History And Story Telling: The reason I blend these two together is because for a very long time throughout the world, history was taught through oral traditions and prose. What I wanted to analyze here was when they started to diverge and also how they still compare. What I discovered was that most history is mostly taught with facts and what we know to have happened from authoritative sources, and more so in the modern era we try to view history not only through the eyes of the victors, but also through the works of the losers. But this practice has only existed for a few decades, whereas viewing history solely through the eyes of the victor was the more common way of analyzing history for about two and a half centuries.
History: The unfortunate truth is that most history beyond even the renaissance era is not as reliable as modern. Often it is biased in favor of the historians and who commissioned them to write the history first. Even in the Medieval Period most historical documents are works of prose and go over a nations victories, sometimes even censoring the nation or cities defeats, failures or mistakes through out the age. Some accounts are more reliable than others, but as language and agenda changes through time so too does the reliability of historical documents. Now, it is necessary to say that some nations were much better about writing all of their history as opposed to just writing down the positive parts. A great example of ancient history that we have a large amount of history on is the Roman Empire, where we know about their losses, failures, bad emperors, and of course there is a lot of information on the crises of the third century, where much of the Empire collapsed. We know the exact date of when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, we also know about how the Eastern Empire transitioned to become the Byzantines. But unfortunately, once we start to try to learn about the history of the worlds before even Rom, we start to loose more and more of the picture because so much was never written down. And much of what was is lost to dead languages or damaged records. Luckily, we have ways of surmising of what may have happened in the time period.
Story Telling: Story telling has existed longer than human civilization. Many of the first stories are about super humans or gods, and their interactions with mortals. The earliest known story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is a prime example, it is about two men, both born from the gods, and their quest to ascend into the heavens. The story has themes of masculinity, becoming a man, responsibility, and what makes for a good ruler. Other great stories, created thousands of years later, like the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid, follow the idea of a character or group of characters going out into the world to accomplish some great goal, or to gain revenge for a past slight. The presence of gods and mortals still exists and the style is still very much written like a long poem. But now there are also major themes of tragedy, comedy, revenge, romance that have been categorized and practiced by many authors over thousands of years for them to perfect. What is interesting is how we have slowly transitioned away from telling stories in the form of poems towards flowing written words, more concerned with scene setting and dialogue. In my opinion, even modern story telling and story telling from two hundred years ago has changed significantly. One of the best examples I can think of is Dracula. Dracula is still an excellent story and a great read, despite how the language has changed in two hundred years, also how the style focuses more on dialogue than world building and description. Modern story telling often reflects the values of our times, and remarkably we live in an age where the main characters have become more diverse; we see a lot more modern stories, for example, that have women as the main characters than what we had traditionally seen in the past.
Conclusion: While History and story telling have diverged away from another as they become their own subjects and fields, there is still some distinct overlap. History is like one massive, never ending story told in chronological order. Its purpose is teach us about our past. We can use it to learn the mistakes of our ancestors so that we do not repeat them, or to learn more about where we came from. And when we know most of the story it flows in such a way that we can garner meaning and insights, that way, we don’t make the same mistakes as the people who lived before us. Much of what we see today in story telling comes from events in history. In fact story telling in a lot of ways builds off of history.
Modern Renaissance Man 