GameBanshee Forums

i (sort of) agree with grunty, that the plays, music, etc. can inform you about the attitudes to the event at the time, and reflect more about the cultural climate in which these events happened, but the events *themselves* are what inspired or influenced those sources. so...

'plays such as Henry V are not history, but they serve to give a clearer understanding of how the historical event was viewed in it's day, and thus the possible reasons for the event and background to it'

That's not to say the play isn't damn good, or any less valuable to a historian, but it's part of the event, not the event itself.

Originally posted by Robnark
i (sort of) agree with grunty,

LOL! You don't have to - honestly, its perfectly alright to disagree with/pillory me.

well, i meant 'agree wit' as in 'agree with providing i ignore a lot of what you were saying', but oh well

Originally posted by Gruntboy
Call me paranoid. ("Hey, Paranoid!")

How come someone can say "Plays such as Henry V are history".

Human history is a record of what has occured among humans. As war is a vital part of that interaction, IMO the study of military history is essential. As a writer of occasional fiction, I read it regularly, because I don't think any writer could possibly produce a honest or realistic seeming battle for a given time and place without having a basic grasp of battlefield tactics, military strategy, etc. Then there are Musashi and Sun-Tzu...but we're getting far afield.

Military history can tell us a lot about what happened at Agincourt, but it can't answer perfectly good questions fielded by historians such as, "What did the English think about Agincourt, and about Henry V? What did the descendants of Henry V approve as the accepted series of events leading up to and through Agincourt?" For that, we need to turn to extremely popular contemporary "historical" plays which were a major form of entertainment, and none were more so than Shakespeare's. He doesn't give us historical fact, though many people (the same ones who believe Mozart is accurately represented in Amadeus) accept it as such. He gives us what people believed. That's an important facet of history that tells us a lot about contemporary English culture.

And it can lead to a fascinating study of the propaganda infrastructure of England at that period, which had been put into place under Henry VIII, and which monitored and controlled not merely publications, but also public and private conversation in an extraordinary way. That's not the province of military history, but an enormous amount of private correspondence exists that gives us an excellent picture of the secret informational police, their activities, their agents, their reports and extra-political powers.

Tangentially, a study of the arts and entertainment in Nazi Germany tells us a great deal about the national myths that led to Hitler's election, while pursuing the control of the arts behind the scenes into Goebbel's propaganda machine yields a wealth of material on how the media can be used and manipulated at a given time, in a given way. This again is an aspect of history: what people aspire to, and how governments can harness this. Shakespeare's Henry V and the Elizabethan internal spy/propaganda machine is as much history as Nazi art and Goebbel's brilliant use of radio as a propaganda tool. Each provides its own historical insights into a powerful culture of the day.

Well exactly, Fable. But you can't have plays about Nazi Germany (Springtime for Hitler? ) without Nazi Germany can you? I mean, plays have to be about something, have to have a context. Without History, there'd be no art. Without art, we'd still have History. No?

Originally posted by Weasel:
Yes it is their responsiblity to go beyond what their job requires. And it's the parents responsibility to get the child educated. The governing body responsibility is to make sure the children who's parents don't care, do at least learn something.

As for a wider breadth of History, a good teacher will show them there is more to learn, where as a bad, lazy teacher following a governing body will only teach what is required.

I disagree entirely. A school curriculum should be constructed in such a way that it takes up all the class time, and a teacher wouldn't have time to teach anything else, and it would be unfair to ask them to do so - therefore the curriculum should include a wider breadth of History. It should be compulsory teaching, not something extra that a teacher can put in if they feel like it.

@Jace My mistake, I thought you said something about having studied History

Originally posted by Gruntboy:
As such, pottery and plays are things people do during war to take their minds off the senseless slaughter.

I wouldn't disagree that these things can be related to war, but I still think you can study areas of History that are removed from History as War. I don't think all History is necessarily that of war, though if you're looking for overarching themes of History, war is certainly a possible one.

I don't know too much about this, Gwally might know more, but I recall seeing a programme about the search for the "mother city", the earliest city, as anthropologists want to work out what the impetus was that made people first settle in cities. I can't recall the place, but one was found (in South America IIRC), and one anthropologist whose theory was that cities originated for defence (ie. because of war) admitted that it didn't look like that was the reason for the beginning of "civilisation", but rather it was because of trade. Just as you can say "History is War", I guess you could say "History is Trade". How many wars happened because of trade? Isn't it rather misleading to attribute war as the main factor in History when there are numerous other themes that contributed to war?

Without History, there'd be no art.

Not all art is based on History (in the way you define it, ie. war), IMO. Referring to plays about war is misleading, since those are obviously directly linked to events, but other literature could have been written whether or not there were wars, although the wartime atmosphere might have affected the way in which they were written.

Originally posted by Gruntboy
Well exactly, Fable. But you can't have plays about Nazi Germany (Springtime for Hitler? ) without Nazi Germany can you? I mean, plays have to be about something, have to have a context. Without History, there'd be no art. Without art, we'd still have History. No?

It's all about focus, @Grunt, as I see it. I see art as part of a cultural continuum which is everything that humans at a given time and place think, feel, and do. If part of that continuum is missing, my understanding of that culture, its history, is less. So we don't know how the Hittites fought in battle or what were their major victories and losses, but we do have ground plans for buildings, abstracts of trade and diplomatic documents, and plenty of household goods (read: art) in fragemented condition. This is history without the military element; it still exists, but we're worse off for lacking that aspect.

Originally posted by Georgi
@Gwally Personally, I find military, political and economic History rather dry and boring. I prefer the more cultural aspects of History, dealing with people rather than states and statistics.

@Georgi: I tend to agree with you, especially about how dry political and economic history can be. Military history can be interesting when told from the perspective of the low-level Grunt(boy) soldier.

My British History teacher in college often complained about the lack of adequate text books that would tell the story of everyone, not just the rulers and war events. I always agreed with her. Memorizing coronation dates for kings and queens along with the dates for various wars and battles hardly tells the story of what makes the English tick. However, this same teacher wouldn't let me do my paper on the early prehistoric people of England, rather she forced me to write my tem paper on Edward III.

I think King lists and wars have been done to death by historians: it is now the challenge for them to truly recreate the life and times of the populace. That necessitates a focus on the actor, communities, and reference to sources of information long neglected by historians.

Besides repeating your objections to my point of view I'm not quite sure I understand where this is going. Misleading, Georgi - what do you mean by that? Whom am I trying to mislead?

I repeat again, I do not deny that History contains many things. Wars themselves (the salient part of my belief in this matter) are constructed from many things - cultural, economic factors etc. But to me, in my opinion, the History of the Human Race on Earth is one of Geopolitics and War. That is what History means to me.

Just to take Fables isolated example. The Hittites invaded the Mesapotamian area. The Hittites were destroyed by the Assyrians. Yes they left behind many wondrous cultural and artistic and architectural things. Where are we going with this? Would Hittite culture still be visible if they hadn't invaded Mesapotamia? Would there still be Hittites today if they hadn't been destroyed? I am really unsure as to just what it is you are trying to say, Georgi, Fable?

Maybe Gwally can help me with this, but what keeps coming up in my mind regarding the war=history argument, is that the majority of humans that have ever existed were hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers have no leaders and no warfare. Should we regard their history as non-history?

Warfare doesn't begin until the Horticulturalists come along (basically hunter gathers who cultivate gardens and only move from camp to camp every couple of months.) An example is the Yanomamo indians of Brazil. When humans stay in one place and have land to cultivate, the population increases, the animal population gets hunted out, and suddenly there's a reason for war. War eliminates the excess men.

With the advent of agricultural societies, land is all-important and warfare is constant.

Our type of society, the industrial type, is the newest, shortest-lived, and most likely to destroy everything. You could argue that hunter-gatherers are therefore the most successful, since they were dominant for the longest period.

I think that the issue Gwally brought up about what separates pre-history from history is the most interesting. We tend to define a civilization as having a written language. The Inca had no written language, but did have a sort of postal service, took censuses, and other things we associate with large civilizations. How do you define the Inca?

I've studied the Maya and Aztec cultures a lot more. What fascinates me is that aside from having horses and gunpowder, the Spanish were not much more advanced, and their thinking was pretty similar. I would love to read Cortez' diaries and find out what he thought when he visited Teotihuacan. Also, the Maya and Aztec had many books, but hardly any have survived since the Catholic church had most destroyed. So the history we know is limited to the few fragments that survived or codices that were oral histories written down by priests who gave the stories a Christian twist (so the church would not destroy them). A lot of the writings of the Aztecs are an account of their wars. I agree with Fable that an account of battle after battle does not give you a sense of who these people were and how they thought without including their art and poetry.
Just to show what I mean, here's a fragment of an Aztec poem:
Even jade is shattered,
Even gold is crushed,
Even quetzal plume are torn . . .
One does not live forever on this earth:
We endure only for an instant!

Will flowers be carried to the Kingdom of Death:
Is it true that we are going, we are going?
Where are we going, ay, where are we going?
Will we be dead there or will we live yet?
Does one exist again?

Perhaps we will live a second time?
Thy heart knows:
Just once do we live!.
Like a quetzal plume, a fragrant flower,
friendship sparkles:
like heron plumes, it weaves itself into finery.

Our song is a bird calling out like a jingle:
how beautiful you make it sound!
Here, among flowers that enclose us,
among flowery boughs you are singing.

@Voodoodali,

I studied a picture of a cave painting, it was dated approx 8,000 BC (IIRC) and had 3 guys with arrows on one side and 4 with spears on the other. It was labelled "The War of the 3 versus the 4."

Isn't hunter-gatherer existence a fight for survival?

Aztec society revolved entirely around the warfare for the capture of prisoners for use in ritual sacrifice (the Flowery Wars).

Didn't the Mayan's sacrifice so many of their own people they poisoned their water supply?

BTW, this is the most depressing view of History.

I studied a picture of a cave painting, it was dated approx 8,000 BC (IIRC) and had 3 guys with arrows on one side and 4 with spears on the other. It was labelled "The War of the 3 versus the 4."

@Grunty,

This comes back to a point I made earlier. History is what we want the past to have been. Who labeled the painting? Certainly not the people who drew it. There are other interpretations possible. I am not saying that you may not be right, but that we colour history with our own perceptions. If we have a war like view of the world then history is war.

Oh, and 'The Producers" - great film.

Originally posted by Georgi

I disagree entirely. A school curriculum should be constructed in such a way that it takes up all the class time, and a teacher wouldn't have time to teach anything else, and it would be unfair to ask them to do so - therefore the curriculum should include a wider breadth of History. It should be compulsory teaching, not something extra that a teacher can put in if they feel like it.

To do this would IMHO cause the the teacher to either hurry or leave any questions the children have unanswered.

I guess we look at a teacher different, I believe a teacher should want to educate a child, not look at it as just a job. Maybe this is what is happening to the US, a child now spends (from preschool to college) almost 19 years of their life being influenced by a teacher of one sort or another.

So I agree to disagree with you.

@Jace, yes fair enough, we colour history with out own viewpoints.

To further clarify what I was trying to say (in response to VoodooDali) - she suggested that there was no concept of war in hunter gatherer society, I was attempting to show there was. I was not trying to inject prejudice into a comment about labels. What else would you call 3 or 4 people fighting in 8000 BC? A scrap? A fight? A skirmish? A Battle? A misunderstanding? Sharing food supplies? Artistic expression?

Recognition of warfare does not, however, make one warlike.

Originally posted by Gruntboy
@Jace, yes fair enough, we colour history with out own viewpoints.

To further clarify what I was trying to say (in response to VoodooDali) - she suggested that there was no concept of war in hunter gatherer society, I was attempting to show there was. I was not trying to inject prejudice into a comment about labels. What else would you call 3 or 4 people fighting in 8000 BC? A scrap? A fight? A skirmish? A Battle? A misunderstanding? Sharing food supplies? Artistic expression?

Recognition of warfare does not, however, make one warlike.

It would be interesting to read what the anthropologists studying that picture have to say about it. However, it is generally believed that the change from hunter-gatherer societies to horticultural societies came about around 8000 BC (according to the British Encyclopedia)--so that could explain the rock painting.

In the 1990's, there was a huge debate in anthropology about pre-historical hunter-gatherers. Prior to the '90's (and I majored in anthro in the '80's), it was taught that modern-day hunter-gatherers were a living history of stone age people, and that we could assume that stone age peoples were the same as them. This has been challenged mainly due to findings of large structures believed to be built by stone age hunter-gatherers. It was not thought that they had complex societies or could build structures, since modern ones don't. It is still being hotly debated. The archaeologists will have to sort it out.

One of the big mysteries is how, when and why people transitioned from hunter-gathering to horticultural societies. Did they hunt out the animals in their territory? Did their language and thinking become more complex and lead to more complex societies? Who knows?

However, for the time being, all we really know about hunter-gatherers we can only know from living ones.

The myth of the cave man is that he was brutal, carried around a club beating on animals and dragging women off by the hair.

There are exceptions to every rule, but with what is known about modern hunter-gatherers, war is the exception.
Some reasons why:
Hunter-gatherers live in small groups of around 30 or so people. They have no leaders. The relationship between the sexes is pretty egalitarian. They wander constantly. For this reason, they do not own anything. There are simply no belongings to fight over. In most parts of the earth, there was enough animals and food for the hunter-gatherer groups. No need to fight over that. Their population is controlled via nursing for a long period--around 5 years--which suppresses ovulation. Some also practiced infanticide. We know a lot about them from the still surviving hunter-gatherers that are around today. The pygmies, the bush-people of the Kalahari, the Australian aborigines, the inuit. None of them participate in warfare. The inuit are the only group who have a high homicide rate, but this is attributed to the extreme environment they live in, and having to share insanely close quarters for long periods of time. There is also a misconception about hunter-gatherers that they need to constantly hunt to survive. The average hunter-gatherer goes out on a hunt about every 2 weeks. 80% of their diet is vegetarian and provided by the women. They have the most leisure time of any people on earth. It sounds like a nice way to live to me. I highly recommend a book called The Forest People (about the Pygmies) and another book called Nisa (autobiography of a Kalahari bush-woman).

Originally posted by Gruntboy
What else would you call 3 or 4 people fighting in 8000 BC? A scrap? A fight? A skirmish? A Battle? A misunderstanding?

"The first spear-throwing contest."?
"Seven guys testing their new spears"?
"Three guys teaching four other guys how to throw spears"?
"Six SYMers trying to prove that theirs is longer than Waverly's"?



I wouldn't call it a war, because the concept I have of the term 'war' implies organization at a political level. Yes, it might be a scrap, fight, skirmish, or a misunderstanding, but for band-level societies, wars are impossible. If egalitarian bands gather together and organize themselves enough to stage a war, then they are no longer egalitarian. If you get mad at your neighbor because he let his dog tear up your roses and you punch him in the nose, is that a war? No.

I wouldn't deny that violent tendencies is a facet of human life, but it is also a facet of the lives of ants, dogs, cats, tigers, big horn sheep, and chimpanzees. Its not particular to human nature.

As far as war an history are concerned, I would guess that war probably makes up less than 20% of history. However, just as English History often involves the teaching of King lists and American History students are made to memorize the names of the Presidents, so to is war a major focus of history when it is taught in school. It is traditional and disgustingly convenient. How much harder to teach the subtler aspects of history?

I’m not surprised that you would think that history can be defined exclusively by war. I just hope that someday history teachers can change that attitude.

(No insult is intended)

I believe it's option four, and you bet one of the six was Grunty.

That's a little condescending, Gwally. When I was 14, my History teacher used to send me on errands because there wasn't anything he could teach me in class. When he came across stuff he didn't know the answer to, he'd ask me. I studied History for 3 years at undergraduate level and read about it in my spare time.

I have had plenty of time to reach my own conclusions about History and disavow the state version of it.

Regarding your points about the painting, now we're getting in to real Historical issues - define "war". When your society is a small, fragile hunter-gatherer one, I'd imagine a fight between 3 or 4 could be called a war.

Originally posted by Gruntboy
That's a little condescending, Gwally.

You are right. Sorry.


How do you define war?

History is the values of today's population manipulating the past to suit their needs.

(War is IMO fighting between groups of people for an extnened period of time(hours,days,weeks, months, years, decades, centuries)