that even though EPIC starts with E, I haven’t yet discussed economics. This is because I find economics to be the mode of analysis that ties all of the others together, the one that includes most of humanity, unlike politics which tends to have been the domain of men, and the one that is most often glossed over and misunderstood. Also, because economics is an ideology as well as a method for understanding the past, it can be very difficult for students and teachers to get their heads around.
What history classes mean by economics is a topic that will be dealt with in later chapters, but very briefly, it involves what a society produces and how it is distributed. I like to think of it as complex system of inputs and outputs that, if I were better at mathematics, I would describe with interconnected functions. The most basic economic relationship is between natural resources and food production. You can’t produce food without land (or water in the case of fish), and the amount of food that you produce will depend largely on how much land you have and its qualities as well as the climate where you live. How things get produced leads to more complicated economic questions: how much labor is required? Who provides the labor? What role does technology play in production, and we could go on.
Once goods (and food counts as a good) are produced, then the community must decide how the goods are going to be distributed. Is everyone going to have an equal share, or will a particular subset of the group have more than others? What are the rules for dividing things up? If there is a surplus, will it be traded for other goods that are not so easy to produce, or will it be saved up? And, perhaps the most important question of all: who decides?
This question of who decides leads us back to the cardinal point of EPIC history, that all of the elements are so intertwined that it can be difficult for students to disentangle them enough to formulate the kinds of questions that they can answer. Dividing historical information into EPIC categories is a first step in studying history; you can’t answer questions if you don’t know the kind of questions that are being asked. The next step, and this is the one that is truly crucial, is understanding that the categories are related and being able to describe the relationships. One more example should be helpful in demonstrating this complexity, which may or may not be all that helpful in itself.
Here is a question that history teachers should be asking and that their students should be able to answer:
How were Arab Muslims able to conquer and control such a vast territory in the 7th and 8th centuries CE?
Notice first that the question assumes that you know where the Arab conquests were and that the 7th and 8th centuries were between 600-800 CE. After that it becomes much trickier. The words conquer and control suggest that this is a question about Politics, so that should be the initial focus of your analysis. Conquer implies military force, which usually falls under the category of politics[1], and control suggests some form of structure or institutions of rule. So a good first pass at this question will mention something about the strengths of Arab armies, and the systems that they imposed over the peoples and territories that they conquered. Although it’s not strictly necessary, it’s probably a good idea to know something about the governments of the people who fell to the Arabs, mainly the Sassanid and Byzantine empires, and how their emperors ruled over their people provinces.
So far, so good. But conquest and control over territory require more than rulers and systems of extending rule, they require resources. Armies need to be fed, roads and buildings need to be built, and government officials need to be paid and in order to do any of these things, taxes need to be collected. All of this requires some sense of what the territory and the people in it can produce, especially how much they can produce beyond their daily needs, which in turn requires that we know something about the geography and climate of the territory and the population living there. Perhaps the most important rule of political history is that the state needs tax revenues to survive, so you can’t understand the state without understanding how it collects taxes. Our government question has become an economics question, because we cannot really understand how a government functions unless we understand what underpins its economy.
What about ideology and culture? Surely we can avoid those topics in answering our straightforward political/economic question about the first Muslim empire? Except that control implies not only government structures and institutions and the people who staff them, it also requires that the conquered obey the conquerors, at least in some degree. Obedience can come from force, which in terms of ideology might be framed as “might makes right.” Or perhaps there is a religious component to conquest, with credit for victory belonging to the god or gods of the conquerors. Maybe the conquerors’ set of ideas are just attractive, and people choose to adhere to them, discarding previous ideologies because they sense that the new rulers will provide a better life. Although we can’t say with 100% certainty that Islam was an attractive alternative to former Sassanids and Byzantines, if it were completely abhorrent to them it is unlikely that the religion would have taken such firm root there. The economics concept of revealed preference can be helpful here: one of the surest ways to know if someone prefers A to B is that she chooses A rather than B. For at least some (probably most) people living under the various Islamic empires that began in the 700s, Islam was preferred to alternative religions.
The interrelationship between Economics, Politics, Ideology and Culture is incredibly complex, which is one reason why history classes will often separate them into different dimensions of study. This separation is a simplification, but such simplifications, like generalizations are necessary to building a greater and more complex understanding of the past. They are also necessary to answering the types of questions that students are asked, the types of questions that build our understanding and, for better or worse, demonstrate this understanding to whoever is asking the questions.
This was supposed to be a brief introduction to the conceptual framework that EPIC History is trying to establish. My hope is that EPIC will provide a strong and comfortable foundation for anyone who studies history in school and beyond, and that using the thinking tools provided will enable you to better understand the world, both past and present.
[1] Michael Mann, whose ideas have informed my own, has his own model of historical sociology that separates out military as its own category. His acronym is IEMP standing for Ideology, Economics, Military and Politics. Obviously, he’s way smarter about this than I am, but I can’t see a good reason for separating military and political history, and EPIC is a much better acronym.
EPIC past 