| | A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts on Xanga concerning heroes (see http://dannwigner.xanga.com/583275351/heroes/ for an example). It amazes me when I check my "footprints" that those posts get read (or at least visited) again and again by people doing random searches on heroes. So, I thought that it might be worthwhile to return to the subject for a couple of posts -- especially when the concept of a "hero" seems to be ambiguous. For this post, I wanted to turn to how heroes interact with history. To do so, I wanted to quote Thomas Carlyle, the great English man of letters, who wrote what is still a very authoritative source on the subject, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History" (which is really a compilation of lectures he gave on the subject in 1840). His work begins in this fashion: "We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men [I would say 'and women,' but I doubt that Carlyle would share this view], their manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did; -- on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may be justly considered, were the history of these." Now, this preamble to Carlyle's lecture demonstrates a very particular view of how heroes operate in history, but it is more illustrative of a particular view of history. Specifically, Carlyle, like those of his generation, view history as primarily the story of the great ones and what they accomplished. This view of history dominated the thinking of Western people in, at least, the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century. However, this view of history has been challenged by histories of the common man, just look at Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" ( http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-Present/dp/0060838655/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244738129&sr=8-1) for an example. So, my question is which view do you prefer? Is history the stories of those with great ambition and accomplishment, or should history be the record of the rest of us? |
