Exclusive Interview: Simon Schama

PREMIUM: Acclaimed documentary writer and presenter Professor Simon Schama talks about the urgent need to give today’s viewers a connection between the past and its influence on present issues.

Professor Schama’s in-depth knowledge of history, art and culture are surpassed only by his exquisite and elegant command of the English language—not to mention his passion for making important historical and contemporary issues accessible to the general public. After bringing to television, as a writer and presenter, numerous series for the BBC and PBS, including the award-winning, Emmy-nominated A History of Britain, Power of Art and The American Future: A History, he is now working on a history of the Jews, Muslims and Christians. He talks about the urgent need to give today’s viewers a connection between the past and its influence on present issues.

WS: There seems to be an appetite for history on television, some say because the subject is taught so poorly in school. Are you seeing evidence of this appetite?
SCHAMA: Yes, I think so. Regarding the school question I think the problem is textbooks. There are often brilliantly good storytelling teachers—that is what makes all the difference in the social studies class really—that are prepared to tell a story as a way of opening up kids to questions. They do that very well, but they don’t do that well enough; it tends to be throttled by the gigantism of the impossible textbooks. So you are right, the displaced energy moves into the appetite for history.  
There is something else, too, though. We live in a world of digital short attention spans. The Tweet world, which weirdly—and this is entirely speculative and subjective—does tend to generate a demand for the opposite: for the epic, for the lengthy, for the slow, for the reflective, for the connected. It’s exactly the opposite. Being human, it’s just the way that our ganglia are organized. So that feeds into the appetite for history on television.
The other thing is that there is not much in contemporary history in the news now, whether it is the election of Barack Obama or the rise of the Tea Party, which doesn’t somehow extraordinarily plug itself into issues and concerns that come from the past. The real challenge is to connect the contemporary to storytelling about the past in a way, which isn’t too forced and artificial.

WS: Isn’t that difficult to accomplish?
SCHAMA: It’s not that hard to do, it requires essentially a conceptual jump. When you do stories from the past they shouldn’t simply be discrete, in other words just men in wigs. It’s much easier to do, say, Frederick Douglass and his connection to Martin Luther King. But there is almost no topic that really is of more urgent concern to kids and to our contemporary generations, than the connection between the economic maelstrom we just passed through and 1929. Both its similarities and dissimilarities are absolutely fundamental to what becomes of us. The question was John Maynard Keynes right sounds impossibly academic but can be made amazingly available and accessible and exciting and powerful. Someone who spent his life worrying about employment was sitting here in a country where unemployment figures refused to move from 9.8. I can go to foreign policy, wherever I go, if you want to [make the connection between past and present] you can.

WS: And you have no problem as an academic to take concepts from history, even complicated ones, and writing about them for the general public? That’s difficult, isn’t it?
SCHAMA: Yes it is, it’s sneered at a bit by colleagues who think it’s a dilution of their intellectual integrity, to which you want to reply, “Try it, buster!” And of course it’s what the great historians from Thucydides to David McCullough to Barbara Tuchman have always done.
No, no, I have a problem with those who lock themselves away and there is this wonderful phrase my professor quoted paraphrasing Kipling, “What do they of history know who know only other historians?” And the more locked inside the world of tenured review committees history becomes, the more it disengages itself from history’s civic calling—that was its origin, that’s its political and ideological function, it’s kind of an honest broker, it speaks truth to power. It delivers difficult and sometimes painful known truths. It’s perennial if embraced in the right way.

WS: What are you working on now?
SCHAMA: It’s the most insanely ambitious thing and also it’s fraught with every conceivable kind of peril! It’s a history of the triangulation between Jews, Muslims and Christians.
I’m also making two short films this year, which will be lovely, on Shakespeare’s history plays. Again, it’s the relationship between the politics of Shakespeare’s time, what we know about his own angle on that politics and his history plays, particularly Falstaff. Falstaff is a figure pregnant with historical significance.

WS: And the series on the Jews is for the BBC?
SCHAMA: It is. We’re going to film it in 2012 and it will be broadcast for sure in the early spring of 2013. It’s a five-part series that is immensely daunting. It is something that might well kill me, but it’s something that I have to do before I die!

WS: You’ve said, “All history is contemporary.” Do you feel that cable news channels’ pursuit of the pithy head bite or controversial topics is shortchanging viewers from the larger context of what is going on in our world?
SCHAMA: It probably is, but we also have a kind of counter-phenomenon which is that people like Glenn Beck are historically obsessed in a kind of weird way, so that Woodrow Wilson is known to millions of people across America as a kind of demonic figure, which is vastly bizarre, it comes out of old rehabilitated John Birch history. [John Birch was a Christian missionary and a right-wing political advocacy organization was founded in his name.] So there is this odd [claim that] those guys back then knew what America really was and it’s been corrupted. So it’s not just the kind of sound bite problem that attacks history, it’s the kind of fake peasantry, fake chronicle aspect of the way which history can be abused and deployed. So gripping television history, which genuinely tells both sides of a story and which actually puts those things together, is more needed than ever.

WS: Is television doing a good job to that end?
SCHAMA: [Television executives] always fret about “the television of complexity” being an entertainment turn off. And whatever is left of my life is devoted to making that a non-issue. I’ve been lucky that the BBC has let me do this, and the Jewish series will be no exception. You must aim very high in every respect, more important that you aim high and the audience may come. We did a really complicated film about Obama and the economy and Williams Jennings Bryan and J.P. Morgan and two and a half million people watched pretty late at night, that was pretty damn good. So you aim high rather than actually listen to [those who say] no one’s going to get this. It absolutely depends on how you film it; above all it depends on how you edit it. And, of course, you have to be aware that it must be understood by your Aunt Ethel, too.