Catalogue, Classified and Alphabetical, of the Books of the St. Louis Public School Library:... Book

This is the best telling of early English history that I’ve come across. Hume gives the facts as he believes them and weaves a narrative that makes for a coherent story as he believes them to be and relevant for his time period of 1760.

I found this book and its accounting of its history to parallel Henriech Graetz’s first two volumes of his History of the Jews and his story telling. As these books unfolded it becomes obvious to the reader that the concept of The English or The Jews is a construct that each author have bought in completely as real that they’ve created out of their fictions about themselves in order to give sense to who they are in the time period that they are writing in, 1760 for Hume and 1860 for Graetz.

As I was reading this volume, I did a wiki on Anglo-Saxon because of the way Hume was using it seemed to conflate with how he was considering who the English People were and Wiki altered me to the fact that the term only makes sense if the assumption of commonality between Anglo, Saxon, and English people are made through out different historical time periods (yes, it is more complex than what I am saying, but I don’t want to elaborate too much since it’s up to the reader to determine for themselves). It seemed to me that the story Hume was telling was a story of the conquerors be they the early Romans, the Danes, the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes, or finally the Normans, and Hume was conflating the conquered indigenous people with their conquerors and seamlessly conflating the two even though the real story he was telling was the story of the conquerors not the conquered. Graetz does a very similar thing in his first two volumes as he tells his story.

I like this book incredibly more than I liked Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Gibbon makes odd forays into the history of England that really don’t belong into his overall telling of the Romans and while I was reading his book, I couldn’t help but think the story that he was telling was a story about only the rulers and elite that was remote from the actual people who lived in the Roman Empire and how remote most of what he was telling did not relate to the actual people that were within the Roman Empire and who were not the rulers of the Empire.

Hume knew how to tell his story such that the English person of his day was discovering who their identity as an individual as part of a nation were and how they were meant to think about themselves. Gibbons dwelt on picayune minutia such as the 30 names of emperors you’ve never heard of in that 60-year time period or was that 60 names of emperors over that 30-year time period? Hume’s book has all of the characteristics that are required for a national epic which first and foremost include who they are as a people, has a hero (Alfred the Great, Richard the Lion-Hearted), and gives a fiction that describes the people as a people both as individuals and as a nation. Hume does that with this book while never entering into Gibbon’s remotely distant presentation from who the people really are or at least who they are becoming.

Hume gives an incredibly powerful presentation of a complex period of time by giving a compelling narrative for how a people should think about themselves while never dwelling on the insignificant more than what is necessary for its understanding, and, moreover, this book reads as good or better than any modern history book.