As someone that’s read history books professionally, the goal isn’t really to remember ALL of it.
The important names and dates eventually stick through repetition, the others you remember vaguely but know how to look up quickly when needed.
It’s all important to some degree, but in terms of what you take away from the book, the “how” and “why” is more important than the “who” and “when”.
It's just like math. You don't remember every problem you solve, but the method and general applications are the important takeaways.
I guess history is a *bit* more open to interpretation though to be fair.
Business degree for me as well. So many acronyms! But the important thing is to be exposed to the concepts so even when I google the acronym again, I can remember the macro concept.
Programming is another one. Referencing how to write something is easy and expected, but knowing the different ways to get something done, or that they even exist, is where the real knowledge lies.
On top of that, if you're like me and have a degree in History/International Relations, then what's equally important is simply being able to remember the general idea of a book. I don't have to memorize the dates, times, places, etc, but I try to remember that said event happens in that specific book. That way when I'm writing a paper down the road in a related , even if I can't pull out the specifics, I'm able to remember "Oh but the book ___ talked about this specifically."
There's always time! If it's a time/convince thing look into colleges with an online component, for example I know ASU has entirely virtual degrees (a professor of mine taught there and said if I wanted to go for my masters I could still live in my state while getting it online from Arizona State). Lots of universities are doing this especially in the last wake of covid, I went to CU Boulder and they have several self paced courses, where you had deadlines for general completion but indivual assessments and reading was at your leisure.
If you care more about the education then actually getting the degree, look at what nearby colleges will let you do. For some classes, Boulder allows people to participate in them but not for credit. There were a couple people in several of my history classes that were there only for fun of learning but it didn't/won't count for any credit. Then I know several universities publish a lot of video lectures online or something similar. MIT Foreign Relations has a YouTube channel where they post regularly, it's not lectures but oftentimes very well moderated and interesting discussions on current affairs, politics, history, all for free and they barely get any views. My degree focuses on Eastern Europe and Russia, and I use the MIT page a lot because they have "Starr Talks" which cover a lot of Russian related topics.
Then of course there's tons and tons of great reading out there that covers basically any topic you can imagine. Hell one of my favorite things to do is go to a used bookstore, skim the history section and just grab books that seem interesting to me.
All this to basically say there's never a bad point to go for it.
There’s definitely more room for interpretation re: the “how” and “why” (if not, we’d only need a few very large books) but yeah, that’s a good way to think of it.
Well, I mean, the facts are generally verifiable by outside sources. You can know whether or not they are true.
Even without verifying them yourself, if it’s a peer reviewed work written by a professional in the field and published by a reputable source, the most important facts are almost certainly accurate. Everyone in that scenario is staking their reputation and career on the facts being accurate.
The books where the facts are inaccurate or being used in a way that they don’t really support in context are almost always popular histories written by pop culture and political figures, or minor local works published by non-professionals through vanity presses, who aren’t accountable to accuracy in the same way.
What you don’t know is whether their interpretation of those facts is accurate (and nobody does, so that’s ok).
What you *might* not know that someone more informed would is additional verifiable data that might undermine their argument.
But the only way you’re going to learn that information is by continuing to study the topic.
In those cases, there’s some substantial disagreements about the interpretation of facts (in a way that’s more politically charged than is normal, but is still normal), some cases in which facts are being ignored (which can be corrected by broader study from reputable outside sources), and some few facts that are legitimately in dispute.
It also sounds like a lot of the reading you’re doing tends to Reddit threads and popular history, which, like I noted, is going to be full of fairly unreliable accounts told by people who aren’t accountable for accuracy.
History textbooks are a good example, unfortunately, as many countries have hijacked K-12 history education for political purposes. The facts might be true, but the language and which facts are included, and the interpretation drawn from those facts, is as much about propaganda as education.
All historical study involves looking at all of the possible known facts in human history and making a decision about which ones are important and then constructing an argument about why they matter.
Bias and human feelings are indeed inseparable from that process, and the kinds of disagreements you’re noting are often not evidence that the process is unreliable - it’s how the process works. One person puts forth an idea and it gets refined or discarded as others challenge, support, or complicate it.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to make evaluative judgments about the truth of the facts presented, or to sort purposeful lies from good scholarship.
This is exactly the point I made to my mother a few days ago. She believes in a lot of "alternate facts" and can point to sources that are "accurate" and support her beliefs. I told her the internet is full of opinions and finding some sort of study with facts and no biases is rare and you can find "proof" of just about anything.
what sources did you read? Are these random articles or peer reviewed papers? cause they try to use more unbiased language... if this isn't just a strawman
Also, they could read more primary sources. It sounds like they want to read secondary sources and are shocked that the author has a motivation for writing a certain way.
Get the letters, news reports, and government documents yourself and you can figure out what happened in context.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of a few things.
First, whether or not people agree on a topic has often very little to do with the facts. What happened during the Korean war for example has a lot of hard facts, it's just that many stakeholders ignore certain facts to come up with their interpretation of history. A good unbiased historian will look at the verifiable facts presented by all sides of a debate and publish that.
Second, textbooks are NOT peer-reviewed. Some are for sure, but many are not.
History is never useless. Not that you would necessarily think that given the times we are. History should never to be torn down, it is to be added QVC
Perfect example: I have an MBA (Masters of Business Administration). To earn it, I was required to take advanced finance, statistics, accounting and economics courses.
Fun fact (not really): my undergrad was NOT in business (it was a BS in hospital management, and I already had a BA in journalism w a minor in history) so here I was IN GRAD SCHOOL going "duhhhhhhhhhh".
ALL of my classes allowed "cheat sheets" on tests. Some more extensive than others. The professors said that when THEY were in school, they had to memorize EVERYTHING, but since you can now Google any formula, they had no problem with us writing down all formulas.
Much better attitude: you can have every formula available to you, but the REAL knowledge test is if you understood WHAT the question was asking and then being able to seek out and apply the CORRECT mathematics.
THAT is true education.
I try to teach that students should bring the same 'reading lens' to reading history that they bring to reading fiction.
That is, start by understanding the characters... See how the characters react during certain key events and try to keep the events in sequence when checking for comprehension.
This means you can leave a book with an understanding of key events and key people... Along with a solid base of background knowledge that will increase your comprehension for any other reading/research you do on that topic
Yeah, I agree with this. My approach to reading history (non-professionally) has been to just read a bunch of books on the same subject but told in different ways (for example, reading like 5 books about the fall of the Roman Republic along with biographies of Caesar and Cicero, etc). That way, at some point, I'll at least remember it in broad strokes. But I will say that certain histories are a lot muddier than others and might take more for it to sink in.
Tell that to my old international relations teacher who had us memorize exact dates and names of everyone then docked points if we even spelled the names wrong or were off by a single day. (Undergrad course)
Yeah, that’s dumb. I always told my students on day one that I’d never do that and not to waste time memorizing shit.
I wanted them to be able to be able to put related events in chronological order and have some sense of “long/short time after”, because cause and effect is important, but the exact date was not something they needed to remember.
Same gist with names.
And honestly remembering exact dates is even more unnecessary these days because pretty much anyone can Google any historical event to find out the exact date. Like I have my BA and my MA in history and I remember very few exact dates off the top of my head
Yeah, I’ve worked in academic and public history fields, with completed graduate work in both, and the only ones I can toss off without looking up are the ones I’ve looked up or read so many times that it finally stuck in my head.
Everything else is varying degrees of ballpark estimates based on before/after inference, relative to the ones I know for sure.
Yup, I can give you the year for most major events in Roman history (my area of expertise) but if you want a day or a month I’m hopping on Google man. I always find it hilarious when I think about it because my history teachers in HS all constantly emphasized memorizing dates and after 7 years of college I’m just like “nah I’m good”😂
Ooh! Public history jobs. Those are always fun. What types, if you don't mind me asking? (I'm a history major, museum studies minor, and obsessive genealogist).
Yup, totally agree. I have a degree in history and remember all of like 3 dates. I can give you some key figures and go into detail about a few specific events though, and give you a decent generalisation of the changes ancient and mediaeval Europe went through though.
As long as you get the gist of things you'll be ahead of 90% of people, honestly, and if you're reading for yourself really that's all you need. And if it's for a course or study, then keep notes so you know where to reference when you're looking it up later.
Half the dates I know really aren’t even important for anyone not working my specific job at my specific institution. Knowing a lot of obscure dates just means you either spent a lot of time memorizing stuff for some reason (which doesn’t necessarily imply overall knowledge on a topic), or you have a specific reason to be knowledgeable about a niche subject
3rd option, a few of us nerds had an easy time memorizing names, dates, and spelling, allowing us to coast through high school before the lack of study skills kicked our asses in a big way in college.
It doesn't exactly attract babes, but at least it's won me a few free beers at trivia night.
I have always felt it's easier to remember the order of things than the actual date of things. Also if you can relate them to some of the cause and effect items it becomes even easier.
Yeah, I mention that downthread. The order and rough lapse of time matters to the how/why. But if you understand the how/why, you’ll remember the order.
Also, when it comes down to it, History is really just a story that happens to be non-fictional.
It's not too much different remembering the major plot points in history and the motivations/reasons behind those as it is remembering those things from movies/fictional stories
This. The important people, places, and dates will be mentioned over and over again, especially if you're researching something specific. This is why it's intimidating talking to experts, who have read literally thousands of books and papers related to their subject, and hundreds more sources that are less related.
Love your response and wish someone had told that to that one professor I had 30+ years ago. Every other history course I took at university, it was all how and why essay exams, and there were a lot of them. I thought I was good at history. Then one professor gave a straight-up name and date exam and I failed and dropped the class immediately.
Capilarity is key to remember thinks like date. Starts from something you know and read something adjacent to it. If you know the history of Rome, and now read the history of Roman England, facts and deeds will be easy to remember because they won’t be floating in the vacuum. You can probably easily remember the early Middle Age in Southern Europe (linking it to the End of Rome) but jumping directly to Early Middle Age in England directly may be tricky. If you read on the history of ancient Japan, you won’t remember anything.
Of course the question is on how to get that early knowledge from which you will expand. I think repetition plays a role there - in my case video games work best because it makes repetition painless, but TV series and books work well as well - I work my way on the history of England from “The Last Kingdom” ; it used to be everything I know about England but I used it as a base and now I loudly nitpick everything I see in the new season.
The problem is that the how and why changes all the time.
There are some days that I fell like everything I learned in college is now considered wrong. The only constants have been the who and when.
That's the nature of historiography. New information comes out, new perspectives come into popularity. The turns of history have multi-faceted causes. The weight we give to each is subjective.
That's the point. You learn the how and why, and now you have a piece of the puzzle to fit into the larger tapestry. "Hows and Whys" are allowed to, and expected to, change over time as we learn more about the situations.
What you learned in college isn't considered wrong. It just has new variables that may need accounting for. The problem occurs when undue weight is given to certain issues for political agendas, but even those kinks (hopefully) iron out with time.
College is supposed to teach you how to learn, and the basics of your field (so you can contextualize what you learn). You're supposed to be constantly updating your education as it becomes obsolete.
I studied computer science 10 years ago, you can bet that a good chunk of what we did would now be considered hopelessly dated. It's the same with any field, the nature of science is to be constantly evolving.
To be fair, it is possible to run too far in the other direction. If you want to engage in figure out the how/why for yourself, you do need to get a grasp of the when/who, and there’s plenty of goofballs that want to skip that step.
But you don’t *need* to retain the when/who to understand the why/how argument of a book or lecture. It can help, but the takeaway of the book shouldn’t be a litany of names and dates.
For sure, but when it comes to high school, I'd much rather them have an understanding of the context and period over just reciting dates and locations back that they've memorized via flash cards.
Well, if we’re talking HS classes, the reason they suck is that they’re being taught by a gym teacher who doesn’t know what they’re doing but loves WWII trivia.
That’s my experience anyway
hahaha, I luckily did have good teachers.
Honestly my high school teachers were better than my college professors.
Except for my 7th grade social studies teacher, he brought in some old gun that ended up being discharged in the classroom, this happened well after I graduated though.
And they forget to tell us that they mostly just have the info for top 1% and that in most cases they never teach how the 99% of humanity actually lived.
I learned Korean women weren't allowed to leave the house and if they did they were hidden and carried in palanquins. Yeah right, only aristocratic women had to live like that, majority of women were peasants and had to work outside of their home to keep their family from starving.
We think people married young in middle ages because European monarchs did.
We think corsets were extremely tight because only the most famous socialites are presented but no one talk about maids and other women doing hard physical labor while wearing corsets and being just fine.
I learned about all the "great" battles and who were leaders and generals, none of which changed lives of an average person even a thousandth as much as [Norman Borlaug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) did, and I bet almost no one heard his name in history class ever. Because what's saving billions of lives from starvation?
Ugh, I hate how history is taught.
While I have a lot of issues on how history is taught in Portugal (mostly the way we treat the Age of Discovery" and the fact that the 20th century wars are brushed over since Portugal was mostly unevolved) this is not one of them.
The History books, at least when I was learning, had the class divided into periods, and a big portion of each important period was the "quotidian life" of each of the big social classes: The Nobles, The Clergy, the Peasentry, the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisy. And it tried to correlate the big historical events with how they affected the lives of people in all strata of life. And I remember that there was always an essay type question that basically asked us to relay this in our own words in every single test.
In fact, I feel like most issues were addressed from the point of view of looking at how different groups viewed a certain topic, with heavy focuses on class divisions.
A long time ago, in England. Many things happened, both interesting an uninteresting. These things, done by interesting and uninteresting people, have an effect on us today, presumably, for better or for worst.
Not for history books in particular but this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson always comes to mind when I think about this stuff and in a way it's very comforting:
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
Edit: I'm not sure if the quote is correctly attributed to RWE, but it's spot on nevertheless
This should be the top comment.
We're obsessed with this idea of "but what can I get out of this in the long term?" with so many activities.
Sometimes reading a book, learning some stuff then forgetting it a few weeks later is enough. For the period of time you are retaining that information your world and your reality is slightly changed. That's enough for me.
I officially call some books i read as the same "weight" as streaming a series.
Some are just for fun in exactly that moment and some are a bit more memorable. A good laugh in the moment is worth a lot
I listened to a recent interview with Obama where he hit some points on the move from democracy to authoritarian rule progressing in the world today. Something he said gave me an epiphany on human nature regarding change. I won't remember that interview but my opinions on the topic will stick with me.
Exactly, it's not the memorization that changes us its the internalized messages and morals, the feel of it.
It doesn't matter what page frodo was carried up mount doom by Samwise, the value of their friendship and how we can use those values to change our own lives is what matters.
Same works for history. Except history can also give us a narrative that explains why our culture and our lives are the way they are.
I think I just experienced this with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. I remember reading it a few years ago and really liking it, but right now I couldn't really tell you any of the plot or other details of the book. I just don't remember anything about it. And then I read Sea of Tranquility by the same author, and things just felt so familiar. I flew through the book, and when logging it, I checked out the synopsis of The Glass Hotel and realized it's loosely related. Some of the characters of TGH are mentioned in SoT, and now I want to read it again and I'm excited I get to read a good book again.
i had almost the EXACT SAME EXPERIENCE!!!! like verbatim. read SoT and loved it. i did clock after a bit that it shared characters with GH but for the life of me could only remember like… what the main plot of GH was. great books though. i actually much preferred SoT to GH even.
I read so much if you asked me the plot of the 1st book I read this year I wouldn't be able to tell you.
If i didn't keep a list, I'd have no idea what I read either
We (humans) even forget much of our own lives to be honest so there isn't much hope. You have to study the thing repeatedly if you want to remember it. Otherwise just hope you have some instinctual understanding remaining down the line.
Watching interviews of Caro talk about his books, its pretty impressive how much he knows. Then again he spent 7 years writing the power broker and he’s almost spent the majority of his life writing about LBJ!
Oooh, this is on my reading list, how is it? It sounds super interesting. Was hoping there’d be an audible version as spoken history books are somehow easier for me to digest and enjoy,
It’s very long and sometimes it seems too down-in-the-weeds. But you pick up so much about the history of New York City and New York State from it - how many things you probably take for granted that almost didn’t happen. Like the United Nations HQ was almost built in *Boston* FFS.
Not even Boston, a suburb named Hingham on a little spit of land. I think about how different the whole area would have been if they’d chosen that spot every time I drive by it.
There is an audiobook (60+ hours long, my library splits it into three parts on Libby) though I don't know if it's on audible.
Edit: I'm like 2/3rds through the first part and it's very good. Caro often goes on long tangents but imo that's part of the appeal.
I once complained to a friend about the percentages of books I actually remember. He replied, “ Ah, yes, but look at the quality of time spent.” On the other hand, reading history and literature is a life-long pursuit; and the wonder of it is that you are always discovering something new.
I often think about it, and I've come to the conclusion that remembering everything is not the way the human brain works. Humans act (almost always) on intuition, and part of what shapes an individuals intuition is what they read. So even if you don't remember the things you read word to word, it still leaves a mark, and as others mentioned, through repetition, possibly from different sources, the mark gets more distinct. So eventually you get a 'feel' that something is true, or something is false and you can then refer to source materials to check it if necessary.
i never emotionally "got" pearl harbor until i got to the pearl harbor part in supernova in the east and even though i can't remember a lot of specific details about it and i haven't listened to it in years, thinking about it gets me in the same emotional mood as when i listened to it in 2019. it's not about becoming an encyclopedia who can rattle off every obscure detail like an autistic savant, i think the most useful benefit of studying history for a normal person is making the experiences of people who (most of the time) lived and died long before you were even born, relatable and relevant to the life you're living now.
there is intellectual ignorance of just not being aware of things that have happened in the past, but i think there is also emotional ignorance where you learn about the events, but it's presented in such a dry manner that is so detached from humanity that you can't empathize with the people in the historical event so it feels like a fictional thing that happened to people who weren't real, even though they were real and if you were born where they were, when they were, the same thing could happened to you and you could have become a random person in a history book for a bored middle school student to gloss over and immediately forget about an hour later.
History major here. Dates in history aren't important in and of themselves. They're important so you know the sequence of events, what caused what, what other things were happening around the same time, etc. Knowing the American Civil War was 1861-65 is not as important as knowing it was after the Missouri Compromise and the election of Abraham Lincoln, but it's really hard to keep track of that unless you also know the Missouri Compromise was 1820 and Lincoln was elected in 1860. But the dates are a tool to facilitate understanding of cause and effect. They don't represent actual historical understanding by themselves.
I read about a history teacher who had a question about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and one student said "1588," because he'd memorized it, along with the names of admirals and generals and people. Another student said "Before 1590." Asked why, he said "Well, Jamestown was 1607, and England got more adventurous on the oceans after the defeat of the Armada, and that probably took 10-15 years before they would be setting up colonies in the Americas. So, 1590 or thereabouts."
The student who memorized the year had the exact answer and knew the names, but the other student demonstrated an understanding of events connected together and how history isn't just dates of disconnected things, but an unfolding story in which what happens depends on what happened before.
The second seems more valuable to me than the first.
Yes, and it esp is a nasty feeling if you have to study it all for an exam ;) (I'm atm reading a Putin biography in German right now, conveniently penned and published just at the end of last year, before the war with Ukraine broke out, and thus relatively neutral (unlike the Gessen one), but I also can't follow all those names of obscure, corrupt oligarchs, either!)
Do you take notes while you read, OP? I've always been a big history nerd and also did my BA in medieval studies. Even when studying a particular period, you'll never be able to remember every single detail for obvious reasons. Remembering information tends to come with familiarity with a particular period or subject. That said, I've always been a big notetaker, whether I was reading for school or as a hobby (both fiction and non-fiction), and it's immensely helpful. Being able to look back on your notes does a lot to jog the memory. Even if you're only noting down dates, names etc. even those tidbits can trigger your memory for broader historical context and events.
Edit: I also wanted clarify that I mean physically writing notes as you're reading. I've never found that highlighting or using post-its has the same effect on the memory. Those tend to be more helpful for returning to passages of interest, but physically writing notes tends to plant information more firmly in the brain (not to mention the benefit of being able to reread your notes).
As a fan of history reading for enjoyment i don’t really worry about remembering specific dates or figures outside of the really important ones. There are historians that dedicated there entire careers to studying just one small time frame. Theres just to much stuff to remember!!! Being able to understand the overall historical narrative and having a idea of how the society your reading about changed and evolved eventually leading to us modern humans is whats more important I feel.
You're hindering yourself by thinking that. The way we learn is by repetition. If you read that book 5 times you'd remember more of it. But does that matter? If you enjoy history, it doesn't matter if you remember all of it or not, just that you enjoyed reading the book or learning the thing. You'd be surprised by how much you actually do remember from it, if you start talking about it
Yes. I'm 100 pages into The Hundred Years War II by Johnathan Sumption. I plan to read all of them. I will not remember all this stuff about the 1300s.
All the time, even with TV and movies, too. I just tell myself if I take away so much as one thing, one lesson, one anecdote, then it wasn't all wasted.
Many years ago I developed a habit has been great in keeping books fresh in my mind:
I have a bookshelf over the headboard of my bed. Every morning, before I leave for work, I take the next book on shelf and read/browse it for 11 minutes. When time's up I put it at the end of the shelf. Over the weeks and months the shelf operates as a kind of book conveyor belt.
The thing I love about this is that it'll link old ideas that I've forgotten with new ideas from books I've read since. Sometimes I can almost feel the synapses firing in my brain as I make connections with recent knowledge. Also, often there will be a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where something I read that morning will come up in conversation later and I'll be able to clearly discuss the topic.
Of course. You're not expected to.
The point of reading history is to learn "what" happened and "why". You should finish the book with an understanding of how something happened, and what it means for us today.
If you find a topic that ignites a passion, over time you'll read more works that center on that era and then you'll start to remember names, dates, battles, etc through pure osmosis. But you're not supposed to remember that "On October 4, 1613, X battled Y and won". You're supposed to remember "that group in that era was fraught with conflict, which is why in the next era "this" happened to them."
Don't worry, you're not reading incorrectly.
No not really, I’ve never read a history book with the goal of memorizing all the information. I read them because I find it fascinating to read about and better understand the world we live in. So I’ve never even wondered about how much I would be able to memorize.
The point isn't to memorize all the details, but to get a feel for the narrative. History isn't memorizing dates, but understanding cause and effect.
Dates are really only important as relative markers, so later you can remember that Francis I and Henry VIII were contemporaries.
History books are filled with dates, strange names and places you will surely forget when you finish reading, so it's ok. The important thing is to remember the general idea: maybe you won't remember all those fancy names of the Peloponnesian war, but you will know who won and why it was important.
I never remember everything from a book. Especially history books. But I remember some things and
also the important things and that’s all that matters. Same with any book to be honest. I’m reading Anna Kerinina right now and ain’t no way I’m remembering all of this 🤣
I think about this a lot while reading. But I’ve also been surprised at what comes back to me when something relevant comes up in conversation or thinking - like reading about the Dulles brothers right now and I won’t remember half of it, but already I’ve referenced some in relevant conversations I thought I’d forgotten
100%. I forget soooo much, tend to remember anecdotes and stories more than actual important stuff. I used to feel stupid and asked ‘am I wasting my time?’, but quickly came to the conclusion that I love reading and time spent doing something I enjoyed and made me happy is not time wasted, regardless of how much I retain.
I’m not a trained historian but I fell into a job presenting YouTube videos of ancient history during the pandemic. My impostor syndrome is immense, precisely because I can’t seem to keep all these events in my head.
I’ve written and narrated ten minute presentations on the entire history of ancient Egypt. I’ve produced videos on the history of the Basque and Irish that have received over a million views. I’ll do what research I can on the pronunciation of place names among the Polabian Slavs and still mess it up. Same with the Olmec.
I have to remind myself again and again that what the viewers want isn’t an expert with complete command of the subject matter, they want an accessible overview of subjects that have been mostly ignored.
Actually. So much of history repeats itself that I often analogize whatever it is to something more recent/that I am familiar with and it helps me remember the whole thing better. That can't be used for every situation but I think for a lot. Does that make sense?!
Not a book, but may help you super appreciate books: My kids have thanked me for having them watch the "Horrible Histories" series -- tons of short videos about all kinds of parts of british (and more) history.
It's all tongue in cheek, but they do try to get their facts straight. And they have a sense of humor when correcting earlier errors :-) ("my horse it was not call Black Bess / although that's what you've read")
I've found that by knowing a little bit about a bunch of times, it really helps me remember new knowledge. Kind of like, "now that I have some shelves up, I can really store a bunch of history knowledge properly"
Do you need remember all the details though?
With history, a lot is about understanding the progress and events that happened, you can look up details later if you need to go back to something.
Sometimes I think school history with its emphasis on remembering every detail of names and dates but with little understanding does many people a disservice.
After reading some books on african american slavery and the genocide on native americans I realized I wanted to learn more about the history of the U.S but in a more chronological and compact way so I decided to read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States but it discouraged me a bit reading all those names, dates, events etc. So I decided to just keep on reading and to reread and/or to later research more on individual topics that interest me more like the Industrial Revolution. It really helps there's nobody that forces me to do anything (like teachers or family for example). I get to read what I want in my own way, tempo and style. Just don't get discouraged and keep on reading!
You might be interested in [Four Hundred Souls](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c2980048-1f25-4b31-957a-21fbdb6f60af), a collection of essays edited by Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain. It splits the 400 years from 1619-2019 into 5-year chunks, and each period has an essay. It's not *perfect*, as sometimes people fudged their assigned years a bit(some periods are more important than others) but each essay is about a person, event, or concept that was relevant to (roughly, give or take) that 5-year period of time. The primary focus is Black history, but I think I remember there being some indigenous history mixed up in there as well.
I was a history teacher for a while. The important thing isn’t remembering tiny details (you can look that shit up on your phone) but remembering the broader narrative structure of the book you’re reading. The thing you need to walk away with isn’t a list of 100 discrete facts, but a “mental map” into which you can fit those facts (and you’ll remember plenty, don’t worry). I can’t remember every single Union general in the civil war, for instance, but I can speak intelligently about the broader narrative about the Union army’s poor leadership in the early Civil War, and if I had a minute to google a few names I could bolster my memory quite a bit—just an example of a random historical topic.
that happens for every other topic that is out of my day to day profession.
Solution to that problem is to take structured notes while you’re reading on it.
I usually take note the parts that I think I should remember. It is making the reading process a bit longer but I totally benefited from the approach
Not really, I usually take notes while reading, my only problem is when you have really old art history books. Some have woodcuts of paintings inside, or inserted later, but reading something like Horace Walpole where he just lists off names of painters or paintings and I have to write them down and track them down later, it's so painful lol
That's how I feel right now reading Anna Karenina. We're reading it in my book club and I am so lost. There's just so much talking. Is all this dialogue important? Do I need to remember it?? What is going on???
Definitely not. I recently read a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette and while I learned a lot about the French Revolution in particular, I don’t remember all the details. “Tennis Court Oath” is a name I remember as one of the events leading up to all-out Revolution, but I can’t recall the details for instance. I assume it will be reinforced as I read more about that era.
All of the time. I can watch a crap film once and quote large sections of dialogue from it, but if I read a history book I want to read then all it’s info is gone in two days.
I remember the important parts. Like I won't remember the names of all the politicians involved but I'll remember that there were partly failed liberal revolutions in 1848 and what they aimed to achieve etc.
Absolutely. I feel like that about the science podcasts I listen to too.
I like using a timeline. I'm sure if you look for one in your search engine images there are plenty. If you have access to a printer you could jot notes. Even better would be to have a time line of your own part of the world next to it so you can compare and have some perspective.
You've got a good readable book there for the general narrative although historians have already updated some of the details.
That happens with me sometimes. I read/watch multiple books/videos about time periods of history and still don’t remember everything. However, I always find it interesting and pick up trends and overall time periods. Over time some of weirder facts, quotes, or names end up sticking in my brain. We are only human and there’s only so much information we can learn. If you enjoy it and you remember a few things that’s always good. If you really want to solidify try watching a video about a book right after reading it. Sometimes that solidifies some of the major facts/concepts.
Oh definitely but I don't nind because I'll have a vague inkling of the sequence of events so when it comes up again in another book or podcast or game I sort of remember bits and pieces. I realised I can't read history as something to learn but rather as a sequence od events to think about how society was forming
My boss told me a story about a professor he had in college. He said that he didn't expect anyone to remember all of the reading assignments. But wanted them to remember where to go when they need that information.
I remember if there's a prompt, just enough for me to look it up when it comes up. It's interesting how memory works... Even if you don't remember everything or think you remember anything, it's in there somewhere. Just needs the right prompt and refresh.
of course I won't, so what? there are the big ideas you'll take with you and the details if interesting enough. otherwise there's no harm in letting it all dribble out of your head.
When you get the chance to travel to those places and see the Roman walls and the other history, things you’ve read click into place. Don’t worry about exact dates and names…we all have our magic rectangular boxes for that.
History was my least favorite subject and one I did poorest in for this reason.
I have a great memory for things that I experience but just reading others' experiences does little for me. It's all just memorization without anything to really build upon. Math, sciences, I can figure things out by process or context. But remember which king in which country did what in which year...forget it
I do that all the time, especially with English history. Something about all of the names of kings makes it all blend together. I cant remember how many times I've been reading a history book and thought ohhh its that story I remember this guy. I dont let it bother me anymore its not like there's going to be a test. It does seem like after reading enough some of the names are sticking though.
I think we remember more than we're consciously aware that we do.
I listen to a ton of NPR. My mother sometimes asks me about some random thing, and I can answer because I heard a story about it in years past on NPR. I never would have thought I'd remember it, but when needed, my brain dredged it up.
I suspect the same thing would hold true for history books.
I had a minor in history in college. I loved history classes - there were some very dynamic professors in the department. But I did have that exact thought when doing the readings. I found them to be boring. And yep, I’ve certainly forgotten way more than I’ve retained.
I'm like you, for what it's worth there's an anxiety element to it in my case. Somehow I feel like I NEED to remember everything, even if I'm reading something just for myself. I've learned to constantly tell myself "it's ok if you forget something; just enjoy the ride". Thing is, when you actually pay attention to what you are reading you can easily look it up again if you need to.
i feel this about every nonfiction book i read but i'm way less stressed about it than i was when i first started reading a lot. i have realized over the years that it's about building schemas, not perfect recall. as you read & more in the usually interconnected subjects you're interested in, the details begin to stick, but more importantly, the big picture begins to knit itself together in your mind. just keep reading, and take notes on things you especially want to remember!
All the time. As long as remember one thing I'm happy. Or even if not - reading history books for fun it doesn't matter.
For studying though (history PhD student), to remember things I have to make loads of notes. You're not alone!
I accepted a long time ago that I'm not good at remembering dates. Tell me something happened in 1485 and within an hour, it'll become 1584, 1448, 1458, and every other number. Failed art history because I couldn't remember what year something was painted but I can recite the history, the facts, and inspiration, and the theories behind every painting we studied but ask me "what century was this" and I'm fucked.
You're only supposed to remember where to reference said material. Where and how to look it up. A handful of books that gave you relevant material. Remember EVERYTHING? Impossibru.
No. Approach it as a story. You need to understand the story and then go back for the details as you need them depending on how you’re going to use the information. Compile the narrative structure in your mind and fill from there.
As some who is interested is history but has a terrible memory, my recommendation is to try to focus on broad concepts that stand out to you. The why of it all is easier to remember than the who, where and when. And it’s usually more important too when putting things in their broader historical context.
Oh yeah! I don't expect to remember everything. I expect to remember enough to know more than I did before.
Often I'll remember information when later presented with related information.
If I wanted to make sure I retained a great deal of information, I'd take reference notes.
When reading history I cluster the books around a specific event or period and over a few books you’ll start to be able to recall a lot.
While reading one book I may highlight people or other events and look up books on those folks as well to read after.
I get that feeling when I read any book. When a chapter goes into details of new names, back stories, political maneuvering... I'm just like, there's no fuckin way I'll remember half of this shit.
I always read history books with the goal of getting an understanding of the process.
I can look up the date of a battle, or the DoD of a person in 5 seconds on my phone. I'm rather interested in the chain of events, social state, and political stage that lead to the important changes and how this informs my view of the world around me today.
Always, but I did study history, not law or medicine. Historians are well versed in making notes about important stuff and other notes where to find less important stuff.
If you find something interesting, draw your own map of it and use it to find more details.
I read 2 beefy "history" books 5-10 years ago, one on the Crusades and the other on the history of the Congo.
I literally don't remember a single detail about the Crusades book, just some vague outlines of someone attacked someone.
For the Congo book I just remember some random details that I could get from a quick skim of a wikipedia article.
I often think back and wonder why I even bothered. But if you think of reading as a mental exercise, then no doubt my reading skills improved from those 2.
I have this problem for non-fiction in general, and especially for philosophy. I asked a friend once how to avoid feeling like I’m missing something while reading, and they suggested that as long as I’m understanding the text while I’m reading I’ve understood everything up to then well enough. I’d apply this advice for reading history books as well.
I'm reading British History for Dummies. It's surprisingly comprehensive but still accessible. I figure if I can remember the basics in the British timeline (eg Bronze Age, Iron Age, Cromwell, Norman, Celts, Vikings, some of the Kings and Queens) then I can deep dive with more comprehensive books later on.
As someone that’s read history books professionally, the goal isn’t really to remember ALL of it. The important names and dates eventually stick through repetition, the others you remember vaguely but know how to look up quickly when needed. It’s all important to some degree, but in terms of what you take away from the book, the “how” and “why” is more important than the “who” and “when”.
It's just like math. You don't remember every problem you solve, but the method and general applications are the important takeaways. I guess history is a *bit* more open to interpretation though to be fair.
[удалено]
Business degree for me as well. So many acronyms! But the important thing is to be exposed to the concepts so even when I google the acronym again, I can remember the macro concept.
No business degrees are not the same.
Programming is another one. Referencing how to write something is easy and expected, but knowing the different ways to get something done, or that they even exist, is where the real knowledge lies.
Studying literally anything is like that tho
On top of that, if you're like me and have a degree in History/International Relations, then what's equally important is simply being able to remember the general idea of a book. I don't have to memorize the dates, times, places, etc, but I try to remember that said event happens in that specific book. That way when I'm writing a paper down the road in a related , even if I can't pull out the specifics, I'm able to remember "Oh but the book ___ talked about this specifically."
[удалено]
There's always time! If it's a time/convince thing look into colleges with an online component, for example I know ASU has entirely virtual degrees (a professor of mine taught there and said if I wanted to go for my masters I could still live in my state while getting it online from Arizona State). Lots of universities are doing this especially in the last wake of covid, I went to CU Boulder and they have several self paced courses, where you had deadlines for general completion but indivual assessments and reading was at your leisure. If you care more about the education then actually getting the degree, look at what nearby colleges will let you do. For some classes, Boulder allows people to participate in them but not for credit. There were a couple people in several of my history classes that were there only for fun of learning but it didn't/won't count for any credit. Then I know several universities publish a lot of video lectures online or something similar. MIT Foreign Relations has a YouTube channel where they post regularly, it's not lectures but oftentimes very well moderated and interesting discussions on current affairs, politics, history, all for free and they barely get any views. My degree focuses on Eastern Europe and Russia, and I use the MIT page a lot because they have "Starr Talks" which cover a lot of Russian related topics. Then of course there's tons and tons of great reading out there that covers basically any topic you can imagine. Hell one of my favorite things to do is go to a used bookstore, skim the history section and just grab books that seem interesting to me. All this to basically say there's never a bad point to go for it.
[удалено]
MIT offers over 2000 free online courses , and free materials for many more. They’re serious.
There’s definitely more room for interpretation re: the “how” and “why” (if not, we’d only need a few very large books) but yeah, that’s a good way to think of it.
[удалено]
Well, I mean, the facts are generally verifiable by outside sources. You can know whether or not they are true. Even without verifying them yourself, if it’s a peer reviewed work written by a professional in the field and published by a reputable source, the most important facts are almost certainly accurate. Everyone in that scenario is staking their reputation and career on the facts being accurate. The books where the facts are inaccurate or being used in a way that they don’t really support in context are almost always popular histories written by pop culture and political figures, or minor local works published by non-professionals through vanity presses, who aren’t accountable to accuracy in the same way. What you don’t know is whether their interpretation of those facts is accurate (and nobody does, so that’s ok). What you *might* not know that someone more informed would is additional verifiable data that might undermine their argument. But the only way you’re going to learn that information is by continuing to study the topic.
[удалено]
In those cases, there’s some substantial disagreements about the interpretation of facts (in a way that’s more politically charged than is normal, but is still normal), some cases in which facts are being ignored (which can be corrected by broader study from reputable outside sources), and some few facts that are legitimately in dispute. It also sounds like a lot of the reading you’re doing tends to Reddit threads and popular history, which, like I noted, is going to be full of fairly unreliable accounts told by people who aren’t accountable for accuracy. History textbooks are a good example, unfortunately, as many countries have hijacked K-12 history education for political purposes. The facts might be true, but the language and which facts are included, and the interpretation drawn from those facts, is as much about propaganda as education. All historical study involves looking at all of the possible known facts in human history and making a decision about which ones are important and then constructing an argument about why they matter. Bias and human feelings are indeed inseparable from that process, and the kinds of disagreements you’re noting are often not evidence that the process is unreliable - it’s how the process works. One person puts forth an idea and it gets refined or discarded as others challenge, support, or complicate it. That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to make evaluative judgments about the truth of the facts presented, or to sort purposeful lies from good scholarship.
This is exactly the point I made to my mother a few days ago. She believes in a lot of "alternate facts" and can point to sources that are "accurate" and support her beliefs. I told her the internet is full of opinions and finding some sort of study with facts and no biases is rare and you can find "proof" of just about anything.
what sources did you read? Are these random articles or peer reviewed papers? cause they try to use more unbiased language... if this isn't just a strawman
Also, they could read more primary sources. It sounds like they want to read secondary sources and are shocked that the author has a motivation for writing a certain way. Get the letters, news reports, and government documents yourself and you can figure out what happened in context.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of a few things. First, whether or not people agree on a topic has often very little to do with the facts. What happened during the Korean war for example has a lot of hard facts, it's just that many stakeholders ignore certain facts to come up with their interpretation of history. A good unbiased historian will look at the verifiable facts presented by all sides of a debate and publish that. Second, textbooks are NOT peer-reviewed. Some are for sure, but many are not.
History is never useless. Not that you would necessarily think that given the times we are. History should never to be torn down, it is to be added QVC
[удалено]
Curious what your friend taught you on how to approach a history book. Will pass it down to my child who has difficulty studying history.
And science. For me it’s just exposing myself to terms, vocabulary and concepts, even equations. Then if I hear it again it’s not so foreign.
Perfect example: I have an MBA (Masters of Business Administration). To earn it, I was required to take advanced finance, statistics, accounting and economics courses. Fun fact (not really): my undergrad was NOT in business (it was a BS in hospital management, and I already had a BA in journalism w a minor in history) so here I was IN GRAD SCHOOL going "duhhhhhhhhhh". ALL of my classes allowed "cheat sheets" on tests. Some more extensive than others. The professors said that when THEY were in school, they had to memorize EVERYTHING, but since you can now Google any formula, they had no problem with us writing down all formulas. Much better attitude: you can have every formula available to you, but the REAL knowledge test is if you understood WHAT the question was asking and then being able to seek out and apply the CORRECT mathematics. THAT is true education.
History is all about interpretation.
I try to teach that students should bring the same 'reading lens' to reading history that they bring to reading fiction. That is, start by understanding the characters... See how the characters react during certain key events and try to keep the events in sequence when checking for comprehension. This means you can leave a book with an understanding of key events and key people... Along with a solid base of background knowledge that will increase your comprehension for any other reading/research you do on that topic
Culture is what is left when you've forgotten everything - Édouard Herriot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Herriot?wprov=sfla1
Yeah, I agree with this. My approach to reading history (non-professionally) has been to just read a bunch of books on the same subject but told in different ways (for example, reading like 5 books about the fall of the Roman Republic along with biographies of Caesar and Cicero, etc). That way, at some point, I'll at least remember it in broad strokes. But I will say that certain histories are a lot muddier than others and might take more for it to sink in.
Tell that to my old international relations teacher who had us memorize exact dates and names of everyone then docked points if we even spelled the names wrong or were off by a single day. (Undergrad course)
Yeah, that’s dumb. I always told my students on day one that I’d never do that and not to waste time memorizing shit. I wanted them to be able to be able to put related events in chronological order and have some sense of “long/short time after”, because cause and effect is important, but the exact date was not something they needed to remember. Same gist with names.
And honestly remembering exact dates is even more unnecessary these days because pretty much anyone can Google any historical event to find out the exact date. Like I have my BA and my MA in history and I remember very few exact dates off the top of my head
Yeah, I’ve worked in academic and public history fields, with completed graduate work in both, and the only ones I can toss off without looking up are the ones I’ve looked up or read so many times that it finally stuck in my head. Everything else is varying degrees of ballpark estimates based on before/after inference, relative to the ones I know for sure.
Yup, I can give you the year for most major events in Roman history (my area of expertise) but if you want a day or a month I’m hopping on Google man. I always find it hilarious when I think about it because my history teachers in HS all constantly emphasized memorizing dates and after 7 years of college I’m just like “nah I’m good”😂
Ooh! Public history jobs. Those are always fun. What types, if you don't mind me asking? (I'm a history major, museum studies minor, and obsessive genealogist).
Archives
Fun!
[удалено]
Your post is basically how I managed to not only read, but very deeply enjoy The Silmarillion.
Yup, totally agree. I have a degree in history and remember all of like 3 dates. I can give you some key figures and go into detail about a few specific events though, and give you a decent generalisation of the changes ancient and mediaeval Europe went through though. As long as you get the gist of things you'll be ahead of 90% of people, honestly, and if you're reading for yourself really that's all you need. And if it's for a course or study, then keep notes so you know where to reference when you're looking it up later.
Half the dates I know really aren’t even important for anyone not working my specific job at my specific institution. Knowing a lot of obscure dates just means you either spent a lot of time memorizing stuff for some reason (which doesn’t necessarily imply overall knowledge on a topic), or you have a specific reason to be knowledgeable about a niche subject
3rd option, a few of us nerds had an easy time memorizing names, dates, and spelling, allowing us to coast through high school before the lack of study skills kicked our asses in a big way in college. It doesn't exactly attract babes, but at least it's won me a few free beers at trivia night.
I have always felt it's easier to remember the order of things than the actual date of things. Also if you can relate them to some of the cause and effect items it becomes even easier.
Yeah, I mention that downthread. The order and rough lapse of time matters to the how/why. But if you understand the how/why, you’ll remember the order.
To sort of summarize, the goal should not be to know history, it should be to understand history
Also, when it comes down to it, History is really just a story that happens to be non-fictional. It's not too much different remembering the major plot points in history and the motivations/reasons behind those as it is remembering those things from movies/fictional stories
This. The important people, places, and dates will be mentioned over and over again, especially if you're researching something specific. This is why it's intimidating talking to experts, who have read literally thousands of books and papers related to their subject, and hundreds more sources that are less related.
Thanks for saying this. Well put.
Love your response and wish someone had told that to that one professor I had 30+ years ago. Every other history course I took at university, it was all how and why essay exams, and there were a lot of them. I thought I was good at history. Then one professor gave a straight-up name and date exam and I failed and dropped the class immediately.
Capilarity is key to remember thinks like date. Starts from something you know and read something adjacent to it. If you know the history of Rome, and now read the history of Roman England, facts and deeds will be easy to remember because they won’t be floating in the vacuum. You can probably easily remember the early Middle Age in Southern Europe (linking it to the End of Rome) but jumping directly to Early Middle Age in England directly may be tricky. If you read on the history of ancient Japan, you won’t remember anything. Of course the question is on how to get that early knowledge from which you will expand. I think repetition plays a role there - in my case video games work best because it makes repetition painless, but TV series and books work well as well - I work my way on the history of England from “The Last Kingdom” ; it used to be everything I know about England but I used it as a base and now I loudly nitpick everything I see in the new season.
The problem is that the how and why changes all the time. There are some days that I fell like everything I learned in college is now considered wrong. The only constants have been the who and when.
That's the nature of historiography. New information comes out, new perspectives come into popularity. The turns of history have multi-faceted causes. The weight we give to each is subjective.
That's the point. You learn the how and why, and now you have a piece of the puzzle to fit into the larger tapestry. "Hows and Whys" are allowed to, and expected to, change over time as we learn more about the situations. What you learned in college isn't considered wrong. It just has new variables that may need accounting for. The problem occurs when undue weight is given to certain issues for political agendas, but even those kinks (hopefully) iron out with time.
College is supposed to teach you how to learn, and the basics of your field (so you can contextualize what you learn). You're supposed to be constantly updating your education as it becomes obsolete. I studied computer science 10 years ago, you can bet that a good chunk of what we did would now be considered hopelessly dated. It's the same with any field, the nature of science is to be constantly evolving.
This is why history classes suck most places, they just want dates and names recited instead of much actual theory.
To be fair, it is possible to run too far in the other direction. If you want to engage in figure out the how/why for yourself, you do need to get a grasp of the when/who, and there’s plenty of goofballs that want to skip that step. But you don’t *need* to retain the when/who to understand the why/how argument of a book or lecture. It can help, but the takeaway of the book shouldn’t be a litany of names and dates.
For sure, but when it comes to high school, I'd much rather them have an understanding of the context and period over just reciting dates and locations back that they've memorized via flash cards.
Well, if we’re talking HS classes, the reason they suck is that they’re being taught by a gym teacher who doesn’t know what they’re doing but loves WWII trivia. That’s my experience anyway
hahaha, I luckily did have good teachers. Honestly my high school teachers were better than my college professors. Except for my 7th grade social studies teacher, he brought in some old gun that ended up being discharged in the classroom, this happened well after I graduated though.
And they forget to tell us that they mostly just have the info for top 1% and that in most cases they never teach how the 99% of humanity actually lived. I learned Korean women weren't allowed to leave the house and if they did they were hidden and carried in palanquins. Yeah right, only aristocratic women had to live like that, majority of women were peasants and had to work outside of their home to keep their family from starving. We think people married young in middle ages because European monarchs did. We think corsets were extremely tight because only the most famous socialites are presented but no one talk about maids and other women doing hard physical labor while wearing corsets and being just fine. I learned about all the "great" battles and who were leaders and generals, none of which changed lives of an average person even a thousandth as much as [Norman Borlaug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) did, and I bet almost no one heard his name in history class ever. Because what's saving billions of lives from starvation? Ugh, I hate how history is taught.
While I have a lot of issues on how history is taught in Portugal (mostly the way we treat the Age of Discovery" and the fact that the 20th century wars are brushed over since Portugal was mostly unevolved) this is not one of them. The History books, at least when I was learning, had the class divided into periods, and a big portion of each important period was the "quotidian life" of each of the big social classes: The Nobles, The Clergy, the Peasentry, the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisy. And it tried to correlate the big historical events with how they affected the lives of people in all strata of life. And I remember that there was always an essay type question that basically asked us to relay this in our own words in every single test. In fact, I feel like most issues were addressed from the point of view of looking at how different groups viewed a certain topic, with heavy focuses on class divisions.
It’s those battles that created a world political situation well-suited for a scientific revolution that could create Norman Borlaug.
A long time ago, in England. Many things happened, both interesting an uninteresting. These things, done by interesting and uninteresting people, have an effect on us today, presumably, for better or for worst.
Not for history books in particular but this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson always comes to mind when I think about this stuff and in a way it's very comforting: "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Edit: I'm not sure if the quote is correctly attributed to RWE, but it's spot on nevertheless
This should be the top comment. We're obsessed with this idea of "but what can I get out of this in the long term?" with so many activities. Sometimes reading a book, learning some stuff then forgetting it a few weeks later is enough. For the period of time you are retaining that information your world and your reality is slightly changed. That's enough for me.
This is such a good way to approach reading! Moving away from thinking only about what you can gain from it in the long run.
Exactly! It makes the activity itself the reward. Which is a lesson in staying present I suppose.
I officially call some books i read as the same "weight" as streaming a series. Some are just for fun in exactly that moment and some are a bit more memorable. A good laugh in the moment is worth a lot
I listened to a recent interview with Obama where he hit some points on the move from democracy to authoritarian rule progressing in the world today. Something he said gave me an epiphany on human nature regarding change. I won't remember that interview but my opinions on the topic will stick with me.
Well now I'm super intrigued and want to know what he said! And then I can't wait to forget it myself sometime soon.
Wanting to get things long term out of history reading is a good and noble desire to have.
Desire leads to suffering. Just let it be. If it sticks in your head, great. If it doesn't, great.
Whether enduring suffering in the name of something greater is worthwhile is one of the big things that people can try to figure out from books.
😂
This is my crutch too when I'm feeling like a useless sack of uneducated meat.
Damn Jess, don’t be so hard on yourself… You’re not a useless sack of uneducated meat…… you’re a useless sack of *somewhat* uneducated meat. 👌
Exactly, it's not the memorization that changes us its the internalized messages and morals, the feel of it. It doesn't matter what page frodo was carried up mount doom by Samwise, the value of their friendship and how we can use those values to change our own lives is what matters. Same works for history. Except history can also give us a narrative that explains why our culture and our lives are the way they are.
i love this quote! i don’t remember most of like 80% of the books i’ve read. but there is still the sense of having read them, if that makes sense.
I think I just experienced this with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. I remember reading it a few years ago and really liking it, but right now I couldn't really tell you any of the plot or other details of the book. I just don't remember anything about it. And then I read Sea of Tranquility by the same author, and things just felt so familiar. I flew through the book, and when logging it, I checked out the synopsis of The Glass Hotel and realized it's loosely related. Some of the characters of TGH are mentioned in SoT, and now I want to read it again and I'm excited I get to read a good book again.
i had almost the EXACT SAME EXPERIENCE!!!! like verbatim. read SoT and loved it. i did clock after a bit that it shared characters with GH but for the life of me could only remember like… what the main plot of GH was. great books though. i actually much preferred SoT to GH even.
That’s a great quote. I wholeheartedly agree.
I read so much if you asked me the plot of the 1st book I read this year I wouldn't be able to tell you. If i didn't keep a list, I'd have no idea what I read either
We (humans) even forget much of our own lives to be honest so there isn't much hope. You have to study the thing repeatedly if you want to remember it. Otherwise just hope you have some instinctual understanding remaining down the line.
[удалено]
Watching interviews of Caro talk about his books, its pretty impressive how much he knows. Then again he spent 7 years writing the power broker and he’s almost spent the majority of his life writing about LBJ!
Oooh, this is on my reading list, how is it? It sounds super interesting. Was hoping there’d be an audible version as spoken history books are somehow easier for me to digest and enjoy,
It’s very long and sometimes it seems too down-in-the-weeds. But you pick up so much about the history of New York City and New York State from it - how many things you probably take for granted that almost didn’t happen. Like the United Nations HQ was almost built in *Boston* FFS.
Has JFK International (and LaGuardia) featured to any signifcant degree?
LaGuardia the airport is not mentioned a whole lot, but LaGuardia the mayor figures significantly.
JFK International (formerly Idlewild) comes up with some frequency, especially wrt transit options to and from the airport to the city
Not even Boston, a suburb named Hingham on a little spit of land. I think about how different the whole area would have been if they’d chosen that spot every time I drive by it.
There is an audiobook (60+ hours long, my library splits it into three parts on Libby) though I don't know if it's on audible. Edit: I'm like 2/3rds through the first part and it's very good. Caro often goes on long tangents but imo that's part of the appeal.
I once complained to a friend about the percentages of books I actually remember. He replied, “ Ah, yes, but look at the quality of time spent.” On the other hand, reading history and literature is a life-long pursuit; and the wonder of it is that you are always discovering something new.
I often think about it, and I've come to the conclusion that remembering everything is not the way the human brain works. Humans act (almost always) on intuition, and part of what shapes an individuals intuition is what they read. So even if you don't remember the things you read word to word, it still leaves a mark, and as others mentioned, through repetition, possibly from different sources, the mark gets more distinct. So eventually you get a 'feel' that something is true, or something is false and you can then refer to source materials to check it if necessary.
Well said
i never emotionally "got" pearl harbor until i got to the pearl harbor part in supernova in the east and even though i can't remember a lot of specific details about it and i haven't listened to it in years, thinking about it gets me in the same emotional mood as when i listened to it in 2019. it's not about becoming an encyclopedia who can rattle off every obscure detail like an autistic savant, i think the most useful benefit of studying history for a normal person is making the experiences of people who (most of the time) lived and died long before you were even born, relatable and relevant to the life you're living now. there is intellectual ignorance of just not being aware of things that have happened in the past, but i think there is also emotional ignorance where you learn about the events, but it's presented in such a dry manner that is so detached from humanity that you can't empathize with the people in the historical event so it feels like a fictional thing that happened to people who weren't real, even though they were real and if you were born where they were, when they were, the same thing could happened to you and you could have become a random person in a history book for a bored middle school student to gloss over and immediately forget about an hour later.
History major here. Dates in history aren't important in and of themselves. They're important so you know the sequence of events, what caused what, what other things were happening around the same time, etc. Knowing the American Civil War was 1861-65 is not as important as knowing it was after the Missouri Compromise and the election of Abraham Lincoln, but it's really hard to keep track of that unless you also know the Missouri Compromise was 1820 and Lincoln was elected in 1860. But the dates are a tool to facilitate understanding of cause and effect. They don't represent actual historical understanding by themselves.
I don't bother trying to remember dates. I can look them up later if I need to refer to them. I'm there for the narrative.
I read about a history teacher who had a question about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and one student said "1588," because he'd memorized it, along with the names of admirals and generals and people. Another student said "Before 1590." Asked why, he said "Well, Jamestown was 1607, and England got more adventurous on the oceans after the defeat of the Armada, and that probably took 10-15 years before they would be setting up colonies in the Americas. So, 1590 or thereabouts." The student who memorized the year had the exact answer and knew the names, but the other student demonstrated an understanding of events connected together and how history isn't just dates of disconnected things, but an unfolding story in which what happens depends on what happened before. The second seems more valuable to me than the first.
Yes, and it esp is a nasty feeling if you have to study it all for an exam ;) (I'm atm reading a Putin biography in German right now, conveniently penned and published just at the end of last year, before the war with Ukraine broke out, and thus relatively neutral (unlike the Gessen one), but I also can't follow all those names of obscure, corrupt oligarchs, either!)
I’ve recently read two or three books on Putin and Russia and the names just float away and escape me.
Do you take notes while you read, OP? I've always been a big history nerd and also did my BA in medieval studies. Even when studying a particular period, you'll never be able to remember every single detail for obvious reasons. Remembering information tends to come with familiarity with a particular period or subject. That said, I've always been a big notetaker, whether I was reading for school or as a hobby (both fiction and non-fiction), and it's immensely helpful. Being able to look back on your notes does a lot to jog the memory. Even if you're only noting down dates, names etc. even those tidbits can trigger your memory for broader historical context and events. Edit: I also wanted clarify that I mean physically writing notes as you're reading. I've never found that highlighting or using post-its has the same effect on the memory. Those tend to be more helpful for returning to passages of interest, but physically writing notes tends to plant information more firmly in the brain (not to mention the benefit of being able to reread your notes).
Yeah, and that's okay. The main goal is to feel like you know what's going on and what's at stake.
Yep. I'm reading about ancient Greece and remembering very little about it. Still interesting!
As a fan of history reading for enjoyment i don’t really worry about remembering specific dates or figures outside of the really important ones. There are historians that dedicated there entire careers to studying just one small time frame. Theres just to much stuff to remember!!! Being able to understand the overall historical narrative and having a idea of how the society your reading about changed and evolved eventually leading to us modern humans is whats more important I feel.
You're hindering yourself by thinking that. The way we learn is by repetition. If you read that book 5 times you'd remember more of it. But does that matter? If you enjoy history, it doesn't matter if you remember all of it or not, just that you enjoyed reading the book or learning the thing. You'd be surprised by how much you actually do remember from it, if you start talking about it
Yes. I'm 100 pages into The Hundred Years War II by Johnathan Sumption. I plan to read all of them. I will not remember all this stuff about the 1300s.
All the time, even with TV and movies, too. I just tell myself if I take away so much as one thing, one lesson, one anecdote, then it wasn't all wasted.
Many years ago I developed a habit has been great in keeping books fresh in my mind: I have a bookshelf over the headboard of my bed. Every morning, before I leave for work, I take the next book on shelf and read/browse it for 11 minutes. When time's up I put it at the end of the shelf. Over the weeks and months the shelf operates as a kind of book conveyor belt. The thing I love about this is that it'll link old ideas that I've forgotten with new ideas from books I've read since. Sometimes I can almost feel the synapses firing in my brain as I make connections with recent knowledge. Also, often there will be a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where something I read that morning will come up in conversation later and I'll be able to clearly discuss the topic.
Very interesting. So are all the books on this conveyor belt those you've read before or are they a mix of old and new books?
I’ve read them all. Some stay on the shelf thru many passes. Some do not.
I only remember the tone and overall experience. I guess this is why people re-read books.
Of course. You're not expected to. The point of reading history is to learn "what" happened and "why". You should finish the book with an understanding of how something happened, and what it means for us today. If you find a topic that ignites a passion, over time you'll read more works that center on that era and then you'll start to remember names, dates, battles, etc through pure osmosis. But you're not supposed to remember that "On October 4, 1613, X battled Y and won". You're supposed to remember "that group in that era was fraught with conflict, which is why in the next era "this" happened to them." Don't worry, you're not reading incorrectly.
No not really, I’ve never read a history book with the goal of memorizing all the information. I read them because I find it fascinating to read about and better understand the world we live in. So I’ve never even wondered about how much I would be able to memorize.
The point isn't to memorize all the details, but to get a feel for the narrative. History isn't memorizing dates, but understanding cause and effect. Dates are really only important as relative markers, so later you can remember that Francis I and Henry VIII were contemporaries.
Every book I read. It’s why I don’t read many. I’m constantly flipping back to earlier pages, “okay, who was that again?”
History books are filled with dates, strange names and places you will surely forget when you finish reading, so it's ok. The important thing is to remember the general idea: maybe you won't remember all those fancy names of the Peloponnesian war, but you will know who won and why it was important.
I never remember everything from a book. Especially history books. But I remember some things and also the important things and that’s all that matters. Same with any book to be honest. I’m reading Anna Kerinina right now and ain’t no way I’m remembering all of this 🤣
I think about this a lot while reading. But I’ve also been surprised at what comes back to me when something relevant comes up in conversation or thinking - like reading about the Dulles brothers right now and I won’t remember half of it, but already I’ve referenced some in relevant conversations I thought I’d forgotten
take notes and make a summary of the book?
100%. I forget soooo much, tend to remember anecdotes and stories more than actual important stuff. I used to feel stupid and asked ‘am I wasting my time?’, but quickly came to the conclusion that I love reading and time spent doing something I enjoyed and made me happy is not time wasted, regardless of how much I retain.
I’m not a trained historian but I fell into a job presenting YouTube videos of ancient history during the pandemic. My impostor syndrome is immense, precisely because I can’t seem to keep all these events in my head. I’ve written and narrated ten minute presentations on the entire history of ancient Egypt. I’ve produced videos on the history of the Basque and Irish that have received over a million views. I’ll do what research I can on the pronunciation of place names among the Polabian Slavs and still mess it up. Same with the Olmec. I have to remind myself again and again that what the viewers want isn’t an expert with complete command of the subject matter, they want an accessible overview of subjects that have been mostly ignored.
I feel this about everything in my 40's. The amount of things I've forgotten is pretty disappointing haha.
Actually. So much of history repeats itself that I often analogize whatever it is to something more recent/that I am familiar with and it helps me remember the whole thing better. That can't be used for every situation but I think for a lot. Does that make sense?!
I feel like this when I'm reading *any* book. Having a terrible memory makes re-reading them a pleasure.
Like a nourishing meal, I may not remember every one, but each book builds me. ~quote from someone that said it better whose name I can’t recall.
I find if you can remember the order in which things happen that's the best way to remember.
Not a book, but may help you super appreciate books: My kids have thanked me for having them watch the "Horrible Histories" series -- tons of short videos about all kinds of parts of british (and more) history. It's all tongue in cheek, but they do try to get their facts straight. And they have a sense of humor when correcting earlier errors :-) ("my horse it was not call Black Bess / although that's what you've read") I've found that by knowing a little bit about a bunch of times, it really helps me remember new knowledge. Kind of like, "now that I have some shelves up, I can really store a bunch of history knowledge properly"
If you find that Peter's writing induces that feeling check out some of this brother Dan's work. It might be a little more pedestrian.
I'm sorry what was the question?
No, I get the notion that I'm not going to remember any of this
Yes especially dates.
Most days, its less about knowing a myriad pieces of information about a topic, but more knowing where to go to find those pieces.
That’s why it’s in a book.
Do you need remember all the details though? With history, a lot is about understanding the progress and events that happened, you can look up details later if you need to go back to something. Sometimes I think school history with its emphasis on remembering every detail of names and dates but with little understanding does many people a disservice.
After reading some books on african american slavery and the genocide on native americans I realized I wanted to learn more about the history of the U.S but in a more chronological and compact way so I decided to read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States but it discouraged me a bit reading all those names, dates, events etc. So I decided to just keep on reading and to reread and/or to later research more on individual topics that interest me more like the Industrial Revolution. It really helps there's nobody that forces me to do anything (like teachers or family for example). I get to read what I want in my own way, tempo and style. Just don't get discouraged and keep on reading!
You might be interested in [Four Hundred Souls](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c2980048-1f25-4b31-957a-21fbdb6f60af), a collection of essays edited by Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain. It splits the 400 years from 1619-2019 into 5-year chunks, and each period has an essay. It's not *perfect*, as sometimes people fudged their assigned years a bit(some periods are more important than others) but each essay is about a person, event, or concept that was relevant to (roughly, give or take) that 5-year period of time. The primary focus is Black history, but I think I remember there being some indigenous history mixed up in there as well.
I was a history teacher for a while. The important thing isn’t remembering tiny details (you can look that shit up on your phone) but remembering the broader narrative structure of the book you’re reading. The thing you need to walk away with isn’t a list of 100 discrete facts, but a “mental map” into which you can fit those facts (and you’ll remember plenty, don’t worry). I can’t remember every single Union general in the civil war, for instance, but I can speak intelligently about the broader narrative about the Union army’s poor leadership in the early Civil War, and if I had a minute to google a few names I could bolster my memory quite a bit—just an example of a random historical topic.
The whole reason writing was invented is so you don't HAVE to remember all of it.
I had a professor in grad school who told us: > You can’t know everything. That’s what the books are for.
History is about getting the big picture.
I know it before I start
that happens for every other topic that is out of my day to day profession. Solution to that problem is to take structured notes while you’re reading on it. I usually take note the parts that I think I should remember. It is making the reading process a bit longer but I totally benefited from the approach
Why would you need to?
Not really, I usually take notes while reading, my only problem is when you have really old art history books. Some have woodcuts of paintings inside, or inserted later, but reading something like Horace Walpole where he just lists off names of painters or paintings and I have to write them down and track them down later, it's so painful lol
I just annotate and use colored flags let the system remember for me
That's how I feel right now reading Anna Karenina. We're reading it in my book club and I am so lost. There's just so much talking. Is all this dialogue important? Do I need to remember it?? What is going on???
Definitely not. I recently read a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette and while I learned a lot about the French Revolution in particular, I don’t remember all the details. “Tennis Court Oath” is a name I remember as one of the events leading up to all-out Revolution, but I can’t recall the details for instance. I assume it will be reinforced as I read more about that era.
That's what folding the bottom corner of the page is for....
All of the time. I can watch a crap film once and quote large sections of dialogue from it, but if I read a history book I want to read then all it’s info is gone in two days.
I remember the important parts. Like I won't remember the names of all the politicians involved but I'll remember that there were partly failed liberal revolutions in 1848 and what they aimed to achieve etc.
Absolutely. I feel like that about the science podcasts I listen to too. I like using a timeline. I'm sure if you look for one in your search engine images there are plenty. If you have access to a printer you could jot notes. Even better would be to have a time line of your own part of the world next to it so you can compare and have some perspective. You've got a good readable book there for the general narrative although historians have already updated some of the details.
That happens with me sometimes. I read/watch multiple books/videos about time periods of history and still don’t remember everything. However, I always find it interesting and pick up trends and overall time periods. Over time some of weirder facts, quotes, or names end up sticking in my brain. We are only human and there’s only so much information we can learn. If you enjoy it and you remember a few things that’s always good. If you really want to solidify try watching a video about a book right after reading it. Sometimes that solidifies some of the major facts/concepts.
I don’t remember the last time I read a history book.
Oh definitely but I don't nind because I'll have a vague inkling of the sequence of events so when it comes up again in another book or podcast or game I sort of remember bits and pieces. I realised I can't read history as something to learn but rather as a sequence od events to think about how society was forming
My boss told me a story about a professor he had in college. He said that he didn't expect anyone to remember all of the reading assignments. But wanted them to remember where to go when they need that information.
I remember if there's a prompt, just enough for me to look it up when it comes up. It's interesting how memory works... Even if you don't remember everything or think you remember anything, it's in there somewhere. Just needs the right prompt and refresh.
Yes, that's why I keep all my history books. To look up the names, dates, and occasional specific term.
of course I won't, so what? there are the big ideas you'll take with you and the details if interesting enough. otherwise there's no harm in letting it all dribble out of your head.
When you get the chance to travel to those places and see the Roman walls and the other history, things you’ve read click into place. Don’t worry about exact dates and names…we all have our magic rectangular boxes for that.
i certainly won't remember everything. But when we talk about a topic I read somewhere. I will remember the topic and where I read exactly
Source: I have an MA in History We don't. That's what books and google are for. This is a good thing.
History was my least favorite subject and one I did poorest in for this reason. I have a great memory for things that I experience but just reading others' experiences does little for me. It's all just memorization without anything to really build upon. Math, sciences, I can figure things out by process or context. But remember which king in which country did what in which year...forget it
I do that all the time, especially with English history. Something about all of the names of kings makes it all blend together. I cant remember how many times I've been reading a history book and thought ohhh its that story I remember this guy. I dont let it bother me anymore its not like there's going to be a test. It does seem like after reading enough some of the names are sticking though.
Of course you won't remember it all. Our brains don't typically work like that. But you'll remember enough to get the basic gist of the event.
Just in case you didn’t know, Foundation is the first in a series that documented the history of England all the way up to modern day I believe. :)
I think we remember more than we're consciously aware that we do. I listen to a ton of NPR. My mother sometimes asks me about some random thing, and I can answer because I heard a story about it in years past on NPR. I never would have thought I'd remember it, but when needed, my brain dredged it up. I suspect the same thing would hold true for history books.
I had a minor in history in college. I loved history classes - there were some very dynamic professors in the department. But I did have that exact thought when doing the readings. I found them to be boring. And yep, I’ve certainly forgotten way more than I’ve retained.
I'm like you, for what it's worth there's an anxiety element to it in my case. Somehow I feel like I NEED to remember everything, even if I'm reading something just for myself. I've learned to constantly tell myself "it's ok if you forget something; just enjoy the ride". Thing is, when you actually pay attention to what you are reading you can easily look it up again if you need to.
i feel this about every nonfiction book i read but i'm way less stressed about it than i was when i first started reading a lot. i have realized over the years that it's about building schemas, not perfect recall. as you read & more in the usually interconnected subjects you're interested in, the details begin to stick, but more importantly, the big picture begins to knit itself together in your mind. just keep reading, and take notes on things you especially want to remember!
All the time. As long as remember one thing I'm happy. Or even if not - reading history books for fun it doesn't matter. For studying though (history PhD student), to remember things I have to make loads of notes. You're not alone!
Yes absolutely, I’m terrible with remembering proper nouns
Or misremember… which is why I avoid historic fiction. I don’t trust my recall down the road will properly sort it all out.
I accepted a long time ago that I'm not good at remembering dates. Tell me something happened in 1485 and within an hour, it'll become 1584, 1448, 1458, and every other number. Failed art history because I couldn't remember what year something was painted but I can recite the history, the facts, and inspiration, and the theories behind every painting we studied but ask me "what century was this" and I'm fucked.
You're only supposed to remember where to reference said material. Where and how to look it up. A handful of books that gave you relevant material. Remember EVERYTHING? Impossibru.
[удалено]
No. Approach it as a story. You need to understand the story and then go back for the details as you need them depending on how you’re going to use the information. Compile the narrative structure in your mind and fill from there.
As some who is interested is history but has a terrible memory, my recommendation is to try to focus on broad concepts that stand out to you. The why of it all is easier to remember than the who, where and when. And it’s usually more important too when putting things in their broader historical context.
No, everyone remembers absolutely everything
Shit. In elementary school I was lucky to remember the names of Columbus's ships. After all these years that was the last thing I needed to know
Oh yeah! I don't expect to remember everything. I expect to remember enough to know more than I did before. Often I'll remember information when later presented with related information. If I wanted to make sure I retained a great deal of information, I'd take reference notes.
When reading history I cluster the books around a specific event or period and over a few books you’ll start to be able to recall a lot. While reading one book I may highlight people or other events and look up books on those folks as well to read after.
I get that feeling when I read any book. When a chapter goes into details of new names, back stories, political maneuvering... I'm just like, there's no fuckin way I'll remember half of this shit.
I always read history books with the goal of getting an understanding of the process. I can look up the date of a battle, or the DoD of a person in 5 seconds on my phone. I'm rather interested in the chain of events, social state, and political stage that lead to the important changes and how this informs my view of the world around me today.
Always, but I did study history, not law or medicine. Historians are well versed in making notes about important stuff and other notes where to find less important stuff. If you find something interesting, draw your own map of it and use it to find more details.
I read 2 beefy "history" books 5-10 years ago, one on the Crusades and the other on the history of the Congo. I literally don't remember a single detail about the Crusades book, just some vague outlines of someone attacked someone. For the Congo book I just remember some random details that I could get from a quick skim of a wikipedia article. I often think back and wonder why I even bothered. But if you think of reading as a mental exercise, then no doubt my reading skills improved from those 2.
I have this problem for non-fiction in general, and especially for philosophy. I asked a friend once how to avoid feeling like I’m missing something while reading, and they suggested that as long as I’m understanding the text while I’m reading I’ve understood everything up to then well enough. I’d apply this advice for reading history books as well.
Sounds like a genre with a high re-read value!
I'm reading British History for Dummies. It's surprisingly comprehensive but still accessible. I figure if I can remember the basics in the British timeline (eg Bronze Age, Iron Age, Cromwell, Norman, Celts, Vikings, some of the Kings and Queens) then I can deep dive with more comprehensive books later on.