A lifetime’s fascination begins without fanfare, in a classroom in the Black Country during the Fifties, where a young boy sits learning about medieval farming. “I remember being much captivated by the rotation system of agriculture, fields left fallow and so on,” the boy, now grown, recalls. As he speaks, he sketches the outline of a medieval field with his fingers on the table.
Big things have small beginnings. Half a century after first encountering the three-field system, Sir David Cannadine is the pre-eminent public historian of his generation. His career has included spells at Cambridge, Columbia, the Institute of Historical Research in London, and Princeton, where he is now Dodge Professor of History.
Cannadine is also chair of English Heritage’s Blue Plaques Panel, and until 2012 was chairman of the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery. He was knighted in 2009 for services to scholarship. He has published 14 books on subjects ranging from his specialist area of 19th and 20th-century Britain and America to the history of history. Few British academics know more about teaching history from primary to postgraduate level.
In a sense, it all stems from his earliest education. “I remember doing drawings of monasteries and cloisters,” he recalls. “I remember school outings to Liverpool, which in the Fifties was still a great imperial maritime city. I remember going to Stratford, Kenilworth and Warwick, which brought alive Shakespearean history. And I remember being taught by a brilliant teacher, Graham Butler. It was that which made history a captivating subject.”
I meet Cannadine one chilly Monday morning at the National Portrait Gallery in London. We sit in the director’s office below a grand portrait of Sir Humphry Davy, after Sir Thomas Lawrence. Cannadine speaks precisely, in long, elegantly crafted sentences. Much of the time he talks with both hands clasped to his face, forefingers pressed into his cheeks, his little fingers covering the corners of his mouth. But when he laughs, the hands come away; he whips his glasses off and throws his head back in infectious mirth.
One guffaw escapes as I describe my own terrific history teacher, who channelled his dreams of rock stardom by composing three-chord anthems about the mid-Tudor crisis and the courtiers of Elizabeth I.
“Ha ha ha! I remember having lunch with Andrew Motion and talking about why he had spent his life doing literature and I had spent mine doing history,” says Cannadine. “We both had the same answer: an inspiring teacher.”
For that, he says, there is no substitute. “You can teach [schoolchildren] dates and kings and queens and if the teacher is good they’ll love it, and if the teacher’s no good they’ll loathe it,” he says. Equally, “if the teacher is brilliant, they’ll able to teach the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, Mary Seacole, whatever, and [students will] be enthralled. That might not give them a detailed chronology of this nation’s history, but it will excite them about history for the rest of their lives and they’ll keep on reading about it.”
Given the furore surrounding Michael Gove’s proposed reforms of the schools history syllabus, this feels like a refreshingly simple analysis. Actually, Cannadine has a more nuanced approach. He is pleased that the Gove history reforms have attracted passionate attention. (“People aren’t complaining that we know less maths than a generation ago… people care about history. I think that’s rather good news.”) But he also thinks turning the syllabus into a Tory-story chronicle of British history addresses the wrong problem. His advice, first developed in The Right Kind Of History (2011), a study of historical teaching over the last century, is that history should be compulsory until the age of 16, rather than 14 as it is now. “If you want someone to be a responsible citizen… who has a degree of ease in the complicated world in which we live, then some knowledge of history is not only preferable but essential.”
This brings us to his new book, The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences, a meditation on the ways in which history has been abused to present the world divided into simple opposing identities of good and evil, “them” and “us”: Christianity vs Islam; women vs men; the working classes vs their capitalist masters; or “civilisation” against “barbarity”, the dichotomy most recently peddled by George W Bush and Tony Blair before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cannadine calls this “rhetorical irresponsibility and conceptual idleness… A lot of politicians and pundits always want to present us with a polarised world… the point of the book is to say that that’s not really how the world is most of the time, and we shouldn’t talk about it that way.”
But what chances, I ask, of politicians actually listening to historians? After all, Gove has repeatedly ignored his advice on education. Cannadine concedes that historians will seldom seriously influence busy ministers with tomorrow’s headlines to worry about. “When the historian says, ‘well, Minister, it’s all very complicated’, the politician will say, ‘I don’t need your professional hand-wringing. I need a policy.’ Complexity isn’t a policy. I do see that.”
Not that this stops him trying. And if any current historian might speak truth to power then we should wish it to be David Cannadine. That might be a form of inspirational history teaching in itself: a little of which can go a long way.
* The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences by David Cannadine (Penguin, £20) is out now.
Dan Jones is the author of The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England (Harper Press, £30)