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    A Student's Guide to the Study of History
    A Student's Guide to the Study of History
    A Student's Guide to the Study of History
    Ebook58 pages46 minutes

    A Student's Guide to the Study of History

    By John Lukacs

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    A thoughtful look at the value of learning from the past: “Nobody has done more than John Lukacs to turn the short history book into an art form” (Antony Beevor, Toronto Globe & Mail).

    To study history is to learn about oneself. And to fail to grasp the importance of the past—to remain ignorant of the deeds and writing of previous generations—is to bind oneself by the passions and prejudices of the age into which one is born. John Lukacs, one of today’s most widely published historians, explains what the study of history entails, how it has been approached over the centuries, and why it should be undertaken by today’s students. This guide is an invitation to become a master of the historian’s craft.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781497645165
    A Student's Guide to the Study of History

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      A Student's Guide to the Study of History - John Lukacs

      AN INTRODUCTION—TO YOURSELF

      WHAT is history?

      No definition will do. Earlier in this century, two German historians tried to give such definitions. They were ludicrous, running to sixty words or even more. They remind us of Dr. Johnson’s great saying: Definitions are tricks for pedants. Ha! I just wrote: remind. And that re-minds me, instantly, of another great Johnsonian saying: that we (teachers or, indeed, everyone) are here less to instruct people than to remind them. Re-mind: to think, and to become conscious, of something that we already know—even though we have not been thinking about that in this way.

      A good description—a description, not a definition¹—is this: History is the memory of mankind. Now, memory—every kind of memory—is enormous, just as the past is enormous. (The past is getting bigger every hour, every day.) But it is not limitless. There is the entire past. There is that portion of it (a varying portion, but let that go for a moment): the remembered past. And there is a yet smaller portion of that: the recorded past. For a long time—and for many professional historians even now—history has been only the recorded past. No, it is more than that: it is the remembered past. It does depend on records; but it is not merely a matter of records.

      But this is true of every human being. You have your own history, because you have your own past—ever growing and ever changing²; out of this past surges your memory of your past; and here and there exist some tangible records of your past. I am coming to your records in a moment, but, first, a few matters about memory.

      All human thinking—conscious and unconscious—depends on memory. There is no function of the human brain that is not connected with memory. For a long time neurologists thought that memory was a very important part of the brain, but only a part; their present tendency is to recognize its central function. (Even our dreams are inseparable from memory: it may be said that when we dream we do not think differently; we only remember differently.) If our memory ceased we could not go on living; we would, for example, walk through a window instead of through a door, not knowing—more precisely, not recalling—that this is a window and that is a door. As the great Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard said: We live forward, but we can only think backward.

      One more thing about the past. The past is the only thing we know. The present is no more than an illusion, a moment that is already past in an instant (or, rather, a moment in which past and future slosh into each other). And what we know about the future is nothing else than the projection of our past-knowledge into it. We know that it will get dark at night, because it has always been so. Notice, too, that even in Science Fiction the author puts himself at a point from which he relates the fabulous events he describes backward—that is, he writes in the past tense. The reason for this is that the human mind cannot for long sustain attention to a narrative that is composed in the future tense. In sum: our sense of the past is profoundly inherent in the functioning of our minds.

      Socrates said that all knowledge must come from human knowledge and from knowledge of the

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