HISTORY: A HISTORY OF HISTORIES IN 10 HISTORIES


If you’ve set foot in a physical bookstore in the last several years, you’re no doubt familiar with the A History of X in N Ys nonfiction subgenre (e.g., A History of the World in 100 Objects, A History of the World in 6 Glasses, A History of the World in 12 Maps, etc.). It’s not a terrible scaffolding to build a non-fiction work around, but the gimmick is certainly getting played out, and descending into self-parody.
A while back I spotted one of these “History of X in Ten Whatevers” snowclones on a “New Releases!” shelf in our local B&N while wandering around, waiting for my boy to pick out another Pokemon desk reference. I can’t even recall the history’s actual title or topic now, just that it had the format, and so goaded me into snarking the above-embedded tweets.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more it’s begun to seem like a sort of a reasonable project, as a framework for picking apart what we really mean when we say “History,” and what we’ve meant over time. Like, Shakespeare’s RICHARD III is a “history,” but is totally slanted. Most US branches of Xtianity take the OLD TESTAMENT as a history–and it meaningfully is, but not in the same way that BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE is a history, or THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK and Studs Turkel’s WORKING are histories, or THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT is a history. Heck, the TORAH (i.e., that same OLD TESTAMENT) *isn’t* considered a history by most of the Jews for whom it is the primary religious text–but the Talmudic and other commentaries on the TORAH *are* understood to be a very important history of the evolution of not just Jewish thought, but human ethical development.
For that matter, there are distinctly different *kinds* of histories that have gone in and out of vogue over time; few true chronicles are produced any longer, but memoirs and biographies–especially those focused on folks previously ignored because of their race, gender, class, or general Otherness–have blossomed and multiplied.
And all of which speaks to our evolving notion of what “history” means–and the possibility that HISTORY: A HISTORY OF HISTORIES IN 10 HISTORIES is actually not that bad of an idea. The question is: What 10 histories would go in? I kinda like the idea of having DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL in there, as well as Plains Indian winter counts, and Iceland’s Islendingabok and subsequent Book of Icelanders database).
What would you include?