Why Study History?
Is it crucial to study history? Distinguished historian Victor Davis Hanson explores these crucial concerns.
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Script:
Why research study history?
Ironically, this concern is as old as history..
Twenty-five hundred years earlier, Thucydides, the great chronicler of the Peloponnesian Wars in between Athens and Sparta, and the guy numerous call the “first historian” said that “… I have composed my work, not … to win the applause of the minute, but as a possession for all time.”.
Thucydides hoped that what he was writing would assist future generations comprehend what taken place in his day. If they might learn from it and make better choices, his efforts would not be in vain..
More than two centuries later on, the American social thinker George Santayana stated similar thing, “Those who can not learn from history are doomed to duplicate it.”.
While knowledge of the past is a requirement to wisdom, it doesn’t provide the historian a crystal ball..
We should be modest in our claims: studying history supplies an indispensable guide– however only a guide– to existing and future political, financial, military, and cultural difficulties.
Just as it threatens to be ignorant of past occasions, so too it is equally risky to presume that history throughout time and area will repeat itself in precisely the same fashion. It never does.
Still, with the appropriate caution, studying history can warn us of risks ahead..
For example, across the ages appeasing or neglecting enemies has actually seldom proven to be a sensible method. Usually, it’s devastating..
The Greek city-states’ coddling of the Macedonian king Philip II, the weak Western democracies’ response to the aggressiveness of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, and the indifference shown to the risks of extreme Islam by an upscale West in the 1990s make the point..
There is another– perhaps less acknowledged– value in studying history.
Every generation, none more than our own, suffers from a pernicious presentism– the arrogance that those now alive have developed the most thriving duration in history. The outcome is that frequently we judge a materially poorer previous by the very same contemporary standards of a wealthy and leisured present..
Those who study history can avoid these misconceptions.
Aside from the reality that the present is the beneficiary of the collected intellectual, moral, and scientific contributions of the past, correct knowledge of the challenges of prior ages teaches us the worth of humility.
To take simply one possible example, it may be a simple thing to chronicle what appears to us prejudices taped among the wagoneers on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s. It is quite another to picture how the trailblazers struggled to make it through another day in an age without effective medicines, labor-saving devices, or adequate shelter.
Studying history likewise gives much required perspective..
It’s neither sensible nor reasonable to try to use the ethical requirements these days to say, the far more deadly 17th century when life, in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, was “singular, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”.
The COVID-19 pandemic seems to many like a public health crisis without precedent– till we take time to discover of the worldwide break out of the H1N1 influenza virus in 1918. The “Spanish flu” killed nearly 600,000 Americans in a country of 100 million, with an around the world toll of maybe 50 million dead– and yet our country and world survived and discovered from it.
One of the manner ins which I utilized to withstand the routine, dust, and noise of tractor driving was to bear in mind that my farming grandfather covered the very same ground with a group of horses. It took him 2 days of back breaking labor to cultivate four acres of land. I might do it in an hour– sitting down.
For the complete transcript check out: https://www.prageru.com/video/why-study-history.
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Is it essential to study history? Why do we need to know what’s come before us? Prominent historian Victor Davis Hanson checks out these crucial concerns.
One of the ways that I used to endure the routine, dust, and noise of tractor driving was to keep in mind that my farming grandfather covered the same ground with a group of horses. It took him two days of back breaking labor to cultivate 4 acres of land.
