5

History grows shorter and closer every year, less rather than more distant, less rather than more alien. The day on which I was born is as close in time to the Scopes Monkey Trial as it is to today, and closer to the Reichstag Fire and the stock-market crash that announced the Great Depression. The day my father was born is closer in time to the Civil War than it is to today. Those old granite hitching posts out in front of the houses in Massachusetts are relics from another time, but one that is not so distant as we imagine it to be. The men who hitched their horses there might marvel at our Teslas, but they would recognize us. They know us, and we know them. Or we can know them, if we want to.

I do not believe that only those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. Plenty of people who study history are entirely capable of making the same mistakes as their ancestors, and worse ones, too. Practical application is not the first, best, or only reason to study history and try to learn something from it — which is not exactly the same as learning something about it — but give that fair consideration, too. Thanksgiving may put us in a historical mood, and different people tell different stories about the founding of this country and what came next. They do not always have the best or most honest reasons for preferring one version of that story to another. But each of us, possessed of the knowledge of his own nearly boundless ignorance (how many things do you really know about?), ought to have a little modesty and a little humility, enough to hope that we might see a little light in some of those other versions of the story, and that we might expand the circle of light outward a little, pushing back the darkness as best we can.