Howard Gardner © 2025
When we think about objects and events, certain ways of organizing and remembering these entities come into play. Presumably, most of us store experiences as being pleasant or unpleasant, recent or remote, blurry or detailed. Most of us also recall experiences visually—sometimes vaguely, sometimes in detail—though of course we might also recall such experiences with a soundtrack or even, as per Proust’s madeleine cookie at tea time, via taste or odor.
These modes of experiencing and remembering draw on our basic sensory and basic emotional equipment—and have probably been consistent and reliable for most of our existence as homo sapiens—perhaps even as members of the primate order.
But in more recent times, other ways of coding, organizing, and recalling experiences have come to the fore. In this essay, as one who has long pondered the nature of human intelligences, I consider whether it makes sense to postulate a historical intelligence—what it is, how it may work, whether it is worth inculcating, and if so, how best to establish and strengthen historical intelligence.
Two challenging thoughts immediately come to mind:
First, what’s the “Father of Multiple Intelligences” up to? Having suggested and provided the evidence for the seven multiple intelligences over forty years ago—and then reluctantly adding an eighth intelligence (the naturalist intelligence three decades ago)—why should I suddenly propose yet another intelligence, and thereby open up a Pandora’s box?
Second, don’t we who live in the so-called West actually have an answer to this question? Specifically, weren’t the Greeks first to create and then to model the practice of historical thinking and writing? And for the title of first historians, isn’t there a competition between Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) author of the primary historical text detailing the Greco-Persian Wars, titled History of the Great Persian War) and Thucydides (c. 460 – 400 BC) author of History of the Peloponnesian War? And if so, am I merely picking an accident—indeed two chronological or historical accidents! —and promoting it as yet another intelligence?
Indeed, falling into that trap, couldn’t we then simply add philosophical intelligence? Scientific intelligence? And other capacities usually attributed to Greek thinkers over two millennia ago, or more recently, to European thinkers in the Renaissance? Or to their counterparts in Chinese, Indian, or Arab cultures? Or even in pre-literate cultures?
So warned—and accordingly: I will proceed with caution.
In proposing a historical intelligence, I have in mind the major matrix or organizing principle which individuals may impose on events, personalities, movements, crises, and opportunities.
Let’s take the two dates cited in the title. For nearly everyone in English society, the date 1066 denotes the year in which the Duke of Normandy (later dubbed William the Conqueror) invaded and conquered the British Isles. For nearly everyone in American society, the date 1776 is the time when the American colonies declared independence from the British Isles and throne—and when, as a powerful date-mark, this declaration was signed on July 4.
For many, perhaps most individuals who can correct identify these dates, they are simply that—there are no other associations. But for those with the hypothesized “historical intelligence,” all sorts of other associations come to mind: What were things like before these canonical dates? What happened immediately thereafter, and can one assign a date (and a probability) to it? With respect to The Colonies, one may cite the Boston Tea Party 1773, Paul Revere’s ride and the siege of Concord 1775, Washington’s crossing the Delaware in the waning days of 1776, the surrender of Cornwallis 1781, the Articles of Confederation 1783? Or to put on a British spin, what was the time of Alfred the Great (and did he really exist?) The knights of the round table? When was the succession of Henrys, including Henry IV and V of Shakespearean plays? Or Henry the VIII (with his multiple wives) or his daughter, the first Queen of England? Or the Magna Carta (whose date of 1215 may resemble the venerated date of 1863—Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.)
Hey, wait a second! Perhaps this is not historical intelligence, but just a good memory for dates—a suitable contestant for Jeopardy!, a possible member of Mensa, but no greater virtue or capacity.
I would decline these diminishing proposals. A memory for dates and for chronology is certainly a prerequisite for a postulated historical intelligence—and those who lack such a memory must either consult a history book (or a website) frequently or consign themselves to the historical dustbin.
So, what transmutes a good memory for dates and names to the status of an operating historical capacity, whether or not one determines to dub it an intelligence? A good short answer is that the names and dates serve as an organizing matrix for the historical intelligence—or perhaps to be less tendentious, a historical way of thinking.
Thinking historically yokes the memory for dates/names to an assumption that there are larger forces at work that contribute to—and perhaps dictate—what actually happened in a landmark year—1066, 1776, 1789 (French Revolution) or 1861 (American Civil War) or 1917 (Russian Revolution) or 1949 (Chinese Communist takeover).
Because, of course, these titanic events did not just happen to happen when they happened. There were larger forces at work—economic (privileged classes, wealth disparity, inflation and bubbles burst), political (struggles among rival leaders, elections, emerging legal systems) military (new weapons, outmoded or inappropriate weapons, armies, navies, air forces, generals and admirals), religious (new religions struggling against established ones, religious or quasi-religious leaders, predictions from sacred texts, icons and iconoclasts). One could also add scientific breakthroughs or ideological innovations and clashes—and looking to our present moment, the decline of traditional media and the eruption of new media.
From pointing to too narrow a focus (merely remembering chronological landmarks), I’ve shifted to a large—perhaps almost endless—litany of forces which somehow combine to make things happen in a certain way, or to keep things from happening (in what one now calls counter-historical thinking: what might have been—e.g. had the French king and queen escaped to another country in 1789; or had Mikhail Gorbachev not become the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 or had Franklin Roosevelt lost the 1940 election to an isolationist like Charles Lindbergh).
I believe that we have come close to the center of historical thinking—or to play this game out, to a delineation of a possible historical intelligence. Against a ready capacity to remember (or to access) calendrical information, the individual with a historical flair—a historical way of thinking—or, if you will allow—the individual with a hypothesized historical intelligence monitors and readily accesses what was happening in a certain society and at a certain time and comes up with a plausible account thereof, including what came before and what ensued thereafter.
And if that person (or group) has extraordinary talents and/or extraordinary ambition, they can actually survey different parts of the world or different times and come up with plausible comparisons and generalizations—such were the aims of historical polymaths Arnold J. Toynbee to Oswald Spengler a century ago…and, no doubt, their successors in our time.
Yet, in the end, I want to introduce a note of caution:
The Marriage of Figaro (opera)
Nearly all of us can come up with other ways of thinking about events and personalities—that’s why we have created scholarly disciplines, arts, and crafts. (It’s been claimed that The Marriage of Figaro—a play by Beaumarchais, an opera by Mozart and da Ponte—prompted the French Revolution. Well, perhaps it was a tiny pebble on the scale—but, certainly, it was not a fundamental factor.)
The individual (or group) with a postulated historical intelligence imposes such a matrix readily and proficiently on the range of events and personalities. Moreover, those who want to enter the ranks of professional historians need to compete with some success with other accounts proposed by other historians. That’s why we have departments, indeed faculties of history.
And indeed, when a new tool (like cliometrics or artificial intelligence) or a new focus (like the histories of underrepresented demographic minorities or sectors) comes to the fore, the alert historian attempts to assimilate or integrate these perspectives into an overarching (though not grandiose) historical account.
Conclusion
Having spent decades probing the possibility of various intelligences, I do not want simply to assert or add a historical intelligence. Having once opened such a Pandora’s box, I could not in good mind or conscience deny the existence of a philosophical intelligence, a biological intelligence, a geographical intelligence and so on.
Instead, it makes more sense, in my view, to stick to the building blocks of the original eight intelligences. But what we can do is to postulate intelligences in various domains and disciplines—like those just named—and then scrutinize how the eight established intelligences contribute to the effective deployment of disciplinary intelligences.
