You’ve Never Actually Studied History

"What Happened?" Isn't Even the Right Question

There is a basic confusion at the heart of how we think about history. (With my apologies, for the provocative headline, to those of you who are actually serious historians.)

Most people believe they’ve studied history because they took classes in school. They memorized timelines of empires and revolutions, learned the causes of wars, and maybe absorbed a few moral lessons—especially (since the 1960s, and more so, the 1990s) about atrocities, oppression, or the like.

Outside school, history is packaged as documentaries, historical fiction, museum exhibits, and trivia books. These familiar experiences form what most people call “history.” (And there is of course nothing inherently wrong with this kind of popular entertainment.)

But the history taught in schools or consumed through popular media is not a simplified version of professional historical method. It is something else entirely. Popular history offers a narrative of past events. Real, professional, history reconstructs the symbolic worlds that gave those events meaning.

A loose analogy might be drawn from physics. What most students encounter as high school or even undergraduate “physics”—plug-and-chug equations and simplified models (often prefaced with disclaimers like, “this isn't really how it works” or “we don't really believe this anymore”)—is a distant cousin of the abstract, counterintuitive, and often paradoxical world explored by theoretical and experimental physicists.

But more than that, almost all physics below the graduate level is about absorbing known results and applying them within a fixed conceptual frame. Real physics, like all real science, begins when that frame itself is questioned. It operates not primarily by affirming what is true, but by ruling out what is false—through falsification, anomaly, and experiment. This fundamental epistemological posture (negation rather than confirmation) is entirely alien to most people's school experience of science as a curriculum of known facts and established theories.

(As an aside: this disconnect is part of what allows fashionable but self-contradictory phrases like “Trust the Science” to circulate unchallenged. In real science, no serious thinker would ever say such a thing, because science is not a source of dogma but a method for overthrowing it. The public understanding of science, like the public understanding of history, is shaped more by institutional authority than by epistemic humility. And in both cases, the real work begins where certainty ends.)

But in history, rather than science, the gap is even harder to detect because the categories appear deceptively stable. We think we recognize concepts like law, power, belief, or truth as they appear in older contexts, and so we treat the past as a different sequence of events inside the same conceptual universe. But this is a mistake. The words may be the same, but the meanings have changed. The symbolic architecture—by which I mean the deep grammar of reality, the internal system that orders time, truth, authority, and the self—has shifted beneath our feet. What counted as knowledge, what defined authority, what structured time or morality—these were not just different answers to our questions. They were different questions altogether. And we would do well to remember that when we ask our own.

For many, history is not even narrative. It is trivia. A collection of quirky facts, ironies, or stories that break expectations. Once, while I was doing full-time historical research (traveling around the country to examine archival collections, studying the papers of Edward Bernays to understand how public relations rewired the symbolic structure of modern American democracy), someone gave me a birthday gift. It was a glossy paperback titled something like “Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About American History.” They handed it to me with genuine warmth: “Matt, I know how much you love history... I thought you'd enjoy this.”

I was flattered, of course. But I was also quietly mortified. Did they think that what I did all day was collect quirky trivia for the next episode of Jeopardy? That historical work is about novelty, surprise, or winning points for knowing what year the Erie Canal was finished? It wasn’t offensive; it was deeply illuminating. It showed just how far most, even very smart and educated, people are from understanding what history actually is.

Historical method is not just the collection of facts, though it necessarily involves that. It is rather the disciplined attempt to understand how meaning operates within symbolic systems that are often radically unlike our own, and to trace how those systems shift over time.

Serious historians do not simply ask what happened. They ask, for example, what kinds of meaning were available in a given world, and what structured their coherence. They begin from the premise that the past was not just differently populated but differently ordered, and they seek to make that order legible.

This requires setting aside our modern categories (e.g., “freedom,” “religion,” “progress,” etc.) and reconstructing the symbolic universes that made those ideas possible, impossible, or radically different in the past.

It also requires working through fragmented evidence, accepting ambiguity, and thinking with rigor and restraint. It requires the patience to see the unfamiliar not as error, but as coherence under a symbolic order very different from our own. (Think, in a certain sense, like learning a completely foreign language without a full dictionary—and certainly without Google Translate.)

The real work of the historian is to uncover the frameworks that governed what people could think, say, or do. This is why it is so disorienting, and yet so common, to encounter highly intelligent people who nevertheless treat the past as if it begins in the seventeenth century—or the twentieth.

I remember an especially frustrating argument with several such people: well-read, thoughtful, well-educated, and entirely convinced that political philosophy begins and ends with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. As if the social contract were the first time anyone had considered the structure of political order! When I brought up earlier concepts (Greek civic virtue; medieval theories of natural law) they were treated not as rival frameworks but as prehistory, which at any rate, were “no longer relevant for modern society.” Their view of the past began with categories already shaped by modernity.

What this misses is not just intellectual diversity, though of course historical illiteracy often flattens any true understanding of culture. It misses the fundamental transformation in the symbolic structure of politics itself: the very definition of the state, the self, and the sacred.

If you start with social contract theory, then everything before looks like error or absence. But if you study the symbolic architectures that came before, you find entirely different logics of legitimacy and personhood: ones that shaped the world for centuries, and still underlie much of what we call political thought today.

Consider a few examples.

(1) In Medieval Europe, time was not linear or neutral, it was cyclical, liturgical, and directed toward divine judgment.

(2) In ancient Rome, a citizen could experience liberty under monarchy, because liberty was not about rights but about one's role in civic order.

(3) The category of “religion,” so central to modern liberal discourse, did not exist as a separate sphere in ancient or medieval life. What we now isolate as “religion” was then bound up with law, ritual, hierarchy, and cosmic order. (The very word “religion” only took on its modern shape in the post-Reformation West, when belief was separated from public authority and redefined as a private matter of conscience.)

These differences are not mere cultural quirks. They reflect different symbolic architectures: entire systems of meaning with their own logics, values, and ontologies. The historian’s task is not to translate the past into modern terms, but to enter those architectures as they were lived.

This is not a matter of pedantry, but the rigor history requires. It explains, in part, why so many popular takes on history miss the mark. Without recognizing symbolic change, we assume that modern frameworks, like democracy or rights, are timeless. We flatten history into a morality tale.

Of course, in challenging the popular image of history, we are not defending everything that currently passes for “serious” historical research. Much of what has emerged from academic history departments over the last few decades—particularly in their more decadent, post-critical-theory phases—has become a conversation almost entirely with itself. Like late-stage string theory in physics, much of contemporary work from professional academic historians continues to spin out ever more intricate internal structures with diminishing empirical or interpretive return.

(Although critical theory once revitalized historical inquiry by exposing hidden structures of power and exclusion, its later iterations too often mistook reflexivity for method itself. What began as a radical rethinking of historical categories has devolved into a stylistic performance of jargon, grievance, or recursive self-reference.)

This essay is not written ex cathedra or from the ivory tower. It does not defend academic gatekeeping for its own sake. Rather, it argues for recovering the original stakes of historical method: to enter into alien symbolic architectures, to think with rigor, humility, and philosophical seriousness, and to make intelligible the deep structures by which people once lived.

The value of historical thinking lies not in nostalgia or trivia but in pattern recognition. It shows us how systems of meaning are built, how they change, and how they dissolve. It teaches us that the world we live in—its categories, its institutions, its common sense—is not fixed. It was made. And if it was made, it can be remade.

That realization is not just educational. It is a kind of freedom: the freedom to think outside the categories you've inherited and to see your own world not as given, but as made, by people like you. With all this implies about your own freedom, and your own power, in our time.

Leave a comment about your experience with history?

And please stick with me here on DRAFTS for more writing in this vein. Thanks.