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History: It’s about Time

• Living with the past
• Good history gives you hope
• A habit in time

So here you are, facing the prospect of writing some history.

I don’t imagine it’s an especially comfortable feeling – if it was, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book. I am, in any case, here to reassure you: this won’t be so bad. Actually, by the time you get your diploma, you have a reasonably good chance of feeling pretty good about your history with History.

I realize that this is not something you regard as a given. That’s not to say you find history to be a boring subject; you may have even chosen the course you’re taking with enthusiasm. But you’re not a professional, and if you don’t find the practices of working historians daunting, you might find them mysterious or even annoying. So however you may be feeling at the moment, it’s worth posing a question at the outset: Why are you doing this?

The obvious answer, of course, is that someone told you to – a parent, an advisor, or, most directly, the teacher who dispenses your assignments and your grades. You didn’t make the rules of the academic game; you’re only trying to play by them as honestly as you can. But if that’s as far as this goes – you’re doing your homework simply because you’ve been assigned it, no questions asked – then you’ve got a problem. If you’re not a little curious, restless, or even a little irritated about why you’re doing it, then you’re not paying attention. And you’re not getting educated.

Living with the Past

Consider all those history teachers you’ve had: Why do they do it? They no longer need good grades. Chances are it’s because they’ve got mortgages or other bills to pay. But that’s almost surely not the original reason they got into this business – there are lots of ways to make money. At some point in their lives, they decided history was fun. Maybe that’s still true.

At least initially, it wasn’t an active decision. Maybe one of your teachers’ mothers got her some books out of the library when she was 7 years old that she liked. Or maybe the uncle of another took him to a museum. Or the teacher of another one of your teachers praised her as a kid in a way she found surprising and pleasing. And so she acquired the habit, the way some people get in the habit of cooking or protecting the environment. Eventually, these people found themselves making a living off that habit, a living that almost certainly includes some writing, along with a lot of reading.

Maybe that idea appeals to you, maybe not. One thing’s for sure: If history is nothing more than a paycheck, it’s going to be lifeless. Whoever you are, the payoff is going to have to be more satisfying than that if you’re going to stay with it.

Plenty of people have decided that History isn’t, in fact, worth the trouble. “History is bunk,” Henry Ford once reputedly said. Actually, what he really seems to have said, in a 1916 interview with the Chicago Tribune, is that “History is more or less bunk. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that’s worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”1 (Ford’s attitude lives on in contemporary lingo, where the phrase “that’s history” is meant to connote the irrelevance of the topic in question, like a relationship you consider convenient to forget.) Yet the man whose cars and the assembly line he perfected symbolized modernity a century ago was obsessed by the past. In the 1920s, he built an entire town, Greenfield Village, as a museum of American life as he remembered it from his childhood. It was a pretty good re‐creation, and remains a model for living history museums. Nevertheless, Ford’s memory was somewhat selective: it had no bank, no lawyer’s offices, and no bars.2 Facts, it’s clear, don’t always get in the way of history.

When history isn’t irrelevant, it can be a crushing burden. “History,” says Stephen Dedalus, a character from James Joyce’s famous 1922 novel Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”3 In the classic socialist anthem “The Internationale,” tradition is a something to be overthrown in the quest to usher in a better world. Maybe Henry Ford was right: Some things – most things? – are better forgotten.

Indeed, you really do have to wonder whether learning about the past can make all that much of a positive difference in a person’s life. Sure, it might be useful to be aware, for example, that you have a family history of alcoholism. But you don’t need a three‐credit class for that. Really: Is learning anything about, say, the Ming Dynasty likely to make a difference in your future career? For a while, I would open my U.S. history courses by asking my students why, other than to satisfy some tedious distribution requirements, anyone should bother. Invariably, I heard variations on George Santayana’s famous dictum, echoing Euripides and Thucydides, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”4 All right, then, I would tell the students wryly, you’ll know better than to start a land war in Asia. But of course, virtually nobody is ever in a position to start a land war in Asia. Nor, for that matter, is virtually anybody in a position to stop one once one starts.

I should add that large numbers of people may collectively stop a war they find problematic or wrong, and that a sense of history can shape the perceptions that make opposition possible. But the “lessons” of the past are nothing if not slippery. The classic example is the so‐called Munich analogy, wherein American policymakers wished to avoid the mistakes of European leaders in appeasing German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did at a 1938 meeting, leading to World War II. But the moral they drew from this story, that their opponents (in this case, Communists) must be resisted at all costs, led to quagmires in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s. By the 1970s it had become common sense that Americans should never start a land war in Asia, proverbial wisdom which policymakers ignored by going to war with Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003 – two wars with very different results. So much for the predictive power of analogies.

Good History Gives You Hope

So: history is irrelevant, history is depressing, history is maddeningly ambiguous. But what may be worst of all is that history is boring. Or, more accurately, History – the professional kind, with teachers and classrooms and assigned reading – is, shall we say, less than incredibly exciting. Movies like 300 and 1917 are okay, but history books are often deadly. Actually, the act of reading itself is often deadly. So what’s the point? Why is history worth your time? Why should it seep into your consciousness?

One answer is hope. Good history gives you hope.

This may strike you as a thin, vague, even foolish, assertion. Actually, some of us look on hope with suspicion. Hope means potential disappointment. It means failure that’s all the more acute when there’s a belief that things could have been otherwise. Hope is risky. It may lead you to commit to things that could hurt you – and it’s painful even before the outcome of whatever it is you’re hopeful about, because it often leads to stress and anxious uncertainty. In many respects, life would be easier without hope.

But even if we grant the desirability and utility of hope, you still have to wonder if history is really the best source of it. Remember that James Joyce line, history as “a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Of course, if you’re an Irishman in the early twentieth century, history, particularly that of Ireland in the preceding 350 years or so before Joyce wrote his promethean novel, was for many a particularly dreadful nightmare. American history isn’t so bad – unless, perhaps, you’re an African American born before, say, 1950, or a Chinese immigrant born, say, after 1850, or someone with a family history of alcoholism. And yet there have been lots of people and movements in American history, from the Puritan migration of the early seventeenth century to the Civil Rights movement of the mid‐twentieth, that have not only made life better for people of the time, but have also given justified hope to succeeding generations that they too can wage and win comparable struggles. Even Ireland is now a sunnier place for many of its people than it has been for centuries, notwithstanding the complications of issues like Brexit. Then again, intolerance, poverty, and racism have not exactly disappeared either. It sort of depends on how you look at it – and explaining just how you do look at it, whatever it happens to be, is one of the things good history does.

One of the things history also does is allow you to live a more vibrant life in the present. I was 41 years old when Kanye West released “Jesus Walks,” the hit song from his 2004 album The College Dropout. I’m the wrong demographic...