It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there's a tradition, but there's also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that's well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.
Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.
English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.
The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.
Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.
History seems to be so clumsy.
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