History endures because human memory gives it life. Stories of genealogy, folklore and epics have been recited around fires for thousands of years; laws were carved into stone before they were painted on papyrus; photography records a face as much as audio does a voice. Our compulsion to document and preserve has remained a constant throughout eras and across civilisations; something that has become exponentially vaster as we become more digital.
We have a lot to thank the digital age for. The internet has given us viral challenges in which people eat laundry pods and Fish Doorbell, a livestream of an underwater camera in a Dutch canal. But it has also fundamentally altered the practice of historical research and the preservation of records. An immense archive has emerged, delivering us from a material world of information scarcity to a digital one with information superabundance.
This is great, in many ways: historical sources are much more accessible to a far wider audience than ever before. But it also has its complications. Not all information is created equal. For every intellectually rigorous essay on how internet speak is the ultimate realisation of Derridean notions of deconstruction there are ten videos of people inhaling ground cinnamon trying not to choke. Attempting to impose order within this chaotic environment would easily feel overwhelming.
Amid this, curiously, a new mode of historical record seems to be ascendant: the telling of a topic – the economy, the modern world, 21st-century inventions – through curated lists of physical objects. The model might be Neil MacGregor’s 2010 BBC Radio 4 show A History of the World in 100 Objects, which used items housed in the British Museum (of which MacGregor was then director) to tell complex narratives through items such as drums and helmets, or those as dainty as a coin from 1903. It was hugely successful, reaching up to four million listeners per segment during its broadcast run. Ever since then, the genre has proliferated with astonishing speed, spawning innumerable iterations, some separated from the original by only the thinnest of threads. It has inspired a relentless compulsion to scour the world, turning every rock, hammer and debit card into an MP4.
Trawl through podcast apps and bookshops and you’ll find endless variations on the same premise: explain civilisation through a collection of things. Tim Hardford tells the inventions and innovations that have shaped the economic world in 50 Things About the Modern World, and June saw the launch of Stuff Matters, a six-part series from Ed Conway in which he reveals the hidden stories of the objects around us. Sixteen years after MacGregor’s podcast, celebrating America’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he’s back to reimagine the landmark series with A History of the US in 100 Objects. An enduring legacy. It seems the present is perhaps a place few care to stay.
So much of human existence has been shaped by the stories we tell. Our identities are tethered to the narratives – of our successes and failures, our beliefs and convictions – that we tell ourselves as much as we tell others. Nationhood, for example, is often articulated through stories: wars fought, lives lost, treaties signed and borders arbitrarily carved. We tell stories to explain why we are the way we are. If we lack a narrative, we build one from fragments, imposing order where there is none, speaking subjective truths from objectively little evidence.
This explains, at least in part, the success of the history-by-object format. As humans, one of our strongest and most consistent compulsions is to narrate. Anomalies and disconnected facts make us confused. We are naturally pattern-seeking creatures and, if presented with enough information, we are all but guaranteed to try to make sense of it somehow: through identification, categorisation or rearranging facts into a cogent story.
That objects are the primary conduit for discovering our past has practical appeal: they are tangible means of explaining intangible histories. A coin can represent empire; a drum the slave trade, a handaxe pre-industrial agricultural farming. They impose physical limits on impossibly large subjects. And the format of each series works because lists are psychologically soothing: they signpost to a sense of completeness. One hundred curated pieces feels thorough, authoritative but not overwhelming. Perhaps it illuminates why these books and podcasts have multiplied so rapidly over the past decade. They simultaneously satisfy two appetites: the desire for digestible knowledge and the desire for narrative certainty. They promise that the complexity of the world can, in fact, be reduced to 100 episodes or 50 inventions.
But we often mistake narratives for absolutes. If not careful, we all too readily accept the proposed story without critically assessing it. With many of these lists, one question remains largely unanswered: who curated them? Causally surveying them and one will notice far more coins and maps than they will, say, nappies and soap. The objects of expanse – war and empire – are far more prevalent than those of domesticity. Such omission serves to remind us that history and its retelling has never been neutral. Objects, obviously, do not speak for themselves; they are ventriloquised by the historian who chooses it and take on whatever meaning we project onto it. Perhaps that is the history these objects represent. A 100-point list of objects may seem thorough, but how many millions weren’t chosen, or even considered?
This new frontier of record-keeping provides a catalogue of civilisation as much as it does a catalogue of our contemporary imagination. It reveals what we believe counts as history and which stories we find satisfying. It reassures us that the world can be organised, ranked and narrated through a finite collection of possessions. But just because it can, doesn’t mean it should; omission is just as important as inclusion. Because, yes, of course, stuff matters, but whose?
[Further reading: What we owe to bread]
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