Why History?
One perfectly good reason to study history is that it’s just plain interesting. It’s about people trying to get on in life in all manner of circumstances in every corner of the globe, doing everything from planting crops to inventing philosophies. As human beings, we are interested in piecing together other people’s stories. What did they have to deal with? How did they create and respond to change? When they are different from us in important ways—as all people in the past were—it is all the more intriguing to try and understand their lives.
But it turns out in this case that what is interesting is also practical. Exploring how people in past constructed, tried to live in, and changed their social, political, and symbolic worlds makes us more adept at understanding our own changing world. Not that we can collect easy “lessons” from the past: each period in time is too different from ours to allow easy instructive analogies between the present and the past. What we gain from the serious study of history is a way of seeing things that helps to orient us in our immediate, ongoing experience.
How? In the first place, it expands our conception of who we are. By studying the past, we learn that our personal story extends back to a time before we were born. It is longer than the years we will live. We come to realize that certain things we associate ourselves with—let’s say our church or our legal system—were made for us, for better or for worse, for particular reasons in specific circumstances by people long since dead. Not to mention that millennia ago our ancestors domesticated dogs and cats to be our companions or invented corn as a crop! By enlarging our identity backward in this way, we learn that our world was built out of centuries of human effort and the chance convergence of many circumstances; we come to understand better why it is the way it is and where it might head in the future.
But if the study of history broadens our sense of ourselves, it does not make us self-centered. In fact, it makes us just the opposite. It helps us create distance from ourselves. If we go at it in the right way, we learn from history to regard our lives and world with some measure of objectivity. That is because the people we meet in our journeys into the past are, even if we stay within the confines of our nation’s story, necessarily different from us. You don't have to go back very far to discover unfamiliar perspectives on things like knowledge and authority and marriage and love. People in the past might believe that it is all right to hold people in bondage, for example, or consider it a marvel to get a letter across the country in a month. But by forcing ourselves to understand their thinking and their behavior in terms of the conditions in which they lived—by working our way into their minds and worlds and comparing our outlook and situation with theirs—we develop the habit of applying that same analytical effort to ourselves: Why, historically, do we think and act the way we do?
Once we’ve developed this larger and more objective sense of who we are, we can no longer take our values and our world for granted: we know they've been made over time by many hands and that they reflect conditions that will change. And this makes us smarter: we are better situated to discriminate between what’s old and new, permanent and passing, worthwhile and worthless. It even prepares us for the times, which always come, when things we cherish, or are at least comfortably used to, pass away. This way of thinking, together with the basic skills that develop with it—the ability to analyze the factors influencing human thought and action, to bring mountains of information into coherent focus, to express ourselves clearly and subtly—is an excellent foundation for practically anything one wants to do in life. History majors go on to become teachers, lawyers, doctors, financial analysts, contractors, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, police offers, coaches and so on. And, let's not forget, parents and citizens.
