The History Buff

The end of another long weekend is here. Sigh.

One of the nice things about working for the government (or as a contractor for the government) is that you get Federal holidays off. And since most Federal holidays are arranged so as to fall on a Friday or Monday to allow for a three-day weekend (one thing our government has done right), that's a nice thing. Of course, a three-day weekend just means that we work on chores at home rather than stuff at the office, but it's the principle of the thing, you know.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk today about history, because I'm a history buff.

There are any number of things I think are fascinating. One of them, as you already know, is language: the idea that I can make these marks on a page (okay, screen) and you can understand what I mean when you read them, or that I can make noises shaped by my lungs, diaphragm, sinuses, tongue, and nose, and you know what they mean and respond. To me, that's just amazing.

Another thing I find fascinating is history. Not the dull, dry history of remembering and regurgitating the fact that the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, but that real people, people like you and I, lived through the events that led up to it. Happily, we're living in a time when there is a lot of great narrative history being written...history that makes the past come alive in a way that many of the fat, dreaded history texts of my high school years couldn't.

Military history is one of my particular interests, and the works of Cornelius Ryan (The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, etc) and, more recently, Rick Atkinson (An Army At Dawn and Day of Battle), bring the struggle of armies and the innocents caught in the crossfire into sharp focus. Social and political history can be fascinating, too, in the hands of someone like Doris Kearns Goodwin (No Ordinary Time) and Mark Bowden (Guests of the Ayatollah). American history is being well served by great writers and historians like David McCullough (John Adams) and Nathaniel Philbrick (Mayflower).

History, well-researched, well-interpreted and -written by a good historian, is a window into a fascinating world, most of which we've never seen and only the smallest fraction of which we've lived through and on which we have our own perspectives.

The philosopher George Santayana once said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There's also a danger of remembering the past and drawing the wrong lessons from it. The fascinating book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, offers cautionary stories of misguided (or outright disastrous) decisions made by leaders who misinterpreted the lessons of history.

History. It's not just for elderly professors with droning voices, leather patches on their jacket elbows, and dust in their hair. You're living it now. You'll find learning about it interesting. Give it a shot.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo