I’ve been reading “The Ottoman Centuries” by Lord Kinross and he committed so many egregious insults to my intelligence in the first few pages that I suddenly realized why I can’t read most books on history.
To put it bluntly, the writing sucks. The worst and most egregious sin Kinross commits is that his descriptions of the founders of the Ottoman state read like they were written by some slobbering Pubbie Bush apologist on drugs. Each founder is more noble and wonderful than the last – masterful leaders, the souls of temperance and fair play, courageous warriors yet also virtuous and religious men. (All men, of course, this is ancient Islam we’re talkin’ about.)
Well, you can’t read much of that kind of glurge without wanting to puke. Kinross has all the facts and a good writing style, but his constant blowjob descriptions of the Ottoman leaders just makes you want to puke.
Sadly, this is why I thought American history was boring when I encountered it in school – all the founders were courageous wonderful men, noble, wise, etc. Puh-leaze! Insulting my intelligence repeatedly is NOT going to make me smarter.
Kinross also lets pass without comment the early Ottoman’s feeling that it was their job to conquer their neighbors by force of arms and so forth. How about at least putting the morality of the times in context, so we’ll know if we’re dealing with an exceptionally bloodthirsty bunch or a par-for-the-course bloodthirsty bunch.
There are a few writers on history whose work I’ve enjoyed – Alan Moorehead, Barbara Tuchman, etc. but Jeebus there are a lot of boring, donkey-brained fruitbats out there.
Try Samuel Eliot Morrison. In High School AP History we read The Growth of the American Republic by him and Henry Steele Commager. Morrison wrote the first volume, Commager wrote the second, which was not nearly as good. Class consisted of chatting about politics, there was no homework except reading the book, no tests that I can remember, and we all did great on the AP test.
Morrison also wrote the official Naval History of WW II. I read his volume on the Battle of Midway which was fantastic.
One of the main problems with history nonfiction is firmly planted in the victorian habit of upper class dilletants to feel that they had to do something…so we end up saddled with books of ghastly poetry, and a lot of semi-educated nobs romanticizing history by barely halfassedly researching a subject and then publishing twaddle about it.
One thing the vickies never managed to understand was that the winners write the histories, and survivors never have anything good to say about the enemy. Hence such wonderful misconceptions about vikings, and any ‘wog’ culture. We have them to blame for many false ideas such as druidism [they pretty much used roman sources, and unfortunalte Tacitus and Julius Caesar had vested interest in having the celts considered unwashed animals.] Mistranslations abound, and frequently the monastics writing were changing things to emphasize certain aspects. Hell - look at the whole hooraw about King Arthur. Mentioned in a very early history in about 3 or 4 lines referring to a series of battles, then puffed up into a romance, then rewritten, now the new age twaddleists get their hands on it and try to make a character who was not in the original corpus some avenging ur-femininst.
FWIW, if someone mentions Richard the 3d to you, do you think of the Shakespeare hunchbacked chortling ogre or do you consider that he had a coronation ceremony that involved being stripped naked to the waist to prove that he was hale and healthy? If someone mentions the 2 princes in the Tower, do you immediately think of a hunchbacked chorteling Richard 3d sending in Will Tyburn to strangle the poor little bairns in their sleep, or could you step back and consider they may have died from disease and neglect and been buried secretly to maintain privacy?
Thanks to the internet, and modern technology, if I really have a burning need to see a document from the 1300s for some part of research I am doing, I can generally manage to get a photo copy of it [I bought a couple manuscript page repros from a museum in England last time I was there, cost me about $5US a page. Now I *can* see the diacritical marks that change the meaning of the words=) so my term paper of the time was able to be more accurate than before=)]
Patrick Balfour (aka Lord Kinross) does have a decidedly pro-Turkish viewpoint. If anything, his predecessor in the title, David Balfour was even more of a Turkophile. In his book on modern Turkey he essentially accepted everything the Turkish government had to say on the subject of Armenian history as gospel.
But don’t throw out all of history because of a few biased historians. The best thing to do is to read more history so you hear different viewpoints on the same issues (and learn to recognize one of the subtlest evidences of bias - sins of omission). I’d also highly recommend After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle - it’s a brilliant book on the subject of weighing historical evidence. It’s one of the most important books I’ve read in my life.
Yeah, I think I would have passed on the book if I had noticed it had been written by a “Lord” something – it was the topic that really interested me, as I’ve heard interesting things about the Ottomans and Byzantines and thought it might be fun to dig a little deeper.
However, I think I spotted a line in the author’s bio that said he was born in 1900 and died in 1973, so he’s not really a Victorian, though he could well be one of those old-school types who linger on in the wealthy classes long after the school has closed.
I tend to be a little dubious about histories that span all of Western civilization over a 500 year period. True, I read Wells’ Outline of History when I was younger, but now I tend to like more focussed works. Still, I’ll give Barzun a try if I can find anything by him in the local library – and I bet I can.
After the Fact sounds interesting, I’ll snoop around for it.
I think history is a fascination subject, and I can’t decide if the unutterable dullness which I encouter when reading most of it is a product of actual dullness and stupidity on the part of historians, or if I am an atypical history reader and don’t “get” history in the same way those who enjoy most histories do.
They can’t help being Lords - it’s a genetic condition.
Seriously, before you abandon all noble historians, check out Lord Julius Norwich. He wrote some excellent histories, including one of the best general histories of the Byzantine Empire.
The Ottoman Centuries is a somewhat typical of an earlier generation of chatty British popular survey. A similar in tone ( but better ) work would Stanley Wolpert’s survey history of India which was published about the same time. It’s still an adequate introduction, but outdated in a number of respects and to be taken with a generous helping of salt.
For a better written and more modern work in both tone and data, try The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe by Daniel Goffman ( 2002, Cambridge University Press ). It’s not a survey history, but it’s also not excessively dense.
Oh and actually if you do specifically want an intro survey history of the Ottoman, Justin McCarthy’s The Ottoman Turks:* An Introductory History to 1923* ( 1997, Addison Wesley Longman limited ) is definitely less dated than Lord Kinross’ book. I have it on my shelves, but have only skimmed it so I can’t give an unqualified recommendation. Even so it is obvious he has a lot more hard data and than Kinross, though at only ~380 pgs. of text you shouldn’t expect it to be encyclopedic.
Aha! A Ricardian! Somebody killed the princes, and Richard is the likely suspect. And, no, I don’t think he was an ogre - he was just typical royalty of the time, and, as you accurately mention, his supporters didn’t get to write the history.
Have you tried Simon Schama? His History of Britain is as good a read as any history I’ve encountered; I hear that Citizens (his chronicle of the French Revolution) is just as good.
You definitely won’t find any sucking-up to leaders in his books, although he isn’t exactly anti-authoritarian, either; he likes to delve deeply into the biographies hof his subjects. One favorite trick of his is to take a second- or third-tier pesonage - Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Orwell, early Victorian photographers - and use their life story as a means to illustrate the character of the age. He tends to focus more on the lives of the “ordinary” people than is usual in his field: for instance, he dismisses the entire series of fifteenth-century English power struggles as “bloody, ridiculous civil wars”, barely giving them a paragraph, while spending the rest of chapter on inheritance laws, crafts, and religious life in the Shires. His basic assumption is that the reader already knows the basics of British history, so there’s no real need to go over the tactical maneuvers of Agincourt and Trafalger; he’d rather write on how the public reacted to these battles back home.
Actually, I am not=) I couldn’t give a rats ass, other than it would be nice to know =)
It is simply one of the better examples you can give of political literary mudslinging=) People never seem to remember that Richard did actually have the exposed coronation ceremony, so that little hunchback warped arm problem would most certainly have been noticed…and the 2 princes in the tower were quite the issue.
