Gibbon was an unlikely bearer of this message and hardly a candidate for fame. He was the only surviving child of an English country squire and, by his 30s, had made little mark in business or letters. He was under five feet tall, with twig-like limbs, a painfully enlarged testicle that sometimes made walking difficult and a face that gathered his eyes, nose and mouth in a tight scrum. A shock of red hair topped his overlarge head. In the cruel view of one acquaintance, he was quite simply “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow.” He sat as a member of the British Parliament throughout the entire American crisis but never found the courage to make a speech. The person often seen as the cultish, confident originator of “big history” was in fact frequently ill, unsure of himself, and what would now be called disabled — all of which became his secret superpower.
To anyone who encountered him on the page, he was an astonishment. Gibbon’s prose was electric, his sourcing exquisite. The book’s impressive title actually undersold its ambition. Gibbon sought to narrate a full 1,500 years of Roman imperial history, from the origins of the empire in the first century B.C.E. through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, with forays into the wider European Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
For America’s early leaders, Gibbon became necessary reading. James Madison used his notes on Gibbon to shape the Federalist Papers. John Quincy Adams recorded his impatience to see the final installments of “Decline and Fall” as if waiting for a serialized novel. When British forces burned the U.S. Capitol in the War of 1812, Thomas Jefferson sold his library, including his copy of Gibbon, to the government to help restock the Library of Congress. Today, a more-than-lifesize statue of Gibbon — rendered as lean and handsome — looks down on the library’s Main Reading Room, right next to Christopher Columbus.
“Decline and Fall” represented the coming-of-age of history writing not just as a profession but as a practice of living. For Gibbon, modesty, skepticism, a preference for evidence over authority and a view of every conclusion as provisional were essential traits of a good historian. They also turn out to be useful skills for getting through your day. We live the present ignorant of the tectonic movements beneath our feet, so we study history in order to pay closer attention. Historians should be in the business of defending the past from the totalizers: the people, factions and ideologies — the ones we despise and, more difficult, the ones we agree with — that want to take the dead, too, into their empires.
At its most basic, making the chaotic events of the past into a coherent thing we call history is an act of intentional, purposeful understanding. History forces us to confront things we don’t comprehend, decisions we can’t fathom, and ways of being and believing that seem utterly bizarre. It makes us look for evidence in unlikely places. It requires that we think like grown-ups, drawing conclusions that we know will change when the available evidence does.
