“History,” said Donald Kagan, “it seems to me, is the most useful key we have to open the mysteries of the human predicament.” Professor Kagan made this bold claim near the end of his 2005 Jefferson Lecture, “In Defense of History” where, having explored the contemporary state of the humanities and the society they are meant to serve, he warns that we have lost our “moral bearings.” By taking a “turn to history,” Kagan hopes we might recover them.1
One may wonder if any human source could meet so great a challenge. At the same time, the proposed turn to history reminds us that, unless we are to acquiesce to the loss, we must seek our bearings somewhere. In that light, I urge everyone to make that turn — to give Kagan’s key a try.
The Challenges of Teaching History
As it turns out, leading students in the study of history poses fairly unique challenges. I hear about them from teachers all over the country. Typically, their concerns take the form of these questions:
How do I choose between competing concepts of history? Is history just one thing after another? Is it more or less a catalog of facts? Does history repeat itself? Is it progressing somehow?
What makes historians select the events that make it into their works?
You hear someone warn, “History will judge us,” or, “This person is on the wrong side of history.” Does history act somehow as a force or agent?
Are history and memory distinct?
What is the relationship between history and experiences that are not strictly matters of facticity, even transcendent experiences?
It is not that these teachers do not know historical content. Rather, they want to know more and gain greater clarity about how to think historically, and they want their students to develop the best historical habits of mind.
Additionally, teachers regularly voice concerns that, as a field of study, history seems caught up in the current cultural turmoil our society faces and is moving along the same intellectual trends that are largely responsible for the general decline of the humanities. Under this concern, they ask these questions:
Some histories seem to be written more as calls to action than as studies or sources of understanding. How do we stay objective and, at the same time, allow history to shape our students’ vision and responsibility?
Some historians describe the history of America and the West as a story of exploitation or oppression. What can we say in the face of such criticism that basically dismisses our culture as corrupt?
In fact, there is a growing approach to history in American schools that disparages America and the West. The general emphasis in that approach is on events having to do with class, race, and gender exploitation. Of those three, the central concern regarding America has to do with slavery and racism.
Finally, the question of how we study history is related directly to how we think about our humanity and the sources that gave us the language and vision with which to articulate who we are. That challenge raises this question:
My students, colleagues, and I are from various backgrounds. Is there an approach to history we can all share?
There are other related questions that emerge, mostly having to do with what a history discussion looks like, how to develop great discussion questions, how to construct an effective lecture, and what texts and documents to read. The foundational questions, however, are the most important ones to answer. Good answers to them will free teachers to map out their plans for readings, discussions, projects, and lectures.
Of all the questions laid out above, the toughest one to answer is the question that brings us face-to-face with the challenge of a shared culture: Is there an approach to history we can all share? I believe there is, and I offer here one that transcends our divisions. It is what I call a liberal approach to history.
A Liberal Approach to History
By liberal, I intend its root meaning: free, as in persons who are genuinely free — free from undue external constraints and free from within, as in intellectually, morally, and spiritually free. That internal kind of freedom is the goal of education, and it really is a goal, not a given. We are born with free will, but we are not born free in the higher sense. We must be educated to freedom.
To be free in this sense is to know the truth, to examine our thought and practice, and to seek ever greater understanding. To be free means to govern ourselves as individuals and together and to meet our shared responsibilities by pursuing ends or purposes that are noble and lasting, reflective of our dignity and of the common good. Finally, freedom means generously giving ourselves to others, even sacrificially. A liberal education is an education to freedom. It guides us to the truth of things within and beyond ourselves, to noble purposes, and, above all, to others.
With that concept of a liberal education in mind, how might we approach history as a field of study? First of all, the liberal approach to history is observational. Our study of the past is driven by wonder and the desire to know, to see the past for what it is. It is directed toward understanding.
We observe the past by looking back and seeing it as distinct from the present and, at the same time, as forming who we are now and how we came to be.
Humans learn history by observing everything we can of past events; gathering knowledge and seeking understanding through the fullest study we can achieve regarding those events; avoiding all reductions of history to less than what it is; and deepening and improving our comprehension by ever expanding examination. Through the study of history, we learn about ourselves by looking beyond ourselves to those who preceded us.
Eventually, history shapes how we embrace our responsibility for one another, as do all the humanities in their various ways. However, the study of history is not, as it is often presented, primarily intended to produce action. Rather, the study of history is primarily intended to cultivate habits of the mind: wonder, inquiry, discovery, knowledge, and understanding, each with the past as its object. Again, first and foremost, history is observational.
Secondly, the liberal approach to history is sympathetic, not judgmental. By judgmental, I do not mean evaluative. I mean it in the sense of moralism. In this respect, to approach the past moralistically is to forget the condition we all share; it is one way that we forget ourselves. Sympathy, by contrast, allows public memory to collect our shared human condition across time. The root meaning of sympathy is to feel what others feel, especially their suffering. The broader meaning of sympathy is to share an affinity for others and for the full range of human experience. It presumes a common ground: the human condition, human nature, a shared past, and the hope for a future together.
Sympathy embraces our capacity for transcendence, creativity, and all genuine loves. Under the impulse of sympathy, recollection extends to our predecessors, attends to their likeness in the living, and sustains our attachment to those yet to be born. In sympathy, we allow others to work on us through memory; we receive them as members of a community of persons across time. Sympathy attunes us to the poverty of our existence, that is, our limitations as individuals and our reliance on others. At the same time, it gathers in our memory and holds what is good, what creates and sustains, and what gives us hope.
Sympathy recognizes all forms of human suffering, the kinds we all endure and the ones imposed by some on others. Memory holds such impositions with regret; and, as painful as it is to recall those failings, they must be retold as part of our story if for no other reason than we ought to feel the suffering of others as a matter of our common humanity. However, because of our affinity for the full breadth of the human condition, history is not, as it is often reduced to, chiefly the recollection of grievances. Rather, the primacy in our shared experience lies with what is good in our existence: the life we have, which makes all improvement possible, its origins and developments, and the inherited culture that situates us in the world.
If understanding is well established by the study of history, and if the goodness of our existence is held sympathetically in our public memory, then our shared responsibility emerges chiefly as a matter of preserving and improving the order of things. For, even when something is clearly opposed to human good — as injustice is to justice, oppression to freedom, or hatred to love — it is the good that measures it and provides meaning. It is the good that provides the foundation for creativity, improvement, and hope. Only something good can transform human suffering. Memory, then, rests on the broader, more inclusive understanding of sympathy as affinity for all things genuinely human, as the feeling that undergirds our interdependence and mutual responsibility, and as the shared confidence in the goodness and continuity of our existence as a society across the past, present, and future.
History is the formal study of the past and is expressed in either academic or popular narratives. At the same time, as a common way of thinking, history is expressed at all levels of culture. The historian approaches the past knowing that culture is already full of recollective expressions such as national holidays, liturgies, and cemeteries, just to name a few, where each one is, in part, an expression of recollection.
Each one of these examples gives evidence that remembering the past is part of who we are. As a formal study or as public memory, history is integral both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to our life together in society. In either expression, history is observational and sympathetic.
Andrew J. Zwerneman is co-founder and president of Cana Academy, which provides teachers with training and resources to lead their students to deeper knowledge and experience of the rich cultural inheritance of our civilization. This essay is excerpted from the introduction of his book History Forgotten and Remembered (2020), which historian Wilfred M. McClay calls “a profound antidote to the abuse and misuse of the past that have become so commonplace in our time.” Andrew is also the author of The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal (2022), the host of Cana Academy’s The Best Books, and the narrator for the new series of films, HISTORY250™. You can read other essays by Andrew and his colleagues on the Cana Academy website.
Above: School Time, Winslow Homer, ca. 1874. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art
Notes
- Donald Kagan, “In Defense of History,” Jefferson Lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2005. Donald Kagan (1932-2021) was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Classics and History at Yale University and one of the world’s preeminent scholars of Greek antiquity. [↩]
