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Remembering things

Strategies for assimilating a lot of facts quickly? Not in a law brief sense.

Eg: the British Empire. Where do you even begin to amass enough knowledge to have an informed opinion on it and hold onto beyond the day after you've finished the book. 

Ive tried a "very short introduction" books for things like British politics or Marxism and I can recall barely anything I've read. 

 

There is very little point trying to remember "things", eg a list of kings etc.

Read, and understand, the general narrative thrust, and ssufficient facts will stick to trigger other facts.

Also unless you are actually sitting an exam, you don't need to know Cecil Rhodes' inside leg measurement, just when senior colonialists' trousering specifications will matter. 

 

Or just tattoo the lot on your arms. 

There is very little point trying to remember "things", eg a list of kings etc.

I'm not sure. It helps contextualise things. Dates in history are like scales in music. Boring but you need to learn them first. Later, it all fits together. 

I'm learning that I've been given a very lopsided view of the world. Britain has been presented time and again in the most flattering light even when that's just untrue. 

I only learned Churchill was a bit of a fascist by accident a few years ago. I had no answer to the "but Britain left a legacy of railways in India and gave them a model of how to govern" because I hadn't understood what the British were doing in India. Not really. I still don't. 

I need a counter narrative to the bollocks I was taught and the nonsense our politicians come up with when developing foreign policy.

 

 

What OP says is why learning "things" isn't terribly helpful, the narrative may make the sseemingly-important facts less useful.

Churchill is a very complex character, and generally iirritated an awful lot of people, some of whom should have been annoyed, and some who shouldn't. And he didn't always annoy the right people for the right reasons.

 

Still think it amusing he kept on trying to ppersuade the king to call a ship HMS Cromwell...

Literal answer to the OP - mnemonics and over simplifications.That gives you a structure from which you can get more detailed and subtle. And then a really good ripping yarn account of the time line.Those V Short Intro books won't do it,they are boring writing. 

 Robin Lane Fox managed this for Greek and Roman history 800BC to 400AD.  

Of course he wasn't a fascist. What nonsense. He was a Liberal by inclination and he saved us from fascism. That said, he was a bit of a warmonger and the deification of him in the 21st centry bemuses me. 

Im not using the technical definition. But his dogs/mangers remarks about Arabs and the 3mn  Bengalis that starved because of his decision to divert food from Bangladesh is pretty awful.  

Narratives and stories are much easier to remember than random dates/numbers. There is some science behind that. 

For discrete information spaced repetition systems (SRS) can be quite effective - have a look at the Anki app. However they are mostly used for languages, applying that method to history would somewhat novel. But if you really want to drill some specific facts into your brain SRS is probably the best there is. 

The other thing with memory is the “use it or lose it” principle. A new language is comparatively easy to continuously practice, but where are you going to utilise your newly-learned history facts?

It's said that London cabbies have larger than average posterior hippocampuses, a trait shared with squirrels and migrating birds. You only need to remember the important stuff. 

Notes.  If you dont make notes as you read you are almost guaranteed to forget.    Its not even about reviewing them subsequently (although obviously this helps), just the act of making notes seems to improve the chances of retaining info.  It is tedious though.

I went to quite a good series of talks by a Churchill historian. He clearly loved and admired “the boss” but did touch on some of his more unacceptable views and flaws. Nobody is perfect. But to understand anything about Churchill you have to try to understand the world he grew up in. You can’t say he was racist because the concept of racism was not well developed then and little he said was outside conventional thinking for the time. 

At the same time we can acknowledge he said unacceptable things about the Indian people. 

My trick for exams has always been going through my notes and writing them out again in a condensed form and then doing the process a second time to the point where I used to be able to get the important details from an hour long lecture on a single side of A4.  The process of writing and writing and again was the main thing that fixed the details in my mind but then I'd go over and over the shortened version until I could basically picture each sheet in my head.

Thanks all. I use the "notes as you read and then condensed notes" method. It's the best one I've got. 

I was thinking maybe I need to write a question that I want to answer and then prepare that answer. It forces engagement but it does require a lot of effort. Barry is right about recall. If I'm not using that info, I'm going to forget it. 

 

When I was a member of a non-fiction drink^h^h^hbook club, I tended to annotate the bool as I went . A bit old school, but there you go.

A copy of Stenton on the Anglo-Saxons at college had veritable conversations going on in the manuscript. 

I tend to make notes on my phone. I've got a good idea for an essay on Waugh[1] sitting on an old phone that I need to put somewhere and do something with.

 

[1] one of the writers not the cricketers... 

Visting the country / place on the opposite side of the war / battle in question is the best way in my experience.

A tour of Croke Park for an Englishman can be a bit of an eye opener

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