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History
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Why study history? It has often said that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. We must live in the present, however few do not plan for and worry about the future. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother to examine what has already happened? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good deal of history? Those who study history do not perform heart transplants, nor do they improve building or highway design, or prosecute criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, many fail to see the functions of the study of history. The fact is, history is very useful, and many would say, indispensable. However the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from other disciplines.
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History offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings.
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Finally, the importance of history in explaining and understanding change in human behavior is no mere abstraction. Take an important human phenomenon such as alcoholism. Through biological experiments scientists have identified specific genes that seem to cause a proclivity toward alcohol addiction in some individuals. This is a notable advance. But alcoholism, as a social reality, has a history: rates of alcoholism have risen and fallen, and they have varied from one group to the next. Attitudes and policies about alcoholism have also changed and varied. History is indispensable to understanding why such changes occur. And in many ways historical analysis is a more challenging kind of exploration than genetic experimentation. Historians have in fact greatly contributed in recent decades to our understanding of trends (or patterns of change) in alcoholism and to our grasp of the dimensions of addiction as an evolving social problem. Therefore, a person who is a student of history may in fact have access to a seemingly
inexhaustible supply of information necessary to our present day.
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