Why Study History?

I wonder, at times, if my fascination with history is perverse. Edward Gibbon called history "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind," though that did not stop him from devoting his life to it. James Joyce wrote that, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," but he read, and cited, it obsessively. Henry Ford was more consistent. He said that, "History is more or less bunk," and treated it accordingly.

"Lessons of history"? There aren't any, or at least not the sort of pithy morals that we were taught to expect in school. The most historians can ascertain with confidence is what happened in a given era. To draw highly practical lessons, you would need to know what might have happened, should have happened, or could have happened. When it comes to these things, we can do little more than make educated guesses. But history is full of surprises, and our best guesses are not very good.

"Let history judge"? Final judgments must wait until the end of history, and there will be nobody to make them then. With time, we lose our ability to judge historical figures or events. Who were the good guys when the Egyptians fought the Hittites? It's dumb to even ask.

But we don't, or at least shouldn't, study history primarily to learn what we should do, so much as to learn where we come from and what (or who) we are. There are probably quite a few people today who lack any sense of the past, at least before the last few decades. They may function quite well in the social and professional worlds, but their lives, in my opinion, are incomplete. We study history not so much to predict the future as to enrich the present. Though it remains one historical moment, it encompasses thousands of years at least, both past and yet to come.