Historians and the Living Past
"Historical study is a broadening and humanizing experience. We find it both humbling and inspiring to realize that life in our own times does not begin to exhaust the possibilities of human emotion, thought, imagination, and endeavor. History provides a glimpse of what people have thought and felt in times and places very different from our own. It reveals their successes and their failures, loves and hates. It portrays the splendor of past civilizations and records their decay and decline. History discloses the arrogance and greatness of rulers, the passions and audacity of revolutionaries, and the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. Finally, history helps us to understand our own identity in the present by giving us an understanding of how we came to be what we are."