The Long Durée

I've been thinking about my training in history lately, especially the idea of the long durée. For most of the last six years, I have been surrounded by students of history--or at least, on some level, in the general vicinity of them. This is the first time in my post-high school education when I have not been in a history program. And I'm starting to see how that has affected my way of thinking.

Students of history learn how to see processes, causation, correlation. We learn how to read and synthesize information quickly and accurately. We learn to see more that names, dates, and places. History is more than memorization of facts. Many of these aspects are only possible because most historians, now, have an understanding of history from a perspective of the long durée (or the long term, in English).

The long durée originated in the interwar period in economic history. The idea is that history cannot be studied as simply events in the short term. In order to understand how and why things happen, it is necessary to look at more than just the immediate causes. Imagine a picture: you only see what is happening in frame. You miss what led to those events and what is happening outside of the frame. The same is true of history. A picture of events doesn't show more than the immediate causes.

For example, a friend once asked me about the causes of the First World War. I told her that it was more complicated than she realized. The causes of the First World War, if you look at the short term, are mostly concerned with the politics around the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But, in the long term, really go back to Napoleon, at least.

Coming back to the present, this idea affects how I think about the events we discuss in class. I know most of the other students think about things in some form of "long term" but I think it might mean something different to non-historians. In my race theory class, we talk about the socio-historical context. And everyone agrees that it is important when discussing current topics of race. But sometimes, my socio-historical context feels like it is much longer and deeper than others'. This is not a bad thing--we need diversity in experience or life would be boring. It's just that, sometimes, it's hard to remember that what I think of obvious context, or related ideas, is not that obvious. And by the time I remember and find a way to explain myself, the moment has passed. And I've been misinterpreted.

I'm not sure I had a point to this. It's just been something I've been thinking about. Studying history prepares you for so much, but it does not prepare you for changing disciplines. I can write and debate and explain ideas and draw connections and conclusions. But I cannot share the interconnected web of the past that I see as I am doing those things. And it's isolating.

[Other than this, life is going well. I really like my new job--a sign that things to tend to turn out for the best. Classes, overall, are going well. I'm working on my term papers now, so I'm sure I'll blog about them at some point. Thanks for reading what turned out to be more serious than I'd anticipated.]