The Compassionate Historian
A Guest Post by Edward Lengel
Compassion is the key to understanding history. Too often, readers and historians look on the past with a kind of arrogance, not just judging their forbears, but absolving themselves of the basic human flaws that have inspired the mistakes and tragedies of the past. We, of course, would never submit without protest to the kinds of misdeeds our ancestors committed. Or would we?
And, by setting our own humanity above our ancestors, don’t we also deny ourselves the chance of learning from their accomplishments?
A much better approach to history is to recognize, as the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark concluded in his great [1969] television series Civilisation, that “men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years.” With this in mind, we can embrace the past and recognize in it the story of ourselves.
George Washington did not achieve victory in the Revolutionary War because he was better than human, but because he made the most of his humanity. The British mishandled the Irish Famine of 1846-52 not because they were exceptionally evil, but because they gave in to instinctive flaws, such as fear, that we also share. And the men and women who fought in and experienced the First World War, such as the four individuals I describe in my book Never in Finer Company, succumbed or overcame based upon the resources inside themselves.
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You can follow Edward Lengel, independent author and historian, via his blog, Facebook, or Twitter. He is currently Colonial Williamsburg’s Revolutionary in Residence. When not writing “cracking good stories,” he’s often hiking through history and giving tours and talks.
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