What those who are curious about the usefulness of history should know
A Near-Perfect 'History User Manual'

Why 'Historical Literacy' Now?

The 21st century in Korea can be said to be a golden age of history.
The term 'the age of historical consumption' is being used, and the 'judgment of history' is often mentioned in the political arena.
Is that all?
A 'history war' is in full swing between conservative and progressive camps over the liquidation of past history.
Meanwhile, books that draw lessons from history are also pouring out.
In the theory of crisis in the humanities, history seems to be an exception.
That's all.
Serious questions about history, such as what is history, what is the difference between historical truth and facts, and whether objective history is possible, are still on the surface.
The author, who majored in German history and historical theory, talks about historical literacy, or how to read and write history, in this book.
Just as citizens who were active readers changed the world during the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe, even in this era of accelerating practical omnipotence driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a thorough understanding of history is still considered useful for understanding the present and predicting the future.

Sima Guang explained his position on writing history books as follows:
“God wanted to organize the rise and fall of nations, the joys and sorrows of the people, and the significant or significant events into chronological order, but he lacked the ability to distinguish between the important and unimportant in each event.” The meaning of these words is clear.
It means that readers should read the book at their own risk, according to their own needs, and with their own eyes.
--- p.53

History is an unkind teacher.
If history is a mirror, it is a blurry one, like the bronze mirrors of ancient societies.
You can learn about history, but it's difficult to learn unique lessons from it.
All we can do is, as readers of the past, draw lessons from history that each of us needs.
--- p.59

Not all historical accounts are true.
This is because problems may arise in the combination of facts, and gaps may exist between the confirmed facts.
Historians fill in this blank space with conjecture, imagination, and interpretation based on experience to write history.
Therefore, even the best historians, with their best efforts, can only reveal partial truths, not the actual truth.
--- p.100

Historians must naturally be mindful of errors and confusions in testimony and bear in mind the distortions of memory.
However, it is very violent to immediately use this as a reason to deny the credibility of memory.
This was the attitude of the Japanese government and right-wing figures toward the testimonies of grandmothers over 90 years old who were former Japanese military "comfort women."
--- p.111

The lesson we should learn from the Battle of Chuncheon is not that we should emulate the unproven self-sacrificing attitude of the patriotic warriors who sacrificed themselves.
The truly important lesson from the Battle of Chuncheon for us is the stark truth that an army trained according to the manual wins.
We already know the fate of the Japanese military, which emphasized the epic of heroic sacrifice, as a cautionary tale.
--- p.121

In Renaissance Italy, numerous stars competed.
One of those brilliant literary stars was Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457).
As a philologist, he… … with his upright character and meticulous research… … exposed the falsehood of the “Constitutum Constantini,” which the Vatican had brandished like a treasure trove.
--- p.128

It is for the same reason that Ranke, the father of modern Western history, found the first criterion for distinguishing between amateur historians and professional historians in the criticism of historical sources.
That is why the words of French historians Langlois and Senobeau, “There is no history without sources,” are so meaningful.
Documents are not the only source of information.
Everything in this world that contains traces of human life is feed.
--- p.130

It would be Braudel (1902-1985), who is called the leader of the French Annales School.
According to Braudel, “history can be divided into three kinds of movement: that which moves quickly, that which moves slowly, and that which appears to be motionless.” Since Ranke, political historians have focused on the fast-moving kind.
Like an amateur critic who focuses on the words of an actor or the steps of a ballet dancer.
--- p.212

Braudel was critical of the historical practice of ignoring the vastness of Earth's time or the long span of human history and fixating on the fleeting, mayfly-like.
Traditional historical writing has focused on the private actions of the ruling elite, while neglecting the daily lives of ordinary people who make up the majority of the population.
--- p.213

The second period of time in history is socio-economic time.
The economy moves in cycles.
The French word for this cycle is conjoncture.
Kongjongtur, commonly translated as 'nation', is a huge rhythm that moves at intervals of several decades at the shortest, or one or two centuries at the longest.
This shift coincided with the discovery of a direct route from Europe to India, the plummeting price of pepper, and the massive influx of silver from America, which shifted the center of gravity of European history from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
--- p.214

The final layer of historical time is political time, commonly referred to as the 'history of events'.
… … The French Revolution is a representative example.
The Paris Revolution, which began with the convocation of the Estates-General in May 1789, ended ten years later with the coup of the 18th Brumaire led by Napoleon in November 1799.
Some historians even say that Napoleon strangled the French Revolution.
… … In this play unfolding on the stage of history, the focus was on political struggles, military victories and defeats, and the wisdom of prominent figures.
--- p.214

The ordinary daily lives of ordinary people, without any particular characteristics, can be said to be a rock layer of historical material that allows us to read the underlying forces that have long defined our lives.
Like a geologist who discovers accumulated tectonic movements in a cross-section of sedimentary layers, historians strive to find clues to the slow-moving changes in the lives of the people who have persisted, deeply rooted in the earth like stumps.
This is 'history from below'
--- p.218

Max Weber once inherited his predecessors' optimistic belief in the progress of history.
Thus, he believed that human history was progressing from a magical stage to a rational stage, and he found evidence of this in the development of capitalism and the emergence of bureaucracy.
Masters of the historical school of national economics, active at the same time as Weber, also viewed Western history as a progression from the ancient household economy to the medieval urban economy and then to the modern national economy, and predicted that this trend would continue and lead to the advent of a global economy in the near future.
--- p.231

East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was no exception.
The three laws of evolution, summarized as survival of the fittest, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, dominated the thinking of intellectuals in Japan, China, and Korea who obsessively pursued modernization during the same period.
… … After the Meiji Restoration, the study of the history of civilization became very popular in Japan for a while.
Japan's invasion of Korea was the result of the latecomer's delusion that he would complete the development of world-historical civilization in Asia.
From this perspective, blind faith in progress and overestimation of one's own abilities may have been the greatest obstacles to human progress.
--- p.237

The young Marx had to cross four rivers before he arrived at the materialist view of history.
These include Hegel's historical dialectics, Feuerbach's materialism, early socialist thought represented by Saint-Simon and Fourier, and the labor theory of value in classical economics presented by Ricardo and Smith.
--- p.283

The young Marx now reached another realization under the roofs of Paris.
Capital is not money, but the accumulation of past labor.
During his time in Paris, Marx was not yet a full-fledged communist.
So people call Marx of this period an 'anthropological materialist'.
--- p.287

Marx declared that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle.
Class struggle arises from the relationship between exploiter and exploited.
Therefore, when understanding human history, it is important to understand when and how this exploitation-exploitation relationship began.
--- p.291

In his 1931 inaugural address to the American Historical Association, Carl Becker (1873–1945) expressed his fellow historians' loss of confidence in their objectivity:
“Everyone is their own historian!” … … Everyone, Becker says, is an ordinary citizen with little knowledge.
--- p.331

World War I was not only a war between nations, but also a battle between historians.
Many historians from the United States, Britain, and Germany took up pens instead of guns and engaged in a fierce propaganda war for their country.
As a result, when the war ended, there was no objective history that historians could agree on.
The bridge of trust between Anglo-American historians, who disparaged the German emperor as a modern-day "Attila," and German historians, who criticized British utilitarianism as a "philosophy of mercantileism," has disappeared.
--- p.335

20th-century historians, including Becker, argued that it was simply a matter of giving meaning to a heap of disordered facts.
… … he predicted that people would come to understand clearly that history does not speak about itself through historians, but that historians speak about themselves through history.
--- p.336

Hegel spoke of two kinds of history.
If the first, 'res gestae', means 'events that occurred in the past', the second, 'historiarerum gestarum', means 'records of events that occurred in the past'.
People sometimes call the former objective history and the latter subjective history.
--- p.358

Professional historians are not only governed by perspective.
The work of a historian must be evaluated within a community of scholars with differing views.
During this process, it is important to review whether the sources have been appropriately cited, whether there are too large gaps between the sources and the claims, and whether there are any inconsistencies between the confirmed facts and the interpretations.
Peer review is responsible for this task.
--- p.362

Evaluations of any person or party in any past era change with the changes in the world.
The most important thing is the change in the economy and social structure, and the politics that these changes bring about.
For example, with the emergence of the masses in the late 19th century, those who had been considered subjects of rule began to participate in politics, thanks to the hard-won universal suffrage, and those who had been considered merely subjects of rule in historical records began to be re-evaluated as key actors in history.
--- p.363

The study of history has also developed through repeated re-examination, reinterpretation, and re-writing.
This process is similar to erasing writing on parchment and then rewriting it.

--- p.364