Thinking Like A Historian—And Loving It!
Image by Nadja Golitschek from Pixabay
History has historically been taught to outsiders as a what—full of facts that needed to be memorized. History is actually a means of answering why questions about human events through an examination of documents and artifacts. These are pieces of evidence that are used to construct a compelling explanatory narrative. We all love a good story and history reconstructs the ones that actually happened (as close as possible)!
Historians are motivated by curiosity like the rest of humanity. They are especially curious about the causes of human events. Human wills, skills, and creativity create a complex causative matrix that resists simple justification. Multiple stories told from different perspectives are the rule, not the exception.
Thinking like a historian has been articulated as 5 C’s by the American Historical Association. This is a commendable attempt to articulate to outsiders what actually goes on in the minds of historians. As I’ve said on previous podcasts deep learning needs to immerse learners in a way of thinking. Historical thinking is not as different from scientific thinking as you may have thought.
Here are the 5 C’s:
Change Over Time
Context
Causality
Contingency
Complexity
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast interview with Dr. Brenda Schoolfield discussing and illustrating historical thinking:
[01:01] Mike Gray: Today we are talking with Dr. Brenda Schofield again about what it means to think like a historian. Every area of human thought has a structure. Engineers don't think like biologists, don't think like linguists, don't think like historians. And yet there are elements of thought that are common to all of them. So today we're going to explore what it means to think like a historian. Thanks for being back, Brenda.
[01:35] Brenda Schoolfield: Oh, you're most welcome.
[01:37] Mike Gray: I've heard journalism characterized as the first draft of history, and frankly, that scares a lot of us because many of us are skeptical of journalism. There's a question of objectivity, with each political pole having its favorite news source. On some level, that's somewhat new. Although I remember the bumper stickers on Dan Rather that just said “Rather Biased” (was the take on Dan Rather the newscaster). But there was Walter Cronkite who was supposed to be this sane, objective voice. But I don't think we can point to any figure like that or any element where people are willing to just go along with the news unfolding, factually. There's always some spin. And then there's the qualification of the reporters. Very often they have no formal training in the area. Say they're a science reporter. And if you go digging, at best they might have a bachelor's degree in biology or physics or something else. There's little to distinguish some reporting from opinion pieces, which supposedly that label means we are just giving our opinion here. So, it's kind of all mixed up. I think you can see where I'm going here. So, do you see a parallel between history and journalism?
[03:23] Brenda Schoolfield: I think they're connected. I will point out that the 20th century or the 21st century isn't the first time that we've had biased journalism. Oh, no, not by a long shot. If you go back to the early Republic, there were newspapers that were openly pro-Federalist, anti-Federalist, Republican, Jeffersonian Republican. I mean, they were known for putting that spin or that bias into their news reporting. It's not new, but as a first draft, a journalist’s story is the first try at putting pieces of evidence together into an account. The account is partial. It's limited. It's influenced by the immediate need to sell a story, or really, we know to sell advertising.
A journalist gathers facts as many as she can, we hope. But those facts may not add up to the truth of the story. And that goes back to the idea that facts themselves are mere building blocks and like you would have a pile of bricks, don't make a house. They have to be put together in a way that makes sense. A pile of facts doesn't make a story. And of course, you may not have all the facts.
Historians have on their side time and hindsight to gather more evidence that the actual journalist's account is in a way an artifact as well. What were people thinking of at the time? How much did people know at the time versus how much do we know now? What other pieces of evidence do we have to fill in that story? Hindsight and time give historians that perspective and a certain level of objectivity. None of us are purely objective, but they give historians more room to build that account.
So, the journalist has a lot of immediate pressures to get a story out, to make a story that sells, that keeps people's interest. That's why some journalists, when they turn their hand to writing history, something that happened further ago, like I think we might have mentioned Steve Johnson when he turned his hand to looking at bigger trends in the past, he knows how to tell a good story. And sometimes I have to confess that there are trained historians, people who've learned methods in using archives and preservation and different things like that, who actually don't tell a good story. They can't make it appealing. The purpose of history is not merely to appeal. The purpose of history is to try to the best of the historian’s ability to tell the truth about what happened. And not all of that is appealing. Not all of that is going to sell newspapers.
[07:04] Mike Gray: Let's touch on the idea of bias a little bit. So, you've got more complete sources, but maybe as a human being with some views of your own, your views still tend to filter the sources and decide what's a credible source and how much emphasis to give it. So how do you respond to the criticism that it's the winners who write history? There's a lot of other history that would be very different if that were not so.
[07:40] Brenda Schoolfield: Winners do write history and so do losers.
Take the American Civil War. There's been an awful lot written about the American Civil War from the losing side as well as from the winning side. But in the past, often winners had the power to impose their stories. They had the power to repress the losers’ stories. If we're thinking about winners and losers, and the losers did not have the power to publish their stories. But I think looking back over a longer range of time since the invention of the printing press, it's been possible for, increasingly possible over time for more people to tell their story or to get it out there. In the 20th century and the 21st century, as with social media and the Internet, it is really difficult to silence and get only one story out.
When I think of winners writing the history, I think that there's one narrative and we're going to tell it our way and we're going to make sure that everybody follows along. And it's really hard to do that now. Totalitarian states have a hard time keeping their citizens from hearing and communicating our information. Borders are more porous than they have been. We know that during the Soviet Union and even in other countries with totalitarian regimes, the history books, the murals, the monuments are very much controlled by the government. In order to tell a certain story, to put their spin on what happened. Stalin rose to power and he painted other people out of murals to put himself into them, actually physically rewriting-redrawing history. It's harder to do that nowadays. And with more access to artifacts and to written sources.
Yes, to some degree, the winners got to preserve more of their own stuff. But that didn't mean that the losers lost all their stuff. Yes. People with power have the ability to get their story told, published, accepted. It goes into textbooks and so forth. That's very true. The historian's job is, though, it should be a job of serving truth rather than serving the powerful. It happens more than maybe we would think.
[10:32] Mike Gray: So, to whatever extent that has been true, it's probably less true now. And our problem is more: is this conspiracy theory that's being unspooled here. Are those sources really credible sources? What's the background of the person who's making these claims? So, we may have a problem on the other side of things. That's very different from somebody who's poor but has a story to tell and has some documents to prove it—but doesn't have access to an audience through publication. They can't afford that or nobody's going to publish it. You can self-publish these days.
[11:16] Brenda Schoolfield: Right.
[11:17] Mike Gray: So, if we restrict ourselves to talking about people who are credible historians, which is an interesting idea, right. Are you bothered by the existence of competing, I mean, strongly competing historical narratives for the same time period or for a consequential event? And I know I haven't exactly prepped you for this question, but there's a book that we're both looking at here. It's a 700-page book that I own but have yet to read called The Dawn of Everything, written by an archaeologist and an anthropologist, published in 2021. And one of the people who commented on the jacket, a historian at UCLA, Robin D. G. Kelly, (I don't know if you know him) a US historian, says of the book this: (I'll quote here):
“It's a thorough and elegant [here's the word] refutation of evolutionary theories of history. It introduces us to a world populated by smart, creative, complicated people who for thousands of years invented virtually every form of social organization and pursued freedom, knowledge, experimentation and happiness way before the Enlightenment. The authors don't just debunk the myths, they give a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about and why they persist.”
It's a very different narrative about early humanity and they debunk this idea of cavemen savages, which happens to be problematic from a biblical worldview too. But that's an example. So, a historian knows this is like upsetting the apple cart that we slowly made progress and we finally got to the Enlightenment and we're reaping the fruits of the enlightened. That's an example and I could give others. I saw a review of a book this morning in the New York Times called Christendom, which was a rewriting of the early history of the church from 300 or so to about 1300. His view is very different. Like we have sold a very different narrative than what the sources represent. So, a historian, again a credentialed historian, so what do you do? I think maybe for some people that throws this element of subjectivity into it, you got people who have access to same sources and are coming to very different conclusions.
[14:08] Brenda Schoolfield: I really want to check out the Christendom book because one of the things about the history of Christianity between 300 and 1300 is the need for the Bishop of Rome and that structure in the west to justify itself as the leader of Christendom. I would be really interested to see what's been buried. It doesn't surprise me that there would be things that haven't come to light if you consider where our history of what do we know of what has happened. Average Joe's and I would include myself here too, I mean, when it comes to consuming the know, reading about it and so forth, we're reading what other people have distilled and in a sense, we're trusting that they're distilling it properly. We can't go back and look at every document and bury ourselves in the archives and that's what other people do, and they find new evidence, new documents.
I think one of the things we have to understand about the past is that it's so big, the past is enormous and we have only a fragment of the past within our grasp. And of that you have people who say, oh well, I consider this fragment more important than that fragment. And this then becomes the story. In a way, the story is far richer than and far more complex than what we can tell because we have only part of the past.
We have been influenced by the people who've written history before us to think in ways that say well, the Enlightenment is AHA. We can think science, we don't have to think superstition, religion, magic, we put that aside and we take on science and now we can control things. We've been influenced by that.
And so, to read a narrative that says, well, what happened before? Put this aside. What actually was going on? It doesn't suit the people who want to highlight the Enlightenment as the moment of turning to admit that there were some pretty remarkable accomplishments of human beings in the past before the Enlightenment. And really in the West, especially, the narrative of the coming Enlightenment and the triumph of science is one that actually tends to make us dismiss the stuff that happened before. The old ancient stuff. Why do we even need to look at that? They're not as advanced as we have so much more information at our fingertips. We know so much more about the universe and about the human body and about the animal kingdom and the oceans and all of that, even though we still have so much more to learn, we know so much more. And that makes us tend to dismiss what has happened in the past as well. They didn't know what they were doing anyway, because they're just mucking about.
[17:29] Mike Gray: As a scientist, I actually have very much looked forward to this discussion about history, because science is properly the study of repeating phenomena. Everybody would agree about that. And it appears that history is inherently the study of non-reproducible events.
While I was in graduate school, to show you how strongly that comes out, there was a spoof periodical called the Journal of Irreproducible Results that camouflaged itself. I mean, they had advertisements and everything in there. It was all a spoof. Like, you had to have at least a master's degree to understand why it was funny. So, does this idea that history studies non-reproducible events and science studies repeating phenomena have any traction with you, or does that need to be tempered in some way?
[18:31] Brenda Schoolfield: I hope that someday my students will, in saying, you remember Schoolfield always said, I hope this is the phrase that comes out of their mouth: “History does not repeat, but it rhymes.”
Because I feel like I'm always fighting against that line taken out of context, by the way, by Santayana, that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And it's been quoted in a number of different ways. It's actually ripped completely out of context. The context of his essay, where this comes up is in talking about how human beings learn; we depend on what we have learned prior to advance forward, and that is as an individual, but also as a group.
So, in other words, wouldn't it be a real pain if every morning you had to relearn how to tie your shoes or how to use the toilet, how to dress yourself, how to cook an egg? I mean, Santayana is saying, this is how we advance, by building on what we've already learned. He's not talking about history as a discipline at all. At all. But it's been used to say, well, you know, it's just history repeating itself. We're doomed to repeat it because we didn't learn the lesson the first time around.
History rhymes. Given that human nature is the same although expressed differently across cultures, we can find patterns in human behavior. If we can't find patterns in human behavior, then psychology or any kind of behavioral science is impossible. But we can find patterns in human behavior. But the pattern is not predictive or even necessarily—It's not a formula that leads to the exact same result.
An example that I like to use is the understanding that we have in the behavioral sciences that a child who's brought up amidst a host of adverse childhood experiences actually, ACE is an acronym for this. There's a list of them. And the more of these that you can check off for a kid the more likely that child is to have trouble.
If you grew up in a household that had a lot of violence with an alcoholic father and with barely adequate nutrition, with lower level of education, you are doomed in that cycle. But what we don't account for is there's some truth to this in that there's a pattern that we see this happen. But not every kid who was raised by an alcoholic father becomes an alcoholic father. And I know that because that's my dad. My dad had an alcoholic father. My father was not an alcoholic father. My husband had an alcoholic father, but my husband was not an alcoholic father. So, we know that there can be patterns. We can see that, yes, many who are in households where alcohol is abused will grow up and abuse alcohol and maybe even abuse their loved ones. We also know that that's not the only choice that human beings have. And because human beings are making choices, we can't say that history is going to repeat itself.
I also like to use the image of not being able to cross the same river twice. The river is not the same because the water that's flowing across is not the same water that flowed across the first time you crossed it. You are not the same. The time is not the same. Does it work to build a bridge across to cross it? Yes. But maybe the bridge that I build now is different from the one that will be built 20 years from now or 50 years from now or 100 years from now to accommodate this river. That's probably going to change in its course in the flow, in whatever is in the river as well and how the river waters might be used before they get here so there are patterns.
[23:26] Mike Gray: Our minds really like patterns. That's the way we're wired.
[23:30] Brenda Schoolfield: Exactly.
[23:30] Mike Gray: We go to look for a pattern as a way of making sense out of something. My example would be actually the influenza pandemic of 1918. So, for a variety of reasons (some of them inscrutable to me as a microbiologist who actually took every course that my institution offered—even a course in public health), microbiology gave only a touching reference to the 1918 epidemic. But when we're in the middle of COVID and it's the second worldwide pandemic, what do we want? Well, we’ve got all of this lack of clarity and perspective about where we go from here. So, we naturally reached back to that pandemic. Well, and I did too, and studying the pandemic, there were aspects of human behavior that made no sense at all. That led to multiple waves of influenza, although there wasn't a vaccine at the time. There were human behavioral aspects that were strong initially and waned eventually to the point where nobody wanted to talk about it.
Well, that's a pattern that all of us lived out in the pandemic. In fact, some people may have just checked out of this podcast because I mentioned COVID because we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to hear it. There are different perspectives, polarizing perspectives about it. So yes, we reach to the past to see if there's any wisdom or any predictive value about what happened with them that might apply in our situation.
Because you are working to teach your students to think like historians, I'm sure you're familiar with Sam Weinberg's book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. In contrast to that title, nobody would write a book and say Scientific Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts because every child is a budding scientist. Every child during twos, threes, and fours frustrates the fire out of their parents because they want to examine things minutely. And they're constantly asking why questions. And the why question will be followed up with another why question because they're looking for ultimate causation. So there seems to be—certainly Weinberg's being whimsical in making that statement—but what do you make with him calling historical thinking unnatural? And does that present an obstacle to your quest?
[26:29] Brenda Schoolfield: He raises the issues of how well, you were saying you know, children are little scientists. And I think maybe Sam would say that we get a little bit of that historian beaten out of us when we're told, stop asking why. Stop asking about why. Stop asking.
[26:54] Mike Gray: We get the scientists beat out of us.
[26:56] Brenda Schoolfield: We get the percussionist beat out of us too, because little kids are percussionists. They like to investigate sound. And Rob, my husband, would say (he was a percussionist), and he said, every two to five year old is a percussionist, and only some of them survive to explore it later. And I'm always telling my students, you were at some point discouraged from asking why, and I want you to ask it again. But I want to give you some tools so that you can figure out and I know in science you're given some tools for scientific thinking. In the history classes that I teach, I want you to learn some tools so that you can think historically. It's unnatural in some ways in that I think he's actually playing on the idea that it's unnatural, but it should be more natural than it is.
[28:02] Mike Gray: You mean it leverages part of the way we're wired, but we don't recognize that connection?
[28:07] Brenda Schoolfield: Right.
So, you want to figure out why something happened. And we're not talking about how a bug, why the ants are doing what they're doing, but now we're talking about why people are doing what people are doing. And we want to ask why do we do this? Why do we do this this way? There's a need for understanding that crosses all disciplines, I think, for history.
Figuring out what happened before can help us look at the consequences of what happened before. Oh, we do it this way because back when it was done a different way, it didn't work, and now this is working. Well, what if there's now some technology or some ability that we can do it a different way, or our attitudes have changed about what's possible, and so now we can do it a different way? What I can do as a history professor in teaching my students about historical thinking is to get them to recover that curiosity and that willingness to explore and look for answers. And not that I want them to question everything that they've ever been told, but we should understand why.
Why do we tell the story of this a certain way? Why is Herodotus's account of this event different from another historian's account of this event? There's where I think even if you're not terribly enamored of Greek history, your curiosity might be piqued. There would be a reason to tell a story two different ways way back in Greek times. Well, yeah. And we know that there are reasons for telling stories two different ways in the 21st century, and there are reasons for telling the story a different way in the 19th century than we tell it in the 20th century or 21st century.
I mean, you look at the way that slavery in the United States has been explained, and it's one of those stories that has changed tremendously over time. If you looked at most history textbooks and books, even specialist books written about the South in the early 20th century, late 19th century, you get an explanation of slavery that doesn't look anything like what we see in textbooks today. That slaves were happy to be on plantations, and that especially from some Southern historians, that the civil war was so disruptive because it uprooted a system that was working. But when we go back and look at some of the documents from that era, we start questioning, why do you define that as a working system when it kept a certain number of human beings in situations and in conditions that were really quite harsh? For the benefit of what? For the benefit of the few who profited from the trade in cotton and so forth.
And even looking at how slave rebellions had been talked about and how that history has been told that has changed over time, as historians have looked back at documents from newspapers to personal journals to plantation journals and found out, well, slave resistance was not just on the big scale. When you have the open rebellion, it was in an everyday manner. And here we have slaves, enslaved people who were quietly, for the most part, working out a space to make their own choices.
[32:47] Mike Gray: So, thinking about history is not—the things that you've touched on are actually not—unnatural.
The curiosity piece—I actually spent several episodes back in season five on recovering your curiosity—which I think is the foundation of being a learner period. No matter where your curiosity takes you, you've got to recognize there's so much that could enrich your life and change your perspective, and to be insulated from it is not a good thing. So, children recognize that they don't know, and they want to know. And adults need to recognize that they know so little that effectively they don't know either, and they should want to know.
This idea of asking questions generated from my curiosity is as basic, you're saying, to history as it is to science. So, a discordant voice comes in here from the historian David Hackett Fisher, who once said about why questions, and he is giving himself some space to be overruled, which I think you're going to do. He says, quoting:
“In my opinion, and I may be a minority of one, that favorite adverb of historians should be consigned to the semantical rubbish heap. A why question tends to become a metaphysical question. It is also an imprecise question for the adverb ‘Why’ is slippery and difficult to define. Sometimes it seeks a cause, sometimes a motive, sometimes a reason, sometimes a description, sometimes a process, sometimes a purpose, sometimes a justification. A ‘why’ question lacks direction and clarity. It dissipates a historian's energies and interests. Why did the Civil War happen? Why was Lincoln shot?”
And he goes on from there. He's obviously down on why questions. And you're not. And I'm not. So, what kinds of why questions do you think history is equipped to answer?
[35:16] Brenda Schoolfield: Well, I frankly think that Fisher is being overly picky. “Why” is where we start, and we know that the answer to why is complicated by a myriad selection of contingent factors.
[35:37] Mike Gray: If I could just interject here. I think for most non historians looking at history, history is a what. It is not a why.
[35:43] Brenda Schoolfield: Exactly. History is a what. History is a list of facts, and.
[35:51] Mike Gray: Maybe I care about that what.
[35:52] Brenda Schoolfield: And maybe I don't care about that what. But the whole thing about it being facts, that the history is a bunch of facts, and we can't avoid the why should I care? Why should I care about this? And the fact is, it's like that heap of bricks. Why do I care about that? That heap of bricks is just in my way until it can become something that is useful. And so that list of names and who cares if you can name all the monarchs of England in order? Who cares if you can name all the presidents in order? It's not until you start putting them into the story, connecting them, seeing how they're connected, that any of this becomes useful.
I was thinking about this. If you take a set of names and you would go, well, that's just a random set of names. Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray, Cal Ripkin, Jr. Jim Palmer, Frank Robinson. Who cares? If I say that to a baseball fan or in particular a Baltimore Orioles fan, they would go—they're all Baltimore Orioles. And you've got baseball fans who know an enormous number of facts: RBIs, earned run averages, all these things. (I don't know what I'm talking about). They can tell you how long certain games went, how many times this team has been in the World Series or how many times they almost made the pennant and all this kind of thing. And they are doing something that I'm not doing with that list of names—they are connecting. Those data points aren't irrelevant to them because they connect to a story. All those men that I listed, they are part of the history of the Orioles, how they built the team, how they contributed to the team, how they contributed to American society in a broader context. Till those pieces start connecting together, they don't mean anything. And no, you're not going to learn them because they don't seem to have any logic or any kind of connection.
[38:16] Mike Gray: There's a why question behind them.
[38:19] Brenda Schoolfield: Oh, absolutely! There's a why. There's a why. Why do we care?
[38:23] Mike Gray: Is it something like “why were the Baltimore Orioles a successful, legendary team?”
[38:28] Brenda Schoolfield: Right.
[38:29] Brenda Schoolfield: Why did they make it some years, and why didn't they make it some years and what made them great? What kinds of other lessons do you learn from someone like Cal Ripkin Jr. I'm not a baseball fan. I like to watch baseball. I think the game itself is fascinating. I can't claim that I have a particular team or that I know a bunch of facts about any particular team. I like the sport. I grew up right outside of Baltimore, and Cal Ripken Jr. was the guy who never missed a game. His consistency in showing up helped contribute to his numbers of hits and home runs and all the other things that go into a baseball player statistics. He became something of a symbol. He was an example. Be consistent. Like Cal Ripken. He shows up. His connection to the game and his contributions to the game make his name significant and his numbers significant and his longevity.
You know, if you don't associate Queen Victoria with know, who cares that she was until Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch of England, who cares? What does she have to do with anything else? I mean. The answers to what, where, when, who and how. Questions help build up the account that draws conclusions about the consequences of what happened, even if our conclusions may seem frail or we say, well, as far as we know, this is what we can say about the outcome of this battle and its impact on the development of the Roman Empire.
It's the why question that gets us into, well, who was involved and how were they involved and what did they do and when did they do it? And then we start looking at how they're connected, and that starts to satisfy our answer for why. So, David Hackett Fisher might not like why questions, but he operates on why.
[40:57] Mike Gray: You could tell me we're assembling an answer to a why. But I think I would like the why question to be in the foreground to help me to reckon with it.
[41:10] Mike Gray: This is part of a process that might be longer than you thought it would be in gathering what we need to answer this why question.
So you give me another example of a why question for me right now. I could do the COVID Pandemic and I could look back at 1918 and I could say, why was that swept under the rug? Why did people get tired of talking about it? I could generate whys for that kind of thing. Can you help me with how do we generate the why? Because I think that's where most people are. And I think the more we foreground the why, the better for the people who need to have some patience with the process of answering the why.
[42:01] Brenda Schoolfield: Do we have revolutions continuing? Why did India want to not be ruled by Britain? Why does India not cooperate fully with the US. Britain? Why would they gravitate toward China? Or at one point, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union? Why would the leaders of India not pick a good, strong ally like the United States to follow in the Cold War? And why do they continue to try to hold the United States at arm's length or hold the British at arm's length?
Well, what happened to them in the past? Do they have a reason to be distrustful or to be suspicious or to even be resentful of what has happened in the past? So, in my course, we talk about, well, we have a unit on revolutions, but we also have a unit on empire, on empires. And with the British Empire. I pull up the experience with India and the British takeover of India, why the British were interested in India in the first place, and then how they went about extending their influence in India. And then how that also left to say a bad taste in the mouth of the Indians is just to underplay what happens when Indians in 1857.
So, what does 1857 have to do with Indians and their relationship with Britain? Well, whole sections of the British Indian Army who were made up of Indian soldiers with British commanders. Indians weren't allowed to be in the officer corps, but they could be infantry. They were foot soldiers; they had had enough. They got word that we still to this day don't know how much of this is rumor and how much of it was fact, but the rumor is important. We know that the rumor went out that and I think this is backed up with some truth about what they were actually doing with cartridge packets. So to load their guns, they've got to have powder and shot and the powder is kept in little packets that are sealed with tallow to keep them from getting damp. And most men didn't—you don't have time to cut them off. You bite them, you bite off the tip and you pour the powder in and you pound the shot in and then you fire your gun.
Well, the rumor goes out that the tallow is made of animal fat, either cow or pig. And this hits the Indian troops and they're horrified. They're disgusted. The rumor goes out that when they are biting these, they are actually biting into what's left of an animal. And for Hindus, the cow is sacred, for Muslims, the pig is unclean. Who are these British? They don't give two cents about what matters to us. And though that's not the only thing contributing to this unrest, and we go into some other attitudes that the British had expressed and how they were ruling the Indians and the Indian sepoys. This sepoy is the Indian soldier. They have weapons and they turn them on the British. And the mutiny lasts for about a year and it's horrible, it's bloody. There are way more Indians killed than British killed. Although there are atrocities on both sides, it ends.
The British decide, oh, we've got to govern India differently now. We can't use the East India Company, we are going to come in and rule it directly. That doesn't make for much more understanding. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were some men, both Indian and British, who said India should be nurtured, to go on and mature as its own country so that it could govern itself and be in relationship with Britain, but not have to be ruled by Britain. This is an expensive proposition for the British to keep the government operating in India with British men. But Parliament's reluctant to let go of this and they put laws down to try to stop dissent, which usually doesn't work.
There's a pattern that we see. If you tell somebody you can't do this, the human response is, “make me, I'm going to do it anyway.” Right? At a peaceful gathering of Indians who were listening to nationalist speakers, the man who was responsible for local peace decided to his troops needed to fire into this crowd. And in the aftermath, when Parliament ran an investigation Dyer reported that his soldiers had 1600 rounds of ammunition. There were 1600 rounds of ammunition distributed among these men and there were over 1100 casualties and 400, approximately 400 dead. So just about every bullet hit a person.
The British government removed him from power, but the British public put up a kind of defense fund for this general to help him because he's not going to get a pension. It gets back to India that Dyer got his hand smacked for this Amritsar massacre, as it becomes known. And that makes the Indians all the more willing to fight to get out from under the British. Well, come to when the British finally leave. Now the independent India says we're going to be independent, and we don't have to side with the people who were our colonists or the people who associated with our colonizers. We're not going to be that way. But we also don't want to be completely in another camp. We are going to be completely independent, and we get a better picture of why there.
Why do the Indians make the choices that they do? And that is obviously a complicated question that requires as you dig further, you find more. And what I hope students go when students leave the class, I hope that not so much that they remember everything that we ever talked about. I know they're not going to do that, but will they remember? I hope they keep asking the question and do some investigation and look at how people have answered these questions. Well, could there maybe be more evidence that's not being considered here? That's part of it. I try not to burden my students with too much of the facts. I want to give them enough facts that they can connect so that they see, oh, there's a way to make this connect and it makes sense. And that's why somebody cares about the Amritsar massacre or about the Seapoi Mutiny. Or know Gandhi's Salt March.
[50:26] Mike Gray: So, this is all very helpful. I think we're all admonished that why questions which we're wired for, demonstrate that we care. And that what we really need to do as adult listeners is to fan our curiosity and ask more questions, not fewer. And that the answers might look a little different, but there's a whiff of cause and effect in what you've talked about here and that's satisfying. It's an explanation. It's not a prediction in the sense that scientists would use it to forecast what's going to happen with a repeatable event. But it's definitely a powerful tool that allows us to enter into a new situation with a more cogent mind frame than like everything is disconnected and you just have to make it up as you go along. Thanks for helping us rekindle our curiosity today.
[51:34] Brenda Schoolfield: I hope that you're curious. I love that you have a big 700-page history book on your desk.
[51:43] Mike Gray: Well, and I need to read it. I need to read it now. The reviews were marvelous. I thought, if that's a rethinking of early history and that is something that my discipline misrepresents from an evolutionary perspective.
[51:59] Brenda Schoolfield: And I think my discipline misrepresents as well from an evolutionary perspective. Right.
[52:04] Mike Gray: That the final answer is not in. And so, what has been glossed over and misrepresented? We can keep going a long time. Thank you for helping today.
[52:14] Brenda Schoolfield: You're welcome. Thank you for what you do to promote curiosity and good teaching.
[52:20] Mike Gray: You're most welcome.
[52:21] Mike Gray: I can say emphatically, that's my pleasure!