Lecture About World War II and the Immediate Post War Period Introductory Comments on the Study of Economic History History is important. Those who are unaware of history are, nonetheless, vastly affected by it and doomed to repeat past mistakes. Clearly, history is about more than any one of these things, or even all of them plus such pieces of economic history as what were the major products of the thirteen original American colonies and who were the leading American industries in the late nineteenth century.
History includes everything that happened in the past.
However, it is obvious that, even if we were able to find out everything that happened in the past, none of us could ever learn about more than an extremely small fraction of it. Even if we confine ourselves to our country's relatively short history and study only those things which are currently printed in books, you could read the rest of your life and not be able to read it all. Obviously, therefore, historians must specialize . A great deal of what happened in the past that was recorded has not been printed in any book, even as a brief summary. There is an enormous amount of information in old newspapers which appears in no book.