Friday, December 20, 2024

What make a historian important - perspective



The worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is today. 

 - Robert Louis Stevenson 

History majors are becoming rarer at universities. Who wants to study the past? How is history going to help me with my job? I am only looking to the future. 

Yet, historians if they do their job correctly, try to make sense of what is often viewed as nonsense. The historian thinks about context. He thinks about cause and effect and what information can be found to support a set of explanatory arguments. There may be a model, but the model does not focus on the elegance of methodology but centers on the ability of explain and give some sense of order to disparate events. This is a skill which if often lacking when we are in the heat of the moment. 

The passions of the current are only tempered with time, but time is not possible when events are unfolding.

Knowledge would be fatal, it is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things beautiful. - Oscar Wilde 

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