The more I learn about history, the more annoyed I am at how it was taught in grade school. I mean, when it comes to learning about the American Revolution, the fact that West Florida (modern Northwest Florida) was actually a British colony at the time seems kind of important. Not to mention the fact that East Florida was Spanish. It explains a lot.
…No, really, it explains a lot. Even to this day Northwest Florida and the rest of the state have serious disagreements on politics, priorities, and how to brew beer. Florida is, as they say, the only state in the Union where the farther north you go the farther South you are. Yes, the bunches of transplanted New Yorkers on the East Coast and Miami’s whole… Miami, makes a difference. But Northwest Florida started out culturally different from the rest of Florida and it still shows.
(If you really want to stir a political pot, mention splitting the state, a la Virginia and West Virginia. For extra fire and fury, suggest joining Alabama. Just make sure you can get to a minimum safe distance first.)
History matters. It may just be a trace; an odd local food, a turn of phrase, strange and unusual street names in one corner of town. But under the right circumstances it can cause ripples that affect people and events across the world.
Cozy mysteries are an excellent place to make use of odd bits of history. Charlotte MacLeod’s books wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the weird quirks of Boston Brahmin culture and history (including whaling and Hawaii), or the tangled relationships and odd prevalence of Viking types in fictional Balaclava County. Weird tales sink their teeth into history as it was and could have been; lost civilizations, ancient monsters, queer lore gathered by an obsessed scholar lost to history. Science fiction can benefit greatly from including history; anyone who thinks old feuds won’t follow us out to space doesn’t know humans very well. On a less bloodthirsty note, P.M. Griffin’s Star Commandos series drew crises in each book from bits of biological and environmental history as we know it from Earth. Some colony planets may have been settled for centuries, but the eruption cycle of a deadly stratovolcano can be longer still….
You don’t have to be an expert in your world’s history. But if you say Nation X and Nation Y went to war twenty years before your story starts, think about what that means. What families lost loved ones? Who came back covered in glory? Who didn’t come back at all, leaving a mystery for all who knew them?
History matters. It’s the background to everything we do today. Think about your character’s background, and what lessons they need to learn because of it. Or what they can teach.
…And yes, I’m still cranky about West Florida. I need to know more of that history!
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And yes, the more you know about history and *what that means* to those who lived it, and how that ripples forward into the present…. Lots of things start to make sense. I do my best to figure out for my stories how history has or has not affected their world, and nothing bugs me more than to have history simplified somehow in a novel or series.
That was actually one of the fun things about the old Star Wars Expanded Universe – there was so much history, lost and known and misremembered or misrecorded, that the potential for mistakes and subsequent adventures was ever-present. Nu-Star Wars doesn’t have that and is the poorer for it. :sigh:
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Oh that was actually something I loved about the old Star Wars EU. The Empire was evil no doubt about that, but there were so many regional grudges and old interspecies conflicts that it kept under control/stamped out that the people yearning for the New Order’s…well order? They weren’t necessarily goose stepping thugs. The Empire for all it’s faults actually did bring peace and order to a lot of the galaxy.
Which made dealing with the remnants of it so interesting as you COULD have officer and leaders like Pelleaon who were believably not evil yet not necessarily the good guys and had a journey of development as people and leaders who took the broken remnants of the Empire and turned it into something…not evil.
Or in short if you looked outside of the Jedi and the Force the old EU was full of shades of gray where the battle between good and evil wasn’t so cut and dry as “Jedi = Good, Dark Side/Sith = Bad.”
You don’t really have that anymore and what’s replaced it is so much worse in that it doesn’t even try to tell an actual good versus evil tale like the original Star Wars. It’s so much protagonist-centric morality drek that it honestly turns my stomach.
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Yeah, and even Luke and Mara admitted the Empire was bad but it kept a lot of OTHER badness down and at bay. Did that make the Empire or Emperor good guys? No. But it meant that not *everything* they instituted was corrupt or should be completely discarded just because the Emperor was a Sith.
It also meant that the New Rep had to up its game *and actually walk its talk* if it (a) didn’t want to fall apart and (b) wanted to make a better impression than the Empire it insisted on replacing. It had to adhere to its principles at the same time it had to be flexible enough to recognize that enforcing those principles at the point of a blaster or lightsaber would be as bad (or worse) than the suppression of the Empire. It couldn’t just be *good.* It had to be *better.*
Which is one reason why Borsk Fey’lya could be understandable and yet still drive one mad. As if we don’t have enough problems just doing our jobs and being good people, now Borsk has to go and complicate things. ARGH. (Okay, there were others, but Borsk was so darn *memorable* for being such a *pain* the heroes couldn’t get rid of, and even he wasn’t totally bad. Just a real pain in the neck.)
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My brother often notes that, for all the Empire’s sins, it worked better than the New Republic did. No, it was by no means a good entity, but it was competent. As opposed to the New Republic, which stumbled every couple of years and ended up being essentially destroyed and replaced within a couple of decades. More than once, I think.
Okay, sure, the Empire might’ve only been truly held together by Palpatine, and once he was gone it shattered like Iskander’s empire. What came after… didn’t exactly do any better.
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Which is not really very likely. The Emperor is unlikely to have consolidated power that quickly, given that it was barely enough time for two babies to grow up.
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Um, no. There is a ten year gap between TPM and AotC, and between AotC and RotS there are three years.
There is a 19 year gap between RotS and ANH, yes, but there was plenty of time before that when he was already consolidating his position.
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This. This so darned much!
And it shows that the Empire was only held together by Palpatine when the whole thing fractures immediately into different factions! The Rebelion/New Republic went from fighting a gruella war to fighting on multiple fronts.
People say that Thrawn wasn’t all that smart… would any of you call being able to predict what someone will do based on the art of the planet they come from originally ‘not all that smart’? That shows a deep understanding of the culture he’s looking at and the person in question that he is countering.
People tell me that the quality of the old EU was all over the place.
No, it was not. Every single book was well written and internally consistent. Maybe there were contradictions between books written by different writers, but that doesn’t mean any of them were badly written.
It drives me insane when I get into these conversations with people.
Heck, I even got into an argument over the god-awful new Main Character Disney pushed onto us.
Hey, you can like her all you want, you don’t need to defend the character. All I was doing was listing the reasons why I don’t.
I listened to the sample for the first High Republic book, and I went: Nope. All it was, was an info dump on the character and her ship for five minutes. Sheesh.
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I’ve read a couple of Nu-Star Wars books that were *technically* well written – tight prose, not many misspellings, that sort of thing – but they had none of the joi de vive of the original Expanded Universe books. The worst offender was a YA book that to my mind has the hero practically rape the heroine. They’re having a knock-down drag-out fight, he pins her to the cavern wall, and she says, “Don’t you dare stop!” Next chapter shows them in bedroll together the morning after. This is their *second* intimate night together and they’re still at political odds even though they’re also in “love.”
That’s not love. I don’t care if she told him not to stop and it’s thus considered “consensual.” That was a fight, he had her pinned, and permission or not he has *no right* to do that to her. *No* Expanded Universe novel I ever read had a situation like that in it. Heck, neither did the *adult* EU books, which weren’t exactly shy about sex.
After that, I was VERY *done* with anything Nu-Star Wars had in print, only reading one more book to check it for someone else (my verdict was no on that one, too, though that one didn’t pull the same stunt as this YA book). The old EU books may not have been *technically* perfect by modern standards for prose, et al, but they could weave darn good stories. Their styles were distinct, too, not the constant imitations of Suzanne Collins’ prose that are showing up a lot these days. That style works for *her,* it doesn’t HAVE to be used by everyone else. Ugh.
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Part of the fracturing, unfortunately, was that Palps deliberately designed it to fall apart of he died and did so, in the EU, by lynchpinning a bunch of different factions together into putting their “us against them” against people he wanted it against.
But for the most part, while he had absolute power, the actual day to day runnings were done by people who had an incentive to make things succeed, because they didn’t want the old republic and they didn’t want the civil war the confederacy represented and they genuinely wanted things to be better.
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Well, here’s one bit of history I never suspected, right off….
People escaping slavery weren’t just fleeing north!
(I’m still reading the sample on this one….)
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Cool! Marked for later reading! Thank you! 😀
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Part of it is the schools try and force things into discrete modules, but there’s no coordination or unifying discussion between them.
So I think I had one semester on Egypt and Greece, 4-5 years on Native Americans and Colonists (repeating the same things over and over, not more coverage), and one section on the Holocaust (nothing leading up to it).
It was only in High School that I actually ended up with a decent history course that was actually trying to explain things rather than random cultural snapshots.
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I think one of the worst things we ever did was create a public school system. It used to be that it was handled by the families and the communities. The contents could be somewhat patchwork but usually they focused on the important stuff, being able to read, write, and do your numbers. AKA basic, functional mathematics. Things like how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, BALANCE YOUR FREAKING CHECKBOOK. You know, the basics.
But even that wasn’t as bad as the creation of the Department of Education at the national level and it’s very, very political nature even as it sets the curriculum for the entire nation. If you really want a place to lay the blame on how history is taught look no further than that. When education and politics are married like that everyone loses, but the students of history lose worst.
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Part of the problem is that some groups couldn’t read, and it was of interest to the responsible community that they not be able to function well enough to leave.
The DoE doesn’t actually set a national curriculum, they just– “just”– give funding, which has strings attached. Take the money, must buy X, Y and Z.
Individual school districts buy the history curriculum, and taht’s set by publishers.
Getting a teacher who actually knows history can fix this a lot, but that’s impossible to do at a sky-level.
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I may be a wee bit skeptical of the publishers. Also, university training to the people who write the textbooks.
Though, I’ve been wondering a bit about mistakes I am making in my conclusions of assigning blame to universities.
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I’m still saltly about the science text book that taught the theory that embryos develop through their prior forms.
…. that one was debunked before photographs existed. For a very simple issue with it, the “gill spots” have nothing to do with respiration.
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Part of the problem is the shear *volume* of history we have available now. Something will always be missed. Something *has* to be missed. It’s now not just the history of your own country and the countries surrounding it that has to be learned. It’s the history of the *entire world* due to how global politics now is. And how if you’re in the US, the US is one of the major world players and has affected so many other nations as a result. There is no way to keep up with that even if history curriculum were designed *well*. Which they’re not.
The other issue is that people learn by *stories*. History is nothing more than the story of nations. But there’s *a lot* of different ways to tell a story when it comes to its *thematic* side. Or parts of a story that don’t *have* to be told from the storyteller’s perspective. Also, one can agree on what the “story” of a given nation should be. And really, no one *should* agree. That’s how parts of the story get lost!
The real problem we have isn’t that history isn’t getting taught. It’s that it *is* getting taught… but put through the frame of a story that doesn’t accurately describe what is going on. How accurate or not a story is relies on how well the person telling the story understands how people *in general* work. And too many academics don’t know how people (and the countries they form) really work as *people*. That warping then gets added to history and then history isn’t as useful as subject as it could be.
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And then, you have a place like Texas, who was its own country before becoming a State.
If you are writing a ‘Hidden World’ you need to take that into account, because the Hidden World could still consider Texas to be its own country.
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Depending on how they figure a “country,” the entire united STATES might fall into it– allied kingdoms with an over-lord, basically.
Figuring how they deal with Germany and allthe bazillion small kingdoms that use to be there might figure in– does the EU count as a country? Or an alliance? How about the United Kingdom?
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Personally, that sounds like a logistical nightmare to me. But done right is would be an amazing series of books.
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“The problem with history is, *they won’t stop making more of it*!”
I mean, I like history. Well, some history. But I like *narrative* history, something that works like the old James Burke “Connections” series, something that explains how A flows into B into C. And sadly, the modern US public education system has managed to find the *most* effective way to make history illegible, indigestible, and BORING.
I can see how it happened — teaching history “holistically” *well* is Really Hard, and doesn’t test well when a government department is (for entirely understandable reasons) looking for quantifiable metrics to measure what they’re getting for their money.
But still, memorizing names and dates for the Standardized Test has to be THE least effective way of *teaching* a subject ever devised. It takes a Heroic-level teacher to save the curriculum from itself. I don’t think I ever had a *good* history class until I hit Community College, and the professor was free to design their own class.
Of course, when professors a free to teach history *however* they like, well… one needs only look at recent events on US college campuses to see how badly the pendulum can swing the other way.
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Can attest to the “farther north you go the farther South you are in Florida” thing. I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area for a bit over twelve years now, and I think I’ve met a grand total of two native Floridians. Everyone else has been a transplant from somewhere else. Admittedly, I’m a hermit who’s been completely housebound for long stretches of the last seven years, but still.
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Okay, I knew about the War of Jenkins’ Ear, but I didn’t know there was a West Florida and an East Florida. I thought it was just “Florida was a Spanish colony, and then the English took over.”
We did the Thirteen Colonies at least three times, but I don’t think South Carolina or Florida were of interest to the history textbooks used in Ohio. Georgia was Oglethorpe and Methodists/Wesley, and that was about it.
I still am freaked out that South Carolina was settled by Barbados planters. Which would seem to be a tad bit important.
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Just a bit, yes, given the mess of the Barbados….
And yes, I need to look this stuff up, because while in RL history the West Florida area didn’t get settled by the Spanish for about 50 years after their first attempt was plastered by a hurricane, in the Colors ‘verse things are likely to have happened a little differently….
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I know some of the history of the magical knights in a WIP. Their origins are lost to history, and they were originally just beefed up with superhuman strength and the like.
The first woman knights were to deal with a monster that needed climbing through a flimsy structure. (And you need to be at least twenty-one to be knighted.) That was when they learned that some knights gained flight.
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My timeline for a story:
Ancients Rise
Ancients manage to snowball enough mages to unify
Ancients Age ends because of a doomsday race. In their last move, they sacrifice themeelves to make certain mages are far easier to identify and learn what they are capable of.
Age of Strife: Nations rise as a result of Ancient loot and records. Cutthroat societies emerges. Seriously, makes Game of Thrones look peaceful and trusting.
Age of Strife ends when various gribbly Things invade. Roughly half of the various races choose to cease the infighting. Half choose to water down the infighting.
Wars of Light And Dark. Both sides go through at least a thousand years of fighting. Warcrime followed by counter-warcrime followed by counter-counter warcrime. This goes on so long the original reasons are completely forgotten.
The Last Demon Lord. Last Demon Lord is such a spiteful jerk that nearly all races join to stop his rampage. As in “You slaughtered every Ork in Trilashin, but this guy comes first.” Literal quote from the Urukan Empire to Iconoclastics Order of Paladins.
End of Demon Lord War after 250 years. The guy was a genius, and managed to cast a necromantic spell with his death as the trigger. Raises dead and seriously destabilizes manaflow in the continent he made his last stand.
Peace Treaty: The Wars of Light and Dark finally officially end, as all armies are redirected to fight the Undead and other side-effects. Veilstone Founded
One thousand years later, Valaria heads to Rainveil Tú….
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Holy crud. Booker T. Washington tried to take a nice educational tour of Italy, and ended up writing a book in 1910 that was an expose of white child slavery in the mines of Sicily.
https://bloggers.iitaly.org/bloggers/1066/child-slavery-sicily-1910
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I could see that happening. Ouch.
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