Peter Wehner: The Importance of History

Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Previously he worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. In the last of which, he served as deputy assistant to the president.

...[A]mong other things, we need to better demonstrate to students what it is they are missing. The historian and literary critic Bernard DeVoto, in writing to Catherine Drinker Bowen on why the task of a historian is so important, said this:

If the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when our Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln and the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible; it began as a dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headlines you read in a newspaper.

History is about increasing knowledge, of course, and there is romance and drama in it, as DeVoto understood. But history also introduces us to ourselves. It connects us to our country, its achievements and failures, its heroes and villains, its ideals and aspirations. It is the sine qua non of democratic citizenship....