Why Not Let the Leaning Tower Collapse?
Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. His latest book is a collection of some of the more provocative essays he has published over many decades that examine how we use and abuse ‘history’.
If the past is everything that has ever happened, he asks, why does what we call ‘history’ keep changing? What (or who) causes historical change? Could aspects of the past itself have been different? What do we choose to retain as our ‘heritage’ – and why? Are ‘the arts’ part of history or merely illustrative of it? Is Auschwitz in danger of becoming just another historical museum? Should the leaning Tower of Pisa be allowed to fall in the interests of ‘historical authenticity’?
Daniel also wonders why historians are supposedly brilliant at explaining everything that has ever happened in the past – yet useless at predicting the future? In the wise words of the great French historian Marc Bloch (who was executed by the Nazis in 1944):
‘Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.’
Daniel was born in London, educated at Cambridge and Cornell and at 24 appointed Lecturer at the new U of Sussex. He later worked at the BBC as Chief Producer (Features) and was responsible for a wide variety of radio projects on cultural and historical subjects many of which he later edited and published as books – among them his visits to the Arctic and Antarctic with the pioneering climate scientists and another in the 1990s (with Asa Briggs) about attitudes to earlier ends of centuries from as far back as the 1390s.
Since 2004 Daniel has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (U of London) where he has given lectures, organised and chaired public seminars and interviewed many of our leading historians.