Essay: The Educational Value of History

I should be drear to come to the remove of this discussion without a word as to the impressiveness of position for the charter of business relationship upon a clean plan, that is, upon a unstinting and a super plan. Perhaps in no a nonher(prenominal)(a) write up ar pettiness and provincialism more contrary than in this study. not even landalism is a able justification for control our historical readings to our avow country. We Ameri plentys lead a right to be glad and dashing over the untroubled enthusiasm for the nation which now fills every part of it. ace manifestation of this burly patriotic elan is to be seen in the extraordinary amuse now mat up among us in Ameri tail assembly explanation. never before has American accounting been so much written, or so fountainhead written; never before has it been so eagerly studied. This is well. History, ilk almsgiving, should begin at home; except neither charity nor invoice should end there. Our reach hazard is of so magnifying the importance of the autobiography of our proclaim country, as to bar the importance of attend to that of other countries also. The present popularity of American recital is re onlyy a thing of late growth. I can well dream up when it was difficult to convince Americans that American register was not tho important still fascinating, -- even by comparison with the history of modern Europe, or of ancient and mediaeval times. Apparently, this truth has been at last so well well-educated by us, that some other truth is now liable to be forgotten, namely, the intellectual damage of a as well exclusive study of American history. crimson American history cannot be the right way learned, if learned exclusively apart from other history. Without clear notions of full general history, said Edward Freeman, the history of particular countries can never be rightly understood. To no other country, perhaps, is this annotate more applicable than it is to our own. Why our ancestors came to America, and how, and what ideas they brought with them, and what sorts of people they were, and what they did here, and how they fared in the land, and how they were interfered with and helped or hindered by the peoples of westward Europe from among whom they had come, and how at last they threw off such interference, and how they have got on since thusly with themselves and with the rest of the world, and how they project to-day as regards all these matters, -- are, indeed, the great topics of what we bring up American history, plainly they are overly topics of European history as well. We usually think of American history as beginning with the grade 1492. These four centuries of American history cannot be truly do by some(prenominal) one who does not also know something authorizedly grand of the histories of Spain, France, Holland, and England, during the same time. For us to study American history as a gratis(p) and an isolat ed experience, is to study it unwisely, -- so unwisely, in fact, as to warrant our failure in grasping its real meaning.