Studying History or Studying Churchill?

I’ve spent so many decades trying to learn history by reading history books! I’ve come to see that the goal of my lifetime project is a bit like trying to learn what other countries are like by reading travel books. But no travel book is a substitute for travel. No book about Italy can tell you as much about the land and its people as a visit to a to a grocery store in an Italian town. I’ll go farther: no picture of the Eiffel Tower can show you what it’s really like as much as an hour sipping coffee at a café on the sidewalks of Paris with the Tower in view.

Without a time machine, though, I can’t actually visit history to “really” learn it. But I’ve come to realize that by reading not books about history but books from history, I come as close as possible to visiting history. Spread out over this third decade of planned reading, I’ve been rereading Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I first read the multi-volume work forty years ago trying to learn the history of England (learning the history of other English-speaking nations was less urgent to me at the time) and was frustrated by how unclear some of it was. On my second experience with the series, the books are clearer, but only because I know better the history that the Great Briton narrates.

So now I understand Churchill better. Because Churchill had a reason for telling this history. Writing in England in the 1930s, he could assume that his audience had learned the salient facts in school. (O tempora! O mores!) His purpose was not to restate those facts but to synthesize them and teach a lesson about the greatness of that history of slowly growing justice and to convince his country and, more importantly, the United States that they had to join forces in order to stop the evils spreading across Europe and Asia. So of course he’s going to rush past philosophies and social movements, perhaps mentioning some of them but never explaining them, and concentrate on battles. It’s not a history; it’s a view of history. Since I need no convincing about the need for my country to help stop Hitler, what I get most out of these books is Churchill’s view.

And what a view! Britain took India “almost by mistake” and never intended to create an empire? Wow! The Battle of New Orleans created the “evil” myth that the War of 1812 had been a second war of independence? This from the leader of a country that once impressed our citizens while at sea and expected those Americans to fight Britain’s war. Maybe Churchill wanted to show that Americans and Britons worked “together” to stop Napoleon and hoped the story would inspire us to work together again to stop another tyrant trying to take over Europe?

Despite howlers like these, I’m enjoying the books and I’m glad I’m rereading them. In some ways they’re worse now (my naive younger self may have believed him forty years ago when he said India came under British rule by an innocent series of mistakes), but in other ways they’re better, too, and somehow better because they’re sometimes worse, because now my purpose is to learn Churchill, virtues and flaws together. Anyway, here’s the moral of my story: read novels and poetry and philosophy and theology from England’s history in order to learn the history. Or read a dry textbook. Then read Churchill.