Interaction: The past

Myers: Hello, and welcome to Interaction. I’m Debbie Myers, and we have an important programme to get to today. This is our examination of the past. In the next hour, we will be telling you everything you need to know about the past. What happened? Why do we remember it? Can we trust things we wrote down about it? Why is it important? Our panel will hopefully shed light on all of these questions. Let’s meet them now. Joining us from Auckland, New Zealand is the noted historian and author of Sixty People Who Made a Difference Even Though You’ve Never Heard of Them, Mr Charles Page.

Page: Hello.

Myers: In London, England, UK is the first president of the Hounslow Historical Society, Ms Corinne Dixon.

Dixon: Good evening.

Myers: From Paris, France is the professor of philosophy at the University of Les Halles, Mr Jean-Alastair Porfignon.

Porfignon: Good evening.

Myers: And with me here in our Warwickshire studios is the host of Ireland Radio Three’s Yesterday Today, Ms Solda Hanney.

Hanney: Good to be here.

Myers: Welcome all of you. Charles, let’s go to you first. Some say the most important event in human history was the French Revolution. Others, the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Still others, the founding of the Internet. What would you say is the most important single event in human history?

Page: Well, Debbie, I don’t believe, and never have believed, that individual events bear great significance. Events can cause people to change the way they see the world, certainly, but the world does not change with a single event. Instead, events are milestones – markers, if you will – that represent the broader, more gradual changes that are occurring in humanity. The French Revolution, for instance. Was it merely a period of upheaval in France that removed and executed the monarch and instituted a liberal democracy? Or was it an event that sits at the confluence of many different trends, including the rising power of the public and the growing sense of the rights of the individual, all of which began decades or centuries earlier and would continue decades or centuries hence?

Myers: Well... er... that’s certainly a lot to consider. I’m sure we’ll be coming back to that many times during our programme. Corinne, you are taking a more local perspective on history with the Hounslow Historical Society. How has Hounslow mattered in recent history?

Dixon: Well, Debbie, in fact the study of Hounslow’s history does have great relevance as it is in fact a microcosm of the history of London and indeed the whole of England. Since its founding, Hounslow has been an important town for those travelling to and from London, the site of a military encampment, a major industrial site, and currently a home of commercial offices. So you can see its relevance to the rise of cities, the Industrial Revolution, and the recent development of the service based economy.

Myers: All right. Well, that’s definitely a new perspective. Jean-Alastair, to take a broader perspective, what is the significance of history? Why do we study it at all?

Porfignon: History exists to put events of the past into context, to show how they fit into our present world, and how they shaped our modern world. By knowing how what we see now came to be, we gain more insight as to what will happen to it in future, and how it will evolve. Knowledge of the past helps us to prepare for the future.

Myers: Well, some noble sentiments there. Solda, you host a popular history programme on Irish radio. What aspects of history have you found to be most popular amongst your listeners?

Hanney: Well, Debbie, there are a number of topics that we often return to. One topic that has been surprisingly fascinating to our listeners is the Clonycavan Man. This is a body discovered in peat a few years ago in Clonycavan, in County Meath in Ireland. It’s an intriguing topic, for several reasons. Forensic examination shows that he was most likely murdered with a sharp implement. His hair was in a mohawk, kept up by a gel made from oils imported from France or Spain. So it is suspected that he was a wealthy individual, because not many people would be able to afford imported products like that.

Myers: So a thousand year old murder mystery.

Hanney: Two thousand three hundred years, yes. Intriguing because this sort of skull fracture is not consistent with most of the human sacrifices we know to be associated with the Celts of the time. At least one historian believes that he was executed for some crime.

Myers: Well, that raises an interesting question. That sort of investigation would not have been possible until the advent of modern forensic methods. Jean-Alastair, as science improves, how does that affect the way we view history?

Porfignon: In many ways. As you say, as new techniques for studying historical artifacts become available, we become able to listen to many more stories from the past. Radioisotope dating, for instance, can tell us how old an object is. At the same time, changing technology causes us to turn our attention to other aspects of history. For example, communication has become an interesting topic to historians fairly recently. We recognise, of course, the importance of rapid communications by radio, television, and most recently by the Internet. But we are just now becoming aware of the importance of communications in earlier times.

Myers: So communications would in fact be one of the trends that you had in mind, Charles.

Page: Yes, certainly. A common topic in recent works is the acceleration of the pace of change in recent times. Historians are increasingly arguing that this is more due to the speed at which news travels, rather than simply the number of people on the planet.

Myers: All right. Well, we have much more to talk about. But for now we will pause to let you know how you can get your questions to us. There is E-mail, snail mail, telephone, text message, and facsimile. There are the numbers and addresses that you can use. As it happens, they are appearing next to one of my baby pictures. And I’m surely going to have a little gift waiting after the programme for the crew member who set that up. So, our first question is an E-mail from Lars in Esbjerg, Denmark. Lars asks what happened in the past. Charles, would you handle that?

Page: Certainly. First the Universe was created. And then our solar system, and then Earth, and then life on Earth, and then humans. And then agriculture developed, and then religion, and writing. Then civilisation developed, and war, and economies, and governments. Then industry formed, and then entertainment, and then genetics, and then space travel, and then the Internet. And then it was now, and then I don’t know what happened after that.

Myers: Thank you. Anything to add, Corinne?

Dixon: No. I don’t know what happened after that either.

Myers: All right. We have now a question from the telephone lines. Shontae in Little Rock, AR, USA, are you there?

Shontae in Little Rock: Yes, I am.

Myers: Hello Shontae. What is your question?

Shontae in Little Rock: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I’ve been a fan of the show ever since I first heard of it a couple of minutes ago.

Myers: Er... good.

Shontae in Little Rock: As a history teacher in high school, I want to present an overview of all of world history to my students in sufficient depth so as to give them enough context to interpret anything else they may learn or read about in future, but I only have nine months. What should I leave out?

Myers: Hm. An interesting approach. What to leave out. Solda?

Hanney: I must say that I’ve always found that historians tend to overstate the importance of cuneiform.

Dixon: What? Cuneiform? Wasn’t that the first writing system?

Hanney: Yes, it was first, but the records from ancient Sumeria are just not all that interesting to us today. Like the Cyrus Cylinder. There has been so much attention paid to that, but it turned out to be all this text praising Cyrus the Great. Like an official biography.

Page: But it’s still of great importance. Whether or not its claims are exaggerated, it still represents a look at the life of Cyrus the Great and his impact on his time.

Porfignon: But you say that you find individuals to be unimportant.

Dixon: Yeah! What the hell?

Page: Well, wait. People and events aren’t completely important. I just mean that I prefer to concentrate on what links them together. Like a railway network. Many historians are interested in the events and the people, which you can think of as the stations. I think more about the trends and topics that connect them all, which you can think of as the railways.

Porfignon: I believe that I understand you now. You believe that examining the life of, for example, Cyrus the Great is important in that it can shed light on the lives of all royalty of his time.

Page: Yes.

Porfignon: Yes, I understand that many more historians are choosing to examine events this way. I do not know whether this is the right approach, but I do believe that it can help us learn more than by studying each subject in isolation.

Myers: Okay, well, I believe we will have time for one additional question. Lylah in London, England, UK, are you there?

Lylah in London: Hi Debbie!

Myers: Hello Lylah. What is your question?

Lylah in London: Debbie, it’s me! Don’t you remember me?

Myers: Yes, I do remember you. And you still owe me fifty quid. All right, well, we can now have –

Hanney: Wait. Who was that?

Myers: She was a bit of my own personal history, I suppose you could say.

Hanney: No way! She’s your ex? I didn’t know you were –

Myers: I’m not. She’s my ex-flatmate. I bet her fifty quid that I could make a news programme better than what we were watching then. And I did.

Hanney: What was it?

Myers: It’s this programme.

Hanney: Oh.

Myers: But this will most certainly have to be the end of this programme. Thanks to Ms Solda Hanney, Mr Jean-Alastair Porfignon, Ms Corinne Dixon, and Mr Charles Page for being here with us. As it happens, that will also be the end of my time as host of this programme. Thanks to all of the crew and all of the guests who have made this programme what it is, and thanks to you the viewers for taking up the invitation to interact with us. I leave you in the very capable hands of Ms Charlotte Kügenliche, who hosts from next week. Her first topic will be the current mission of the Discovery space shuttle orbiter, and her first guests will be a space author, a space filmmaker, a space photographer, and a space downloader. [pause] Is that right? Downloader? What on Earth is a space downloader? [pause] Well, I suppose you’ll have to join her then to find out, but for now, it’s good night from me.

Director: And that’s a wrap. Debbie, thank you.

[Applause.]

Kügenliche: Well done, Debbie. I’ve got some big shoes to fill now, that’s for certain.

Myers: Thanks.

Director: All right. We’re going to close things down here, and then meet at the Duck and Treacle for drinks in an hour.

Myers: [sigh] Must we?

Kügenliche: Come on, girl. You can get totally sauced now you haven’t got to prepare for next week.

Myers: All right. But not so sauced that I wake up with my feet in the Serpentine, my arms in a straitjacket, and my face all painted like a Na’vi. Like Kingson here. Right, Kingson?

[Laughter, which abruptly stops.]

Myers: Sorry? [pause] What d’you mean we’re still trans–