History in the making.

AuthorMcCullough, David
PositionAmerican Thought - Viewpoint essay

HARRY TRUMAN once said the only new thing in the world is the history you do not know. Lord xxx Bolingbroke, who was an 18th-centtny political philosopher, said that history is philosophy taught with examples. An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. We are raising a lot of cut flowers today and trying to plant them.

The task of teaching and writing history is infinitely complex, seductive, and rewarding, and that one of the truths about history that needs to be portrayed--needs to be made clear to a student or to a reader--is that nothing ever had to happen the way it did. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at any point along the way, just as your own life can. You never know. One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences. These all sound self-evident, but they are not--particularly to a young person trying to understand life.

Nor was there ever anything like the past. Nobody lived in the past, it" you stop to think about it. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington did not walk around saying, "Isn't this fascinating, living in the past?" They lived in the present, just as we do. The difference was it was their present, not ours--and just as we do not know how things are going to turn out for us, they did not, either. It is very easy to stand on the mountaintop as a historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or did not do that, because we are not involved in it; we are not inside it; we are not confronting what we do not know--as everyone who preceded us always was.

Moreover, there is no such creature as a self-made man or woman. We love that expression, we Americans, but every one who ever has lived has been affected, changed, shaped, helped, and hindered by other people. We all know, in our own lives, who those people are who have opened a window, given us an idea, encouragement, a sense of direction, self-approval, self-worth, or have straightened us out when we were on the wrong path. Most often they have been parents. Almost as often they have been teachers. Stop and think about those teachers who changed your life, maybe with one sentence, maybe with one lecture, maybe by just taking an interest in your straggle.

Family, teachers, friends, rivals, competitors--they all have shaped us, as so, too, have people we never have met or known, because they lived long before us. They have shaped us as well-the people who composed the symphonies that move us, the painters, the poets, those who have written the great literature in our language. We walk around everyday, every one of us, quoting William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Alexander Pope. We do not know it, but we are, all the time. We think this is our way of speaking. It is not our way of speaking--it is what we have been given. The laws we live by, the freedoms we enjoy, and the institutions that we take for granted all are the work of other people who went before us.

To be indifferent to that is not just to be ignorant, it is to be rude, and ingratitude is a shabby failing. How can we not want to know about the people who have made it possible for us to live as we live, to have the freedoms we have, to be citizens of this greatest of countries in all time? It is not...

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