Why Study History? (1985) | AHA - 0 views
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Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past
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Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.
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Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider
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Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!
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what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?
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This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that
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in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago
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Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.
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Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.
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Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.
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what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.
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skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?
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Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief
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What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?
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Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.
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Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.
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Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups
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The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor
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Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?
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But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history
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But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.
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much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.
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Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.
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Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.
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The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.
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Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.
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Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.
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National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.
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the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen
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Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.
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Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.
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Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.
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On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop
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Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago
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For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.