Book Review: The Story of Mankind

[osprey_archer]

“All times and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding generations play tag with each other.” - Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind

I actually ended up enjoying The Story of Mankind, which I was not expecting, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve put off reading it for twenty years. I expected that this first winner of the Newbery Medal would be a dry tome, chosen more for Weightiness (in the literal as well as moral sense: it’s five hundred pages long) than literary value. But in fact it’s a lively, well-paced read, although inevitably dated; after all, it is literally one hundred years old.

But it’s not exactly a caveat to tell the reader to take the book with a grain of salt, when, van Loon himself instructs the reader to do so. He gives a brief sketch of his own life and tastes, and explains, “I state these few facts deliberately that you may know the personal bias of the man who wrote this history and may understand his point-of-view. The bibliography at the end of this book, which represents all sorts of opinions and views, will allow you to compare my ideas with those of other people. And in this way, you will be able to reach your own final conclusions with a greater degree of fairness than would otherwise be possible.”

I’ve seen this sort of “laying my cards on the table” note from modern historians, who often seem to think that their particular generation invented this sort of thing; but no. Van Loon got there a hundred years ago in a popular children’s book. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

On that note, I was particularly fascinated to discover the persistence of certain historical myths, despite all attempts at debunking. When I was growing up, history books patiently explained that, despite popular misconceptions, most educated Europeans in Columbus’s day did know the Earth was round. And here’s van Loon, a hundred years ago, patiently explaining the exact same thing!

As he says in another context, “Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish.” Old misinformation lives, and lives, and lives - in this case because it tells us something we want to hear about people in Ye Olden Days: they were stupid. (And, by implication, we are smarter, and will not make the same mistakes they did.)

But van Loon is not immune to such stories, either. He repeats a tale, which I first heard from my father, that the director of the US Patent Office once claimed that “the Patent Office [should] be abolished, because ‘everything that possibly could be invented had been invented’” - except my dad dated it to 1900, while van Loon says it happened in the 1830s! The irony is apparently most delicious when you envision this incident happening about a hundred years ago.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

in this case because it tells us something we want to hear about people in Ye Olden Days: they were stupid. (And, by implication, we are smarter, and will not make the same mistakes they did.)

*nods a lot* It really does get frustrating. Hey, we could be learning stuff, but instead we're just practising repeating old chestnuts and indulging in chronological snobbery!

But oh well. Humans are going to human, I suppose. :-/

I'm glad it turned out surprisingly fun after all. That is very cool!

[osprey_archer]

How can we think that we're smarter when we can't even wrap our heads around "Actually people DID know the world was round"? We've had so many generations to learn it and yet it Has Not Sunk In.

[regshoe]

Sounds like an interesting read! Yes, I suppose those historical myths contribute to the idea that people in Ye Olden Days were somehow fundamentally different from us (and we're better, of course), rather than just being the same sort of people in a different historical period. Reading a hundred-year-old history book must be a fascinating way of looking at those ideas about time and history and so on—history in history, as it were.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, fascinating is the right word for it! It was so interesting to see, for example, that Napoleon was clearly still a live issue in van Loon's mind, even though he'd been dead for so long - sort of how people today still see Hitler as a live issue, although in Napoleon's case the legacy was so mixed instead of just bad. Or the fact that van Loon blames the Treaty of Paris after Waterloo for years of disorder in Europe, ultimately resulting in the Great War, just as historians today blame the Treaty of Versailles after World War I for World War II.

(I was also REALLY struck by van Loon's emphasis on the continual revolutions and small wars in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. I've seen more recent historians emphasize that there wasn't a big European war for a hundred years between Waterloo and the outbreak of the Great War, which is true, but ignores so many smaller conflicts and a continual sense of churning disorder in many countries...)