Marc Ferro (1924–2021)

This is a good, weird one: the project is looking at children's history textbooks to see how national history is presented to kids in various countries. It has that kind of Sorbonne-lecturey French social sciences style where you can imagine Ferro not preparing notes or anythng but just going into class, yawning mightily, and paging through the book in front of the students: "Let's see what we have here ... Armenia, well, this is a nice cover ... according to this Armenia is the oldest Christian nation in the world. In the world!" There's something Socratic about that, I think.

In addition to Armenia, we visit South Africa (whitewashed history), "Black Africa" (not savages!) India (seduces her conquerors), Trinidad (the world's first multicultural utopia), the Arab world (would have been top kings of earth, because Islam is wins, if not for that Euroimperialism [because Islam is loses???]), Iran (has kept its nobility through good times and tough), Turkey (Attila made the trains run on time), Spain (the first large-writ "civilizing mission"), Nazi Germany (Zivilisation v. Kultur, the Aryan nation v. the "Eternal Jew," all the usual filthy binaries), France (rationalism and revolution, united by the gloire thing), the UK (the reluctant hero, making the world safe for commerce, forever defeating the Eternal Continental) the Soviet Union (permanent revolution in the teaching of history to match the ideological exigencies of the day, within a framework of dialectical laws of progress and pan-Slavism), Poland (outperforming against the odds, shooting themselves in the foot, and--during the communist era--getting by anyway with a little help from the Warsaw Pact), China (despots and brave peasants, in the seat of civilization--or in the Kuomintang perspective, despots and brave generals, peasants being the field upon which they mark out their ambition), Japan (exceptional always, sometimes because of its ability to adapt to anything, other times because of its Wa-purity, always because of the emperor, who connects we simple Nihonjin to the sun), the US (a shifting normal--never any talk about internal conflicts or competing interests, but moving from an implicit "American = brave pioneers" to "= WASP elite" to "and let's not forget the Irish! They are also white!" to "=regular kids like you in a house on the prairie where history is nothing but locusts and steam trains and there's no such thing as social issues), the Latino world (here's your history of communities and social conflicts. I'm so glad these guys are taking over America again) to the Australian aborigines (everything that happens disappears, but if you know how to look you can see the traces, across the land, in the stars) and Europe during World War II (the Germans try to equivocate Hiroshima or Dresden with the Holocaust, the Russians remind us that they won the thing and intimate that they were basically fighting the Western Allies, those snakes, as well, the English go "'tweren't nothing. Fair play. All in the line of," etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., and the French shuffle uneasily and fixate on the Resistance, and everyone ignores the other resistances, in the Nordic countries, in Italy (apparently the largest and most effective of all!) except, presumably, for the people in those countries themselves. Ferro's a desultory but agreeable host, and this is undisciplined but diverting pop academia, good for a sunny dock.… (more)

Ferro reviews a range of histories—narratives about heroes, resistance, liberation, greatness and decline, resurgence and progress—that nations tell of and to themselves. These narratives are the foundations of identity and community in today's world, and the juxtapositions are enlightening: the ‘white history’ of Johannesburg or the U.S. v. the ‘decolonized black history’ of Africa and ‘forbidden Chicano history’; Persian, Turkish and Arab versions of Middle East history; pre- and post-ideological history in China and Russia; decentered history in India, coded history in Japan, and victory-in-defeat in Poland and Armenia. Omissions are as telling as the emphases, notes Ferro, and there can be no such thing as a universal History.… (more)