Why Study History?
Is it important to study history? Why do we need to know what’s come before us? Isn’t it just enough to “live in the moment?” Renowned historian Victor Davis Hanson explores these important questions.
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Script:
Why study history?
Ironically, this question is as old as history.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Thucydides, the great chronicler of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta, and the man many call the “first historian” said that “…I have written my work, not…to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
Thucydides hoped that what he was writing would help future generations understand what transpired in his day. If they could learn from it and make better decisions, his efforts would not be in vain.
More than two millennia later, the American social thinker George Santayana said much the same thing, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
But while knowledge of the past is a prerequisite to wisdom, it doesn’t give the historian a crystal ball.
We must be modest in our claims: studying history provides an invaluable guide—but only a guide—to current and future political, economic, military, and cultural challenges.
Just as it is dangerous to be ignorant of past events, so too it is equally risky to assume that history across time
