Jeremy Black’s book contains numerous insights into the uses and abuses of history around the world, not least his identification of ‘collective grief’ as a new element of public policy. In a wide-ranging (if necessarily sketchy) survey of individual regimes of all shades and persuasions, Black begins his study of the use and abuse of history for political purposes by cautioning that the phenonemnon is enigmatic: ‘It can be seen as a product of a lack of confidence in the future and one that contrasts markedly with the situation in the 1960s, or, alternatively, as a construction of the future in terms of a continuity with the past’ (pxi).

With an awareness of the ‘kaleidoscopic’ setting for his work, Black goes on to outline his central thesis, that:

there is a politics of grievance that runs through the political uses of history around the world and that, overall, this is a bad thing because, politically, it splits communities rather than drawing them together, while, historically, it leads to distorted and monolithic interpretations. (pxii)

Essentially, therefore, Black has identified the potential for the debasement of the discipline of history through its co-option by politicians seeking legitimacy with their people – or staking a claim on a ‘new’ people, given the multiplication of states since the end of the Cold War. He notes that academic historians could be left on the outside looking in as the complexity of their arguments are reduced to quick fix soundbites designed to re-connect political elites with their constituencies: ‘This will doubtless cause difficulties at the individual level in the classroom, with committed and intolerant students complaining about being asked to read or listen to different views.’ (pxii)

Black sets up his overall target as - take a big breath - the idea of empowerment through grievance, and the locating of both grievance and empowerment in a misleading and destructive historical context. This theme is then pursued through examples from all over the world, taking in historiographical problems of nationalism and ‘culture wars’, and the empirical problems of Eastern Europe (after totalitarianism), Western Europe, and ‘transoceanic’ states such as the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, whose histories span continents as well as centuries. He also considers issues of history education.

Black is good at noticing underlying features of current debates, and the chapter distinguishing academic from popular histories is strong at illuminating the downplaying of history as a linear process and its replacement by ‘personal memory’. He rightly notes that ‘the desire for memory says something distinctive about humanity in general. In some respects, memory is a return to the earlier quality of identity and history as mythic and myth, and at the level of individuals and families as well as that of society in general.’ (p14) As that particular sentence makes clear, however, not all his thoughts are clearly expressed.

The major problem with the book derives from its vast range. Given the wealth of material under consideration, Black has set himself up with a difficult task of compressing a huge diversity of historically specific examples into an interesting thesis. Ultimately, however, the depth of that thesis may not be that great, as all societies have a changing and evolving relationship with their past resentments. So, although Black is right to observe that the use of history to make political points is frequently ahistorical (p19) the follow up point that the role of historical legacy in this form is also ‘potent’ (as with Japanese discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) does not really hit home.

While I am aware of the way Japanese politicians (like some British ones) have referred back to their past in opportunistic ways, what strikes me as more interesting is the way US/Japanese post-war policy has destroyed the idea of Japanese political and social history before 1945. With the young Japanese people I have taught, the striking fact was not just the absence of collective grief, but the entire absence of collective memory. Possibly, this is a feature of young people today in many societies, but in selecting the shifting historical language of national political elites as his object of analysis, Black perhaps unwittingly downplays the potential for genuine social and historical illumination of the societies he assesses.

Thus, Black’s desire to implicate history as a kind of ‘displacement activity’ for politics is itself premised on a particular view of social norms – he does not want to ‘split communities’. It might also be that he overvalues the social role of history in generating consensus. After all, popular and academic histories frequently capture similar views of the past, even if expressed in different terminologies. Setting them up as ‘enemies’ can caricature or erase the shared social roots and causations that genuinely split communities. Perhaps we even need a rather more monolithic and distorted history to express this.

Possibly, therefore, historians are getting tangled up (even if in an interesting way) in their own lack of methodological confidence about what type of historical writing is possible today and what sort of society they are writing for. The recourse to the labels ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ tells its own story about the way historians have ceased to perceive a potential universal audience. Norman Davies, for example, appears to have resolved similar issues more satisfactorily by focusing on a shorter period but in greater depth than Black in his recent Europe at War 1939-45: No Simple Victory. Elsewhere, it may be that historians will begin a retreat not just from the popular but the modern. Some have already begun to search for ancient and medieval solutions to their perceptions of contemporary misuse. This may or may not be the right decision, depending as much on their theoretical framework as much as their nose for facts.

Black also covers the shifts in debates about the tendency to misconceive the nature of slavery in the USA (‘states rights’ versus ‘slaves rights’ in the post-civil war period) and teaching history, paying close attention to problems associated with the ‘Hitlerisation’ of history in British schools (p170). He does an able job at capturing the associated shifts in public policy and historiography, noting how, for example, in 2007, Barack Obama was quick to quash the association of the 1965 Selma civil rights march with African-American history: ‘No, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history’ (p181, my italics). Black goes on to discuss the problems associated with this language (pp209-212).

These debates do continue to interest students of the subject, many of them fed up with multicultural indoctrination into closed-minded views of what they should think. Again, however, one is left feeling that the skin of the subject has only been scratched, and that the real problem (ie. the intellectual collapse of the civil rights movement as it split and allowed itself to be captured by identity politics) is neglected by the elites that now feed off the movement’s idealisation. Two useful books to actually broaden this area are Harold Kruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and David Brion Davis’s Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Kruse, in particular, has frequently proved useful at opening minds – more with students than the policy-makers who continue to live in a world of pedagogical Garveyism.

Similarly, Hitlerisation in schools, as discussed by Black, is not really a proactive process. It really means the reduction of teaching time for other aspects of history and the consequent selection (by default) of Hitler as the most significant modern ‘period’. The proper depths of this fascinating period of modern history (which should certainly be taught thoroughly to every child) are frequently not taught because of the trend (correctly observed by Black) to replace History by other subjects such as ICT, citizenship and, now, ‘creativity and cultural understanding’.

Thus, opportunities to study the complexities of Weimar culture, Bauhaus and Expressionism – to begin to capture the social whole of the German tragedy – are frequently removed from the historical record, sometimes through the overemphasis on sources at the expense of narrative. Even allowing for the inevitable need for some reductionism in school teaching, it is no wonder so many History students carry on with it at A-level, as they know they have not been taught it properly before then. Of course, by then, most British students have already completed their entire history education two years previously (at age 14).

In the UK, I often think the problem is not Hitlerisation (or, as others have implied, Stalinisation) but a lack of the subject knowledge among teachers that would enable them to synthesise the past in a creative manner and allow their students to contextualise Hitler. In focusing on Ofsted’s criticism of weak teaching of ‘chronological frameworks’ (p171), Black is again perceptive. The coda, nevertheless, must be that ‘chronological frameworks’ is itself a historical soft-soaping of the need to teach periodisation so that children can properly distinguish between moments of progress and reaction.

Finally, Black’s discussion of the ‘History Wars’ deserves comment. In the chapter, ‘The Historical Dimension of Manifest Destiny’, Black mentions the conceptualisation of the USA as a non-class society until the 1960s. This was then challenged (particularly because of civil rights and Vietnam) by calls for greater diversity. The subsequent polarised (and possibly illogical, given the formal mismatch of ‘class’ with ‘diversity’) intellectual challenge and reaction led to what has been termed the ‘culture wars’. As Black observes: ‘they are a major theme in the perception and ordering of social developments as well as in the framing of political debates’ (p178).

Black goes on to discuss the role of history within such ‘culture wars’, and recaps his earlier point that this is not always done in the right way: ‘This…is of scant interest to those who seek to use history to support the manifest destiny of their particular political interpretations.’ (p190) The British historian Andrew Roberts is then given a surprising role in US policy for Iraq owing to his 2006 book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. Apparently, they were all ears in the White House when Roberts turned up. Perhaps this vignette distracted him, but Black could have done more to emphasise how the frequently short-term nature of each phase of the History Wars has actually become a caricature of historiography and historical revisionism – and history itself.

In effect, Black fails to provide an explanation of the shallowness of the history wars – and for the fact that they themselves have become institutionalised as staged expressions of intellectual identity and integrity. I am not proposing an explanation, but would suggest that their roots (as with those of the culture wars) lie in the increasingly individualised and alienated response to academic knowledge that has become increasingly melodramatic rather than explanatory. Hence the longevity of the thesis of ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ history – and culture.

Black finishes his book with a reference to the failure to use history to teach complex lessons as opposed to guidance and justification: ‘In short, the public treatment of history frequently takes on a demagogic form and also a quasi-religious character, with episodes providing homilies about what will happen if wrong choices are made.’ (p214) The solution? ‘An intelligent scepticism in predicting the future is the most pertinent lesson from the consideration of the past.’

True enough, but there is more to be gleaned from the contemporary scene than this. The discussion above ultimately centres on the shift in understanding of official narrative history. What Black fails to see though, is the way in which the new histories he describes are really premised upon a collective forgetting. As the more perceptive Tony Judt has pinpointed in his recent Reappraisals:

To judge from the virtual disappearance of narrative history from the curriculum in school systems, including the American, the time may soon come when, for many citizens, large parts of their common past will constitute something more akin to….realms of forgetting – or, rather, realms of ignorance, since there will have been little to forget. Teaching children, as we now do, to be critical of received versions of the past serves little purpose once there no longer is a received version. (2008: 215-6)

Overall, I am not sure Black wins the argument he has created. As I recall, the public chose to ‘grieve collectively’ for Diana (with some manipulation, I concede - if his diaries are to be believed - by Alistair Campbell) more than politicians did, but Black has selected a useful potential theme and does illuminate aspects of present politics that are ‘misusing’ the past.

My own view is that a more promising and socially illuminating approach might have been to advance the idea implied by Judt of ‘collective forgetting’ as noted above. Alternatively, the thesis of contemporary ‘collective grief’ could have been compared with ‘collective guilt’ in post-World War Two Europe. These could have had more interesting intellectual pay-offs. Nevertheless, through his treatment of history, Black offers a reasonable insight into the opportunistic state of politics in many countries, and the continuing absence of the voice of the ‘silent majority’.

What this suggests is a change from the old view that the people get the politicians (and historians) they deserve. Instead, the politicians create the history (and historians) they think the people will put up with, in order to hold on to the power they think they deserve. And some historians, Lear-like, are happy to play up to their new role as modern court jesters and ‘wise fools’. There is undoubtedly something to be said for this view.