Too busy to read?

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example, studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realise that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy, and that the world might well be arranged differently.

History before the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. also receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the human species.

You cannot change your past, only the way you think and feel about it.

I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world.

We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written (peccavimus) is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting--because it is exceptional.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." Study history and notice its patterns.2 This is the first lesson I learned in how to think about the future.

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.

The universe doesn't care about your past. It is blind to it. The universe doesn't care that I wore pink pants in high school. (Hey, remember Miami Vice?) The universe doesn't care that I got in a fight with Francis Franken and lost. The universe doesn't care about your MBA from UCLA, your drug-dealing father, or that you wet your bed in junior high. The universe simply doesn't care. One person and one person only weaponizes past transgressions: you. If the universe doesn't remember, why should you?

"You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don't you won't know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won't know how to deal with them."

"Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice."

As I walked home carrying the heavy manuscript, I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry's lectures, which he had begun by writing, "Who writes history?" on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King's College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought.

events during prehistory, by definition, left no historical record,