Most of us remember history as a series of Big Events: wars, revolutions, inventions, disasters, and so forth. (Historians in recent decades have done an immense amount of really amazing work studying day-to-day life in the past, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them aside from other historians.)
The trouble with Big Events is that we only know after the fact which events are the Big ones. The Protestant Reformation of Luther was a Big Event, but similar insurgencies like that of John Wycliffe were not.
This means that sometimes people react to little events as if they are Big Events, and later generations laugh at them for their "hysteria" and "over-reaction." The recent "Occupy Wall Street" movement is an example: in 2011 politicians and journalists seized on it as the next great American social/political movement. Three years later it's about as relevant as Disco.
And, of course, often people react to Big Events as if they're just another ordinary thing. We wonder at the way Europeans reacted to the rise of Hitler and the events leading up to World War II — but of course they didn't know Hitler was anything but a crackpot political extremist, nor did they know that the series of crises in Europe during the 1930s were leading up to anything.
This is a common problem in fiction, particularly historical fiction and science fiction. Historical novels often revolve around Big Events of the past, while science fiction stories frequently revolve around Big Events of the future. In both, there's a remarkable tendency for people to know, somehow, which events are the Big ones, even before they happen.
I recall an anthology of alternate-history stories, Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick; the stories was based on the premise that each of the Presidential elections in the United States had gone the other way, so that people like Thomas Dewey or Henry Clay reached the White House instead of Truman or Polk.
What struck me on reading Alternate Presidents was how two events — World War II and the American Civil War — tended to "colonize" the decades of history leading up to them. All the alternate Presidencies of the 1840s and 1850s turned into alternate Civil War stories, while most of the elections after 1916 or so turned into alternate World War Two stories. Admittedly, it's more interesting to read about an alternate World War Two than about an alternate Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but nevertheless it was striking to me how those Big Events swallowed up the history around them.
While no doubt a Clay administration in 1844 would very probably have had a big influence on the growing conflict over slavery, at the time politicians had other fish to fry. There was the Oregon Crisis, another round of the Tariff issue, the Mexican War, and various other issues to face. (In fact, one reason that Big Events can get so Big is that people are busy dealing with other matters and simply don't have the attention to spare.)
So I want to urge fiction writers: don't assume your historical characters know (or care) about the Big Events coming up. English farmers in Shropshire probably didn't find out about the Spanish Armada until its ships were rotting on Norwegian beaches, and it's jarring when they act like they're following events on CNN in real time.
But of course not all Big Events happen in fiction. Right now it looks like Russia is fixing to annex another chunk of Ukraine. To students of history it bears a disturbing similarity to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, in which Germany snapped up bits of Czechoslovakia. Both times the aggressors claimed to be safeguarding minority populations of "their" nationality. In 1938 it ultimately led to Germany swallowing up Czechoslovakia as Europe slid towards war.
In 2014 . . . ? We don't know. This could be the start of a new Cold War, the spark of a hot one, or just another crisis people will barely remember in a couple of years (outside Ukraine, anyway). Will future generations look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, or wonder how we could be so blind?
"Admittedly, it's more interesting to read about an alternate World War Two than about an alternate Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but nevertheless it was striking to me how those Big Events swallowed up the history around them."
Sharp!
I'm writing an alternate WWII/Manhattan Project novel & it's useful to recall that all presents seem fresh and contingent--a point historians seldom convey.
Posted by: Gregory Benford | 05/04/2014 at 06:01 PM