Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
History serves as a model not only of who and what we are to be, we learn what to champion and what to avoid.
History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.
Leave history to historians.
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