Why Do Historians Only Care About Rich People? - How History Works

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you lived at a different time in history?

I am sure all of us have at one point or another, but it can be quiet hard to imagine.

How would you live as a regular person? What would your house look like, what would your job be, what food would you eat, what would you do for fun, would you be educated and would your life be more or less stressful than the one you lead today?

The answer to all of these questions can be quite hard to work out. Historians have done much less work researching and reporting on the lives of common people than they have on the lives of a handful of wealthy and powerful individuals.

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#HowHistoryWorks #History

Video Created By: Arun Singh

Footage Courtesy of: Getty Images

Music Provided By: Epidemic Sound

[timothynewton]

I recall there is this saying that I think goes something like, "Its tragic there are important stories we will never know. It's also tragic there are important stories we could know but simply do not care for. "

[mafiousbj]

That´s why Pompey being fully preserved by the Vesubius eruption is so cool. There were even graffiti preserved in a tavern and the messages scribed in those walls are not much different from the things you see in the doors of bathrooms in a pub (and are direct messages from these people, not things reported by authors or historians of the period)....reminds you people are gonna be people no matter the time and language we speak.

[calitaliarepublic]

I was born into a blue collar family and attended a University of California campus in the 2000s/2010s. I wasn’t as class conscious back then as I am now. But I remember being assigned only one non-fiction book to read that I felt reflected the life experiences of my family and myself: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
The book is written from her perspective as an undercover journalist working minimum wage jobs around America, and sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States.
I mean think about this; white collar Americans are so sheltered from the hardships of blue collar Americans that they have to send undercover writers to experience blue collar life and write about it in a way that is palatable to white collar audiences. Yikes.

[danielhale]

Something I appreciate about my courses on England from The Great Courses is that they go deliberately out of their way to take breaks from the big personalities and events, and focus on the common people. What was life like for them, what might they have thought about these big events, how much do we know about them and why? They're admittedly not my favorite lectures to revisit -- the narrative of kings, queens, wars, and rebellions is very compelling. But they're super important for establishing the background, and what someone like me would experience back then, since I'm more likely to have been in the ranks of commoners not the upper echelons. Not a lot of history courses bother, but I'm glad professors Paxton and Bucholz did so.

[Spider-Too-Too]

this is why i love invicita's "everyday moment in history“ series so much, it's much more interesting and helpful in building a perspective of history when we learn about how roman citizen eats and lives.

[Nolaris]

As I guy with a degree in history (and an interest in psychology), it's hard to disagree.
For one, people are more interested in things that don't happen a lot. There's a saying that news is called news because only things out of the ordinary would be worth writing about.

While history tends to favor the victor (or those who can write), the tendency to favor the rich and powerful doesn't really reflect the individual historian. Many historians do want to document and write about common folk, but can't because there is too few sources, they're not getting enough funding, and people straight up not caring anyway. I know some people personally who are getting into "microhistory", where they look into stories about common individuals to extrapolate the life of the common people (e.g. Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms), but currently it's too niche.

The thing about where the money and attention goes is also true to some extent. I'm from Southeast Asia which has very little attention in the west. I went to my school library which is separated into geographical regions, and most of the shelves for Southeast Asia are half-full. The only one with multiple shelves is Vietnam, and of course it is mostly about that thing you all know about.

Btw, I sort of hope you can do video on historian jobs, where the demand and thus supply is unfortunately declining with no signs of recovery. Even I as a trained historian (not to mention a non-western one) see little future in pursuing that career.

[pizzacheeseman]

There’s a journal by a common mercenary in the 30 years war but only a tiny portion of it has been translated into English, I was really shocked that nobody was interested enough

[mariatorres-bydu]

Hi, historian here, and I don't know if this video is incredibly focused on an american perspective or just ignorant of the last century of historical research. Yes, for most of history the focus have been on the upper classes, but a lot of that has change since the 20th century. Just one example is the fact that historical materialism (marxism) has had a lot impact in academia since last century, which focuses on studying the conflict between the classes. The question you posed, how did regular people lived, what jobs they had, how where there houses... There is a lot written about this topics. Specially if you look at archaeology (which works together with historians despite being different disciplines) it can tell you incredible mundane stuff like what type of entertainment the people of a city preferred based on stuff like when the swears where abandone. We may not have chronicles written about the regular farmer, but we do have a lot of bureaucracy. There are records of when someone sold something or for trials for stuff like "when can the sheep walk through x field".
The idea that life for the regular classes "just suck" is also very reductionist and coming from a very presentist perspective.
If these video was made at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th I guess it would be fine, but I feel like today is ignoring a lot of the progress that the historical field has gone through in more than a century. (Sorry, for the long comment)

[qw]

What rich people do affects everyone; what poor people don't even affect other poor people.

[patternwhisperer]

Wow, you sound just like this how money works guy!

[dogetaxes]

It’s also a bandwidth issue, most people don’t care really about history or know very little, and those who do already have a lot in their plate already just with the big events. So it’s kinda hard to record everything and the commons. It’s also just more fun to learn about the big figures and battles, like would you rather trudge through the common life of a peasant/slave, or know about the epics of Roman emperors and battles.

[Poszlakowaneopinie]

not only history - our culture is mostly about the rich, happy people (imagine the Sims where you cannot buy a house but have to rent a room for years or the TV series where characters mostly work or spend the remaining time in front of the screen)

[thalmoragent]

Its not even necessarily rich people, more so influential people.

Whether rich, skilled, intelligent, lucky, etc its all the same story; there are those who did important/heavily impactful things that we see as more interesting to hear and learn about than the commoner's situation.

The poor folk's situation are mentioned when necessary or where its relevant. If a King is overthrown, we hear of what his people were going through. But its a story still surrounding HIS fall and how it impacted the nation in questions' future.

[Akash.Chopra]

It's not just historians, it's everyone.

[lesleyjohnson]

George Orwell, as a journalist and author, was clearly ahead of his time by every measure. He used to sleep in Hyde Park in the summertime and go hop-picking in the autumn. It is likely he caught TB (which killed him near the end of WWII) from all his interaction with the poor and working classes as an early gonzo journalist. His commitment to authenticity and to the highest journalistic standards is still celebrated by those in his field. ❤❤❤

[holeeshi]

actually, A lot of poor people's lives were documented: Genghis Khan(had nothing in early life), Diocletian(born to freed slaves), Nicola Tesla(died penniless), Zhu YuanZhang(beggar), Abraham Lincoln(born to poor family), Adolf Hitler(starving artist), John D. Rockefeller(born to poor family with unstable finances, so John D Rockefeller's family historian is going to be real helpful in understanding the lives of a poor person in the era of his childhood). these individuals were all poor at some point in their life.

History is mostly a "documentation of large scale change", so for the most part, historians are interested on when things takes a large scale turn. a Ruler or a scientist or a tycoon's life can have and create a lot of these turns, while if you are a peasant, you farm, unless one day you stop farming and became a ruler or scientist or tycoon. of course, even if we want to find things unrelated to any large scale changes, we can't because most people don't write how things "don't change"(do you write all your daily routine every day?). I guess the big takeaway people" do make history, it's just that when they do, it often involves a change of status, wether from poor to wealthy or wealthy to poor.

[kurlykaitlyn]

Wealthy people(or those of power) are the ones who have told history or hired people to tell it for them.
Thats why so much is biased and not entirely truthful.

[tomlxyz]

I wonder how well preserved our time will be. Like we capture as much as never before but in ways that don't keep up for long if not looked after

[CarlosRios]

History is written by the people who write things down

[bribhoney]

This kind of makes me think how they word things in our history books in school.