The people who teach us history aren’t always historians

By Douglas Brinkley

April 22, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

When documentarian Ken Burns debuted “The Civil War” on PBS in 1990, columnist George F. Will declared the nine-part series a “masterpiece of national memory” in which “our Iliad has found its Homer.” That was high praise for a 37-year-old New Hampshire filmmaker fresh out of the used-record-store business, and it was a bit demoralizing to me, a young U.S. historian fresh out of my PhD studies at Georgetown. With Burns’s opus, my chosen profession had just pole-vaulted into the Golden Era of history film documentary, while I was still using library card catalogues and reading dead people’s mail. Book writing, I feared, would be condemned to play second fiddle to “Ashokan Farewell,” the haunting violin theme that packed such an emotional wallop in “The Civil War.”

Ironically, it’s a new book — “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past” by the British historian Richard Cohen — that has me thinking again about the magnificence of “The Civil War,” and more broadly about the whole endeavor of my profession. Sprawling andwildly ambitious, idiosyncratic and also consistently readable and engaging, “Making History” dives deep into the way history-driven scholars and artists — from Burns to Shakespeare to Herodotus — have shaped the collective memory of humankind. Championing both famous and largely forgotten historians as well as storytellers, filmmakers and photographers, Cohen’s volume offers memorable anecdotes and reasoned judgment as it explores themes including the foundational mythos of the Old and New Testaments, the Roman era, the contributions of history-maker historians from Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill, Black American history from George W. Williams to Ibram X. Kendi, historical works from medieval texts to the New York Times Magazine’s recent “1619 Project,” and the failure of Japan to prosecute war criminals after World War II.

A former London publishing director and the author of “How to Write Like Tolstoy,” Cohen clearly prizes narrative flow over ivory-tower historical analysis, stressing novelists’ and playwrights’ ability to conjure the atmosphere of past times and places instead of just recording facts. In that regard, he places Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” as the most vivid way to understand the Napoleonic Wars — a view that might have been shared by Tolstoy himself, who refused to call his masterpiece fiction while also denying that it was a historical chronicle.

Cohen’s valorization extends to more recent historical novelists such as Shelby Foote, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison and Gore Vidal. He even creates the genre “History as a Nightmare” and anoints Soviet novelist and political dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn its master practitioner. To his credit, Cohen also quotes novelist Vladimir Nabokov dismissing the entire novelists-as-historians trope: “Can anybody be so naïve as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels?” Nabokov asked. “Certainly not. . . . The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales.”