Over the long Independence Day weekend, the Washington Free Beacon published an essay by Waller Newell calling for renewed attention for what he calls the Next Best Books. These are works of history or literature that, while you wouldn’t file them away in the canon with books by Plato or Shakespeare or Hegel, nevertheless ought to have some claim on our lasting attention. Books by authors like Solzhenitsyn or Tuchman or Ortega y Gasset can help readers, especially younger readers, develop their political and psychological instincts, educating them about human nature, about greatness and great evil, and about what is required for a free society to endure.
Concluding that the universities have fallen down on this job, among so many others, Newell provided a provocative list of 15 history books “to get the ball rolling.” The earliest among them, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, was published beginning in 1776; the most recent, Bernard Lewis’s Crisis of Islam, appeared in 2003. Most of the volumes are products of the mid-twentieth century, with books by Churchill, Robert Conquest, and Karl Polyani among them.
Given that these are histories rather than, say, novels, an obvious objection arises: aren’t most of these books a little, well, out of date? If we really want young people to understand why the Roman Empire fell apart, is a book written during the decade America fought for its independence really the best place to look? If Rome’s transition from self-governing republic to monarchic empire seems important for students to understand, what utility could be found in Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution, originally published in in 1939?
The same objection could be applied to most of the books on this list, or any similar list. In the years since these volumes have been published, hasn’t there been important new research that later authors have usefully synthesized? And even if the books have certain superficial charms that haven’t been improved upon—the rich skill of Barbara Tuchman’s prose, for example—a now half-century-old account of the start of World War One by definition cannot include the latest developments in the scholarship pertaining to that period of history, right? Not to mention the latest developments in our understanding of history or politics or human nature in a broader way! So, superficial appeal or antiquarian affectations aside … why bother?
Here’s why. The strongest point that can be made in favor of systematically preferring more recent histories to their predecessors is that later writers have access to more and better data. That later writers know more facts is generally true—though not universally, and certainly not before the era of modern western scholarship. (An interesting feature of medieval Arabic histories of the origins of Islam is that the later histories indeed tend to be longer than the earlier ones—chock full of inventions and fabrications that were passed off as discoveries.) But the flaw in this argument is the assumption that the main reason to read history is to determine the facts of the period in question to the greatest degree possible—to learn what really happened, or what von Ranke called wie es eigentlich gewesen (which sounds much more impressive). (Read more from “Why You Should Read ‘Out-Of-Date’ History Books” HERE)
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