What history gives the present
Eight Harvard historians gathered at Emerson Hall Wednesday night with an ambitious goal in mind: to explain — in eight minutes or less apiece — that “everything is history and history is everything.” Without historical inquiry, they suggested in their short presentations, people may be ill equipped to take on the most daunting challenges of the age, including the financial malaise, climate change, the state of American democracy, and the role government should play in citizens’ lives. “We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act,” said the financial historian Niall Ferguson, quoting R.G. Collingwood at the Harvard History Department-sponsored discussion titled “Everything is History — History is Everything.” History is too chaotic and unpredictable to tell the future, but it can help to understand possible futures, said the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and author of “The Ascent of Money.”...