What Makes a History Book Good
Several weeks ago, someone asked in the comments whether I thought a particular history book I'd read was a good book. I realized that's something of a complicated question. Looking back over the history books I've read, there're several different ways in which a history book can be good. A book can totally fail one standard, but I can still love it because it's good in a different way.
Of course, I'm not talking about what makes it good as a book, such as clear and engaging writing. That's another and much larger topic; this's about what makes it good or bad as a history book specifically.
Also, this's all based on my personal experience. I'm not a professor or formal student of history - but as you can see from this blog, I've read a whole lot of history books. But, I hope this framework will be helpful.
One way a history book can be good is if it brings history to life for you - if it gives you a clearer and more vivid picture of some part of history.
I'm reminded of The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn, a book tracing Wyatt Earp's life up to and beyond the famous shootout at the OK Corral. It did tell me a lot of new facts about Earp and the town of Tombstone in particular - but what I appreciate most about it is the vivid picture it gave me of life in the Wild West.
If you'd asked before I read the book, I would've already known about a lot of what this book was talking about - say, drifters going out west to make their fortune, and town policemen who were charged with keeping the peace among drifters and rowdy cattle drivers. But this book painted a vivid picture of what it was like for a police deputy like Wyatt Earp who'd gone west to make his fortune in a frontier town like Dodge City. I feel I understand much better his motivations and the sort of choices he made. This book brought history to life much more than just a list of facts. Now I feel like I understand Earp's - and, probably, myriads of other young men who were like him in some ways.
Or, for another example, I remember some of the stories shown in history museums when I was visiting Boston last spring. I already knew a lot about the beginning of the American Revolution - the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Siege of Boston, and the Battle of Bunker Hill. The museums did tell that high-level story. But, they also told the stories of individual people caught up in those events, collected and written down by early historians. That - for example, the story of a Concord family hearing gunshots on the horizon and seeing soldiers march by - made the story I already knew come more alive.
Technically, this's on a continuum with the raw facts. The fractally-deep details of history I saw in the Concord museum, or the individual motivations of Wyatt Earp, are technically new information. But what makes them so powerful is that they aren't just new information. What a Concord family experienced on 19 April 1775 as the American Revolution erupted around them is far more interesting and powerful than what they'd experienced two days before. It awakens our senses in new ways. It doesn't just lay up new facts about their lives; it makes the larger story of history much more vivid.
Another way a history book can be good - the one most people probably think of - is if it tells you new facts that you didn't know before, new parts of the story of history. This's probably the most common reason why people read history books: they want to find out more about history. Children in school, or other people just starting to learn about history, typically read books that broadly sweep over the whole story of history or some large amount of it; people who already have some idea of history typically read books that tell one or two parts of the story or dig into some of the details. By this standard, a good history book takes what you already know about history and teaches you some part of the story of history that you didn't already know.
Of course, this depends on the reader. The history books I loved at age 13 are far too elementary for me now, but I'd enthusiastically recommend them to other teenagers. Nowadays, I'm eagerly digging into more detailed books about things like slavery in Delaware specifically, or Incan religious practices. They don't recount a lot of adjacent history in detail - say, the whole grand story behind the abolition of slavery - because they assume the reader already knows it.
If you don't already know that adjacent history the book expects you to know, the book might not be a good book for you. I was reading two history books recently: The Making of Roman Italy, by Edward Salmon, and The Bukharan Crisis by Scott C. Levi. They talk about subjects that could be interesting - the rise of Rome, and the fall of the Bukharan Khanate - but both of them were primarily written for academics who already know the background history in detail. (It doesn't help that they both failed to some extent as books: they were both written very dryly.) From reading other books, I had a basic framework of the history of the Roman Republic to hang that on, so even though I didn't know the specific wars The Making of Roman Italy was referring to, I did come out of it with a new understanding of how Rome integrated other city-states in Italy into its growing domain. But I knew next to nothing about early modern Central Asia or anything that tied into it, so even though a few images are now stuck in my mind, I'm still virtually as ignorant as when I started reading The Bukharan Crisis. A book supplying new facts isn't quite the same thing as a book helping you remember them.
Of course, this does make it much harder to build out your knowledge of history to totally new areas. Several years ago, I decided I wanted to read up on the history of Czechia before a trip there. Since I was coming to the history with next to no pre-1930's knowledge beyond knowing a bit about the Hapsburgs and the Hussite Wars, it was all too easy for what I read to go in one ear and out the other. I first had to establish some tie-rods, some points that were clear to me, and then build out everything else around them. For example, learning about the response to the Hussite Wars helped me build to an understanding of early modern Czechia. It was a challenging effort, but a rewarding effort, both in my more-informed visit to Prague (such as knowing some of the background behind the buildings and museum artifacts I saw) and in my larger knowledge of history.
Yet a third way a history book can be good is when it highlights a theme - when it traces new connections between facts you might already know and helps you see them from a fresh perspective.
One of the strongest examples of this to me is When France Fell by Michael S. Neiberg. I read it last year, but it still sticks in my mind. It told me next to nothing I didn't already know in terms of facts - I knew how France fell in World War Two, and how many Americans got shocked out of their isolationism by prophecies of the Nazi threat. What Neiberg's book supplied is that it pointed out the connections between these facts. He points out that American newspapers suddenly started talking up the Nazi threat after they'd defeated France, and after French colonies in North America threatened to become Nazi bases. (France owned, and still owns, several islands in the Carribbean and off Canada.) Similarly, that was when Congress suddenly started enthusiastically raising the military budget.
The connections don't have to be that immediate. Take The Perfectionists, a book about the history of precision engineering. I already knew some of the stories it told, and the importance of precision to manufacturing, but this book helped me see the stories in a pattern of technological development building on itself. Even aside from the individual chapters that were new to me, drawing together that real trend made it a good book.
This can also involve connections to the present, like I tried to do myself in my piece on the US Presidential election of 1800 trying to draw parallels with reactions to modern political events. However, here especially, it's all too easy to draw superficial and wrong connections. For example, I've seen a number of people trying to understand historical political events in light of modern events (or vice versa) in ways that elide significant differences.
Of course, doing this right requires the connections to be real. Too much pseudohistory depends on manufacturing fake connections. For example, the "Phantom Time Hypothesis" tries to connect similar historical figures, architectural trends, and the dates of the solstices to argue that three hundred years of the Early Middle Ages never happened but were made up by kings and the church. Strictly speaking, the facts they use to make their case are facts - for instance, Romanesque architecture did exist, and the Gregorian Reform did move the calendar by eleven days. However, the apparent anomalies can be explained in other ways. The connections they draw are fabricated, and thus not helpful in understanding history.
We need each of these sorts of history books. We need the facts to build everything else on, vivid pictures to help us appreciate the facts, and connections to help us understand why they happened. And, we'll keep needing more of each of them. History is a deep story - fractally deep. There's always room for more books to dig into it, or to connect it in new ways, or to make the facts and connections more palpable in people's minds.
And, I'm happy about this.
One approach to history I really appreciated is found in Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August", about the first month of World War I. In the book's introduction she has a small rant against the kind of history writing which fabricates incidental details, such as "upon first seeing Elba, Napoleon must have thought that . . . " etc., where the narrator describes things that would be impossible to know. In her book Tuchman says she has documentary evidence for everything; if she writes that it was raining on a particular day, she has a weather report to back up her assertion.
Very nice essay. A point I hadn't really considered before is how one book can be very valuable to one person and dreck to another just because of how much background information they have when they read it. Of course vibrant writing is a good thing no matter how much you know, but the main point of history is to learn stuff you didn't know previously.