History
For
Homeschoolers
For
Homeschoolers
History is philosophy teaching by examples. [Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War]
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
[James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son]
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
[Pearl Buck]
Our values, attitudes and beliefs are not simply the product of our abstract ideals. Our moral consciousness is also fashioned according to our historical consciousness. He who controls the historical imagination of a people is master of the age. To be ignorant of history is to be an unwitting prisoner of the dominant ideologies of an epoch, an incarcerated subject of a kingdom of vicarious opinion. The historian provides a telescope into the wider cosmos in which the planet of immediate human experience moves. Like the astronomer, the historian brings new points of view into focus -- new models of understanding that help us to see more than the sparkling yellow lights that decorate the night sky of popular culture. At the same time, history teaches us the skills of critical awareness and a knowledge of the philosophical movements that, like gravity, direct the planetary movements of peoples, cultures and events.
