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Introduction: Histories of the Future and the Futures of History

David C. Engerman is Professor of History at Brandeis University, where he has taught since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. His first two books—most recently Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts (Oxford University Press, 2009)—examined Russia and the USSR in American intellectual and political life. His current project, tentatively titled “The Global Politics of the Modern: India and the Three Worlds of the Cold War,” studies superpower aid competition in postcolonial India. It has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

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David C. Engerman, Introduction: Histories of the Future and the Futures of History, The American Historical Review , Volume 117, Issue 5, December 2012, Pages 1402–1410, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1402

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As regards knowledge, the future … presents itself as an impenetrable medium, an unyielding wall. Karl Mannheim 1

I n spite of K arl M annheim's warning about the difficulties of reckoning with future events, a small but growing number of brave historians have been exploring the place of the future in twentieth-century history. Drawing especially on the vocabulary of the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck, they have sought to analyze aspects of past “horizons of expectation” rather than limiting themselves to “spaces of experience.” Studies of experience seem more susceptible to historical analysis; they are, in Koselleck's apt phrase, “drenched with reality.” Yet this flood of “reality” is deceptive, he suggests. It is impossible to analyze experience without incorporating expectation; how historical subjects imagined their futures is crucial to understanding their pasts. 2 Thus the contributors to this AHR Forum seek to link experience and expectation, the past and the future, in order to illuminate key moments of possibility in the twentieth century and to offer insights into the methods of historical scholarship.

The three essays that follow all concern themselves with explication and analysis of horizons of expectation in the past: how did their historical subjects envision the future, and what do those visions reveal about their own time? The articles by Jenny Andersson and by Matthew Connelly and his nine co-authors (termed, for convenience, “Team Connelly”) focus upon the latter half of the twentieth century in the North Atlantic world, and especially upon state sponsorship of studies of the future. Not surprisingly given their chronological and geographic emphases, the Cold War plays a prominent, even dominant, role in these essays. The third article, by Manu Goswami, focuses on the earlier twentieth century, offering a subtle and penetrating analysis of the prolific Indian social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar. Goswami is concerned with horizons of expectation for a world order no longer defined around empires.

Individually and together, the forum articles draw our attention to the politics of the future—how visions of the future both reveal and shape the exercise of power. Each of the essays operates at two levels of political analysis: geopolitics, on the one hand, and state politics, on the other. First in prominence and scale is the focus on geopolitics. The articles document creative imaginings of new world orders, post-imperial in Goswami's case, post–Cold War in the cases of Andersson and (in a very different way) Team Connelly. The authors thus build on the insights of anthropologist Johannes Fabian, whose landmark critique of anthropological time contained the observation that “ geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics .” Notions of time, Fabian continued, are not “natural resources” but “ideologically construed instruments of power.” 3 These instruments, in turn, underwrote the world order, whether imperial or Cold War. Thus at the geopolitical level, the essays focus on ways in which creative imaginings of the future offered sites of resistance to a dominant world order—as well as the boundaries of that resistance. These boundaries were guarded at the next level of political analysis: state politics. State power is the central category in Team Connelly's essay, and is present in Andersson's and Goswami's as well. Government officials underwrote studies of the future (for Team Connelly), shaped future studies (for Andersson), and presented a conceptual obstacle for anti-imperialism (for Goswami). The tensions between state politics and geopolitics appear in all three articles; interrogation of these tensions can generate substantial insights.

T he title of J enny A ndersson's essay , “The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World,” reflects the self-perceptions of its subjects, a disparate group of futurologists in the North Atlantic who considered studies of the future to be the central task of not just social scientists but societies. The futurologists ranged widely in terms of politics, geography, their relationships to state power, and their place in their respective nations' intellectual lives. Celebrated in a 1972 account by American Alvin Toffler, these students of the future prided themselves on not just predicting the future but also (in Toffler's breathless prose) outlining “the alternatives facing man as the human race collides with an onrushing future.” 4 The activities and the ideas of Andersson's subjects reveal a certain parallelism: just as they sought to identify trends that affected the whole world (crossing, in particular, the divide between the Cold War East and West), they frequently crossed borders themselves and self-consciously sought to establish a transnational discourse on the human future. 5

Andersson's subjects attempted to overcome the Cold War divide through at least two gambits, one transnational and one global. The transnational move of futurologists such as Bertrand de Jouvenel was to identify common ground between the industrial nations of the East and West. De Jouvenel was joined by many American and Western European scholars and commentators from the right and the left. His critique thus echoed Herbert Marcuse: both saw the emergence of massive bureaucratic states as impinging upon “the future of democratic institutions.” 6 The second, global, form of futurology among Andersson's subjects identified common trends that took place beyond the level of individual states. Foremost here were environmental issues, concerned with humankind's effects on the earth; the major issues were environmental degradation, on the one hand, and fear that the earth's human population would outstrip its resources, on the other. Both approaches constituted critiques of the Cold War global order.

Other challenges to Cold War geopolitics were even more explicit, and here Andersson's accounts of Eastern European futurologists are especially interesting. “Social forecasting” grew in the Soviet Union and across the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s and especially the 1960s. Just as “concrete social research” transformed studies of Soviet society from derivations of Marxist ideology into something resembling research into actual social conditions, prognostik used quantitative measures rather than ideological presuppositions at its core. The notion that the Communist future would be discerned through quantitative metrics rather than Marxist eschatology was itself a challenge to party power. Andersson shows how Eastern European futurologists, particularly those in Poland and Czechoslovakia, used future studies for “critique and dissent.” 7 These studies, in turn, quickly found enthusiasts among Western Europeans engaged in critique of their own societies—most notably Ossip Flechtheim, who had coined the term “futurology” during World War II. By the 1970s, futurologists East and West hoped that their field could serve what Flecht-heim called a “critical emancipatory function.” They created numerous institutes and working groups, including the World Futures Studies Federation, and developed a circuit of international conferences with portentous titles like “Mankind 2000.” 8

Yet hopes for global emancipation were no match for Cold War state power, as was amply illustrated at the 1972 conference “The Common Future of Man” in Bucharest. Japanese government officials ensured that their nation's delegates adhered to the country's pro-growth policies; they were not critics but closer to bureaucrats. The Romanian hosts maintained close surveillance on participants and intervened directly to challenge the notion of plural futures; there could be only one, state-sanctioned, future. Anti-establishment futurology could go only so far. Powerfully imagined futures could not surmount actually existing state power. Just as states sought to control the narratives of their past (a familiar topic for historians), they also sought to restrict studies of their future. 9

S tate power is unambiguously at the core of Team Connelly's article, which analyzes official American views of the Soviet threat. In cataloguing the series of unfortunate predictions about Soviet nuclear capabilities and intentions, this essay offers a spirited critique of the so-called “Soviet estimate,” as well as of historians who ignore past futures. Unlike Andersson's subjects, who included critics of the status quo, Team Connelly's key subjects are comfortably ensconced in the state apparatus. Hence one key element of the article is the bureaucratic politics of the future—as suggested by the wonderful title quote from Alain Enthoven, an economist who rejected the claims of uniformed officers that they had any unique insight into fighting a nuclear war. While well-attuned to the internal disputes over the Soviet estimate—competing visions of the USSR's ability and desire to engage in nuclear conflict—Team Connelly also seeks to identify the contributions of histories of prediction to broader histories of state power. The essay contains, at the start and again at the end, highly suggestive references to the ways in which state power constituted itself “in the mystique of clairvoyance.” The state's efforts to reinforce political authority and control its subjects are visible, Team Connelly suggests, in endeavors such as the civil defense programs of the 1950s. Evident in easily satirized cartoons like “Duck and Cover” as well as the official and unofficial promotion of home fallout shelters, talk of civil defense was ubiquitous in the 1950s and remained a presence throughout the Cold War. Yet civil defense was not just a strategy for legitimation or mobilization. As American nuclear strategy shifted from “Massive Retaliation” to “Counterforce/No Cities” and beyond, the question of how many civilians could survive a nuclear exchange was of pressing (if morbid) concern. And its results were complex and at times counterintuitive; historian Dee Garrison suggests that reactions against civil defense drills helped broaden the peace movement in the late 1950s. 10 But for nuclear strategists, estimates of Soviet civil defense programs provided clues about Soviet strategy—at the same time that they shaped American efforts.

The lack of reliable information about Soviet nuclear plans, furthermore, created a divisive bureaucratic politics of the future within the dubiously named “intelligence community”—which was actually a fractious group of analysts from a dozen or so agencies. (The divisions in this group are perhaps best summed up in a joke about the Soviet estimate: as one wag had it, the State Department believed that the Russians were not coming; the CIA insisted that the Russians were coming but would not be able to get to Washington; the Defense Intelligence Agency countered that the Russians could get to Washington and indeed were almost there; and the Air Force believed that the Russians were already in Washington—where they were hard at work in the State Department.) 11 The gaps in reliable intelligence meant that estimates of Soviet strength and strategies were rooted in assumptions of varying degrees of plausibility. Such predictions—“previsions,” in the language of the article—were all the more uncertain because they were so hard to falsify. No one could disprove a prevision in its own time, and Team Connelly notes that there was little effort on the part of the Soviet experts to review the often dismal record of past predictions. Given such interpretive freedom—or, better put, unaccountability—it is hardly a surprise that predictions were based in large part on presuppositions; previsions of the future depended less on past patterns and more on present priorities. Even concrete estimates, like Soviet nuclear capabilities, prompted significant disagreement among American analysts.

Over the course of the Cold War, estimates of Soviet intentions were less and less present in the major intelligence estimates: the first National Intelligence Estimate of the series was “Soviet Intentions and Capabilities” (1950), but later reports in the 1950s were limited to “Soviet Capabilities and Probable Programs”; by the 1960s, these estimates focused almost exclusively on “Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Attack.” One of the rare public controversies over the Soviet estimate—the creation of a “Team B” of outside experts to challenge CIA analysts in 1974—revolved around the estimates' typical emphasis on capabilities as opposed to intentions. Originally framed as a technical exercise to recalibrate official estimates of the Soviet threat, the core issue soon became, as one CIA official put it, “conflicting interpretations of the Soviet stance in the world today”—that is, around divergent a priori assumptions about Soviet intentions. Team B participants, most publicly the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, declared total victory over CIA analysts. In a 1986 article, Pipes claimed that after Team B “badly mauled” the CIA's in-house team, the National Intelligence Estimates took a “more somber” view of Soviet intentions. 12

Connelly et al. offer a different example of how horizons of expectation could alter spaces of experience. Briefly describing the career of Andrew Marshall, an economist who worked for the semi-official RAND Corporation before becoming the Pentagon's director of net assessment, they show how Marshall sought to understand Soviet defense policymaking in order to “game that system.” 13 Predictions about the future could be a weapon in the Cold War, not just in bureaucratic battles.

Team Connelly's attention to the ways in which the Cold War was fought through visions of the future is itself a significant insight. There are, however, more important, if at times less tangible, ways that the Cold War was as much about the future as the present. The Soviet Union and the United States battled on an ideological plane, offering contradictory visions of the future. Thus the Cold War was a battle as much over future time as over present-day space. Nikita Khrushchev's infamous boast “We will bury you” revealed his absolute certainty about the ultimate (i.e., future) superiority of Communism; it was not a threat of imminent attack. 14 By the same token, American liberalism insisted that the brightest future was possible only through free markets and democratic systems. 15 The future was not just a weapon in the Cold War, as Team Connelly's article amply demonstrates, but indeed one battleground of that conflict.

M anu G oswami's article offers a different sort of consideration of the tensions between geopolitics and state power, and focuses on the realm of the production of knowledge in the social sciences broadly defined. In “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” Goswami reports on the battle between colonizer and colonized by explicating some of the texts of the prolific Indian social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar. She documents Sarkar's creative imaginings of a post-imperial future that looked beyond autonomous nation-states. Devoting himself to crossing national boundaries and bridging cultural traditions—he spent most of the decade after 1915 away from India—Sarkar insisted that cultural and intellectual interchange, not celebrations of age-old autonomous national traditions, was the best course to a post-imperial future. Through his own interactions with American and European intellectuals, he incorporated the North Atlantic “revolt against formalism” into his own ideas—emphasizing pluralism over monism, social selves over fully bounded individuals, cosmopolitanism over patriotism, and contingency over certainty. Just as Sarkar's ideas were shaped in conversation with some of the most important European and American intellectuals of his day, so too did he insist that nations “are moulded through constant interactions and intercourses of life and thought.” 16

Sarkar's vision stood in contrast to that of anticolonial nationalists who used the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson to insist upon national self-determination. Independence, Sarkar insisted, could not be achieved without the participation of others: “The political emancipation of India will be achieved,” he wrote in 1922, “not so much in the Indus Valley or on the Deccan Plateau as in the Chinese plains, the Russian steppes or the Mississippi Valley.” While he presciently identified the Cold War powers that would loom so large in postcolonial India, he notably excluded Britain (or perhaps, in his syntax, the Salisbury Plain). Indeed, his intellectual and political attachments seem to have ranged across the United States and much of Europe to the exclusion of Britain. Soviet Russia, which was not on Sarkar's itinerary, was one important reference point for not just political but also cultural revolution. He also looked to Italy and Germany—in spite of their rising fascism—for inspiration in creating an independent and yet interconnected India. 17 Others from Europe's Asian colonies sought different interlocutors. Indian National Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, joined with other anticolonial agitators in organizations such as the League against Imperialism; originally a nonpartisan left-wing organization based in Brussels, by the late 1920s the League was under the control of card-carrying Communists. 18 The intense and extreme politics of interwar continental Europe, then, cast a long shadow on the struggle for independent India—but did so by looking toward post-imperial futures beyond the nation-state.

Sarkar frequently critiqued the nation-state—the second level of political analysis—along the lines of his geopolitical vision. He called for a “futuristic reconstruction of the problem of external sovereignty,” a reconstruction that would reimagine the state without rigid and absolute external boundaries, and without presumed homogeneity within those boundaries. Sarkar's cosmopolitanism here drew not only on his geopolitics, but also on his immersion in the modernist artistic and literary currents of early-twentieth-century Europe and the United States. This is an important observation, as Goswami illustrates how Sarkar's geopolitics were closely connected to his aesthetic positions. Here, of course, he found good company during his decade-long peregrinations. New York City alone was awash in writers and artists questioning the relationship between nations and cultures, and between politics and aesthetics. 19 Goswami frequently notes how Sarkar and his interlocutors “anticipated” or “prefigured” later academic critiques. Sarkar's criticism of “orientalisme” in Western scholarship, for instance, clearly has more in common with Edward Said's famous critique than just the name. Similarly, his interrogations of Western intellectual traditions clearly resonate with the critiques of Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. Postcolonialism, in other words, did not need to wait for the demise of the colonies. By drawing historians' attention to the more fluid visions of post-imperial futures, Goswami breaks the necessary link between anticolonialism and nationalism. This link is, as she points out, not just an artifact of imperial histories, but an essential exercise for the nations that ultimately emerged from the wreckage of European empires. 20

I f S arkar anticipated some key intellectual moves of the late twentieth century, what can we historians anticipate for studies of past futures? Taken together, the three essays in this forum offer powerful analyses of the politics of the future. The articles of Andersson, Goswami, and Team Connelly hardly exhaust the possibilities of incorporating the future into studies of the past. For the future is a subject not just for political analysis, but for economic and cultural analysis as well. Take, for instance, the example of economic forecasting, a key enterprise of twentieth-century economics and political economy. Economists' increasing use of mathematical tools and quantitative measures in the first half of the twentieth century facilitated efforts to anticipate the direction of these measures. Thus the era saw the rise of economic forecasts, as business leaders sought to predict the future for their own gain. 21 Even the politics of the future, as Andersson discusses, could entail economic forecasts. A debate about the earth's carrying capacity and the threat of “overpopulation” in the 1970s ultimately took the form of a wager between a biologist and an economist over the future direction of commodity prices. 22

Economists' visions of the future were hardly limited to prediction; theories and practices of national economic planning were also ubiquitous in the twentieth century. Wars occasioned the expanding reach of the state in national economic life. And between the world wars, Soviet economic organization prompted extensive debates about the costs and benefits of central planning. These debates took place among economists as well as ideologues waving the flags of Soviet Communism, Nazism, imperialism, and anticolonial nationalism. Even the United States, with its strong laissez-faire traditions, instituted extensive wage, price, and production controls during World War II. The newly independent nations of the so-called Third World took up the cause of planning in the 1950s, to such an extent that one American economist noted in 1967 that planning “has become so popular and has been applied so widely” that it could “refer to almost any kind of economic analysis or policy thinking in almost any country in the world.” 23 This statement, though, was more about the past than the future; central planning would be on the defensive around the world by the 1970s.

While economists spent much of the twentieth century trying to bring the future within cognitive if not literal control, artists and writers took almost the opposite tack. Utopian (and occasionally dystopian) visions of the future abounded in the 1920s: in the cultural and social experimentation of post-Revolutionary (and pre-Stalinist) Soviet Russia, in fascist Italy, and around the world—not least at World's Fairs providing concrete visions of the future. Futurist movements have been the subject of extended aesthetic and literary analysis, which would facilitate their consideration by historians of the future. 24

Forecasting the study of the future beyond political and economic histories would be a difficult task indeed. On the basis of this forum, though, it seems safe to say that even without central planning, the histories of the future will multiply, expanding our knowledge of past hopes and dreams.

1 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge , trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (1935; repr., London, 1991), 234.

2 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time , trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), esp. 270–275.

3 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983; repr., New York, 2002), 144.

4 Alvin Toffler, The Futurists (New York, 1973), 3.

5 This species-wide vision suggests a continuation of the trends in mid-century American social science; see David A. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’? American Intellectuals and the Problems of the Ethnos since World War II,” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 317–337.

6 For citations on varieties of convergence theories after World War II, see David C. Engerman, “To Moscow and Back: American Social Scientists and the Concept of Convergence,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2006), 47–68.

7 On the rise of Soviet “concrete social research,” see Ilya Zemtsov, IKSI: Ocherk istorii razvitiia sovetskoi sotsiologii (Jerusalem, 1976).

8 Mario Kessler, “Zur Futurologie von Ossip K. Flechtheim,” in Bernd Greiner, Tim B. Müller, and Claudia Weber, eds., Macht und Geist im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2011), 239–257. For other futurological organizations, see Kaya Tolon, “Futures Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking,” in Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York, 2012), 45–62.

9 On historians and nationalism, see David A. Hollinger, “The Historian's Use of the United States, and Vice Versa,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 381–395; and Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995).

10 Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York, 1981), 132–137; Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Dee Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955–1961,” in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia, 1994), 201–226.

11 Ann Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park, Pa., 1998), 89–90.

12 Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, eds., Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C., 2003), 135–186; Howard Stoertz, Jr., to Robert W. Galvin, December 23, 1975, Anne Cahn Collection, National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; Cahn, Killing Detente , chaps. 7–9; John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength (New York, 1982), 248–257; Richard Pipes, “Team B: The Reality behind the Myth,” Commentary 82, no. 4 (October 1986): 25–40, here 32–34.

13 This gambit is not mentioned in two antithetical evaluations of Marshall's work: Ken Silverstein, Private Warriors (New York, 2000), 9–21; and George E. Pickett, James G. Roche, and Barry D. Watts, “Net Assessment: A Historical Review,” in Andrew W. Marshall, J. J. Martin, and Henry S. Rowen, eds., On Not Confusing Ourselves: Essays on National Security Strategy in Honor of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Boulder, Colo., 1991), 158–185.

14 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 427–433.

15 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005), chaps. 1–3.

16 Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (New York, 1949). On European-American connections, see especially James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford, 1986). Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind (London, 1912), 66–67.

17 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007); Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia, and Other Essays on the Relations between the East and the West (Berlin, 1922), 306–307. Kris Krishnan Manjapra, “Mirrored Worlds: Cosmopolitan Encounter between Indian Anti-Colonial Intellectuals and German Radicals, 1905–1939” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009), chap. 7; Mario Prayer, “Creative India and the World: Bengali Internationalism and Italy in the Interwar Period,” in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New York, 2010), 236–259, esp. 236–242.

18 Michele L. Louro, “At Home in the World: Jawaharlal Nehru and Global Anti-Imperialism” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2011).

19 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Politics of Boundaries and Tendencies in International Relations (Calcutta, 1926), ix. In addition to Goswami's citations, see Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); and for an “Arab-American Renaissance” akin to the Harlem Renaissance, Nicoletta Karam, “Kahlil Gibran's ‘Pen Bond’: Modernism and the Manhattan Renaissance of Arab-American Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2005).

20 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi, 2003), chap. 2.

21 On the American case, see Walter A. Friedman, “The Rise of Business Forecasting Agencies in the United States” (Harvard Business School Working Paper 07-045, 2007); Eli Cook, “The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of America” (Ph.D. dissertation-in-progress, Harvard University). Both works are cited with permission.

22 Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and the Gamble over the Earth's Future (New Haven, Conn., forthcoming 2013).

23 Max F. Millikan, “Introduction,” in Millikan, ed., National Economic Planning: A Conference of the Universities–National Bureau Committee for Economic Research (New York, 1967), 3–11, here 3. The historical literature on planning tends to focus on individual national cases too numerous to cite here. For a helpful overview, see Dirk van Laak, “Planung: Geschichte und Gegenwart des Vorgriffs auf die Zukunft,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, no. 3 (July 2008): 305–326.

24 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989); Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, N.J., 2009); Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avante-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 2003). On New York's World's Fairs, see David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York, 1995); Lawrence R. Samuel, The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York World's Fair (Syracuse, N.Y., 2007).

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In History, The Past is the Present is the Future

If the past is so all terribly bad, then aren’t we lucky in the present?

If history is, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, says, “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, how and when do we wake up? What, in short, are we going to do about the crimes of the past, the slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonization? These crimes have contributed to making the world we live in. Attention paid to them is recognition that “what’s past is prologue,” and they have shaped our lives, traditions, institutions, and ideologies.

But what kind of attention? Lately, much has been made of historical injustices around the world. This is, scholar Berber Bevernage writes, “ one of the most remarkable phenomena in current international politics .” Across the globe, initiatives addressing “all kinds of historical evils” have occurred. These range from:

“Symbolic acts such as memorialization programs, truth commissions, and public apologies, to more practical political measures such as reparation payments and historical redress, to straightforward judicial prosecution through tribunals and (inter)national courts.”

Acknowledging that this trend has both its defenders as well as its detractors, Bevernage argues that there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it. “Retrospective politics,” as he calls this tendency, can have negative effects. He is most concerned about a sharp historical division between good and evil, what he calls “temporal Manichaeism.” This positions the past as a place of evil and suggests that evil existed only in the past, and that the present has progressed enough to be free of such horrors as, say, the twentieth century was replete with.  

The tendency of an “Evil Past” threatens to “legitimize the present” as the best of all possible worlds. If the past is so all terribly bad, then aren’t we lucky in the present? Bevernage calls this kind of thinking anti-utopian, blighting present- and future-orientated politics. Too much satisfaction about how bad things were may “marginalize claims of victims of contemporary crimes and human rights violations” Bevernage, it should be noted, questions the progressivist views of history, which holds that things inevitably get better over time.

“Ethical Manichaeism and anti-utopianism are not inherent features of all retrospective politics but rather result from an underlying philosophy of history that treats the relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding ‘transtemporal’ injustices and responsibilities.”

“Transtemporal” suggests the past, present, and future are not mutually exclusive. Bevernage gives the example of the Argentine Madres ( often actually grandmothers, because the mothers were murdered) who have claimed the state kidnapping of children during the Dirty War of the late 1970s does not belong in the past. After all, a six-year-old disappeared by the dictatorship in 1976—the children were given to regime supporters—would be 51 today. Another example is the Khulumni Support Group of South Africa, which advocates for the victims and survivors of apartheid, which was formally repealed in 1991: the group declares “the past to be in the present.” The past made the present and is inseparable from it.

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“We should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present- and future-directed politics—and the other way around: present- and future-oriented politics that do not forget about historical injustices.”

Bevernage’s theoretical discussion doesn’t address the forces opposed to historical redress. It isn’t, after all, just theorists of history who may question the historical moment. Those responsible for historical crimes typically reject accountability, for obvious reasons, and rally around Longfellow’s “Let the dead Past bury its dead.”

The trouble, of course, is that the bones keep turning up.

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The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.

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P eter Turchin , one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know.

But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.

From the June 2020 issue: We are living in a failed state

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical model­ing unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”

Diamond and Harari aimed to describe the history of humanity. Turchin looks into a distant, science-fiction future for peers. In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.” The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

From the November 2020 issue: A pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class ,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

From the September 2019 issue: How life became an endless, terrible competition

In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

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I’m a Historian. I See Reason to Fear—And to Hope.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-­Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld . None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.

T urchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could collaborate and live together. His father, Valen­tin, was a physicist and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New York as political refugees. There they quickly found a community that spoke the household language, which was science. Valen­tin taught at the City University of New York, and Peter studied biology at NYU and earned a zoology doctorate from Duke.

Turchin wrote a dissertation on the Mexican bean beetle, a cute, ladybug­like pest that feasts on legumes in areas between the United States and Guatemala. When Turchin began his research, in the early 1980s, ecology was evolving in a way that some fields already had. The old way to study bugs was to collect them and describe them: count their legs, measure their bellies, and pin them to pieces of particle­board for future reference. (Go to the Natural History Museum in London, and in the old storerooms you can still see the shelves of bell jars and cases of specimens.) In the ’70s, the Australian physicist Robert May had turned his attention to ecology and helped transform it into a mathematical science whose tools included supercomputers along with butterfly nets and bottle traps. Yet in the early days of his career, Turchin told me, “the majority of ecologists were still quite math-phobic.”

Turchin did, in fact, do fieldwork, but he contributed to ecology primarily by collecting and using data to model the dynamics of populations—for example, determining why a pine-beetle population might take over a forest, or why that same population might decline. (He also worked on moths, voles, and lemmings.)

In the late ’90s, disaster struck: Turchin realized that he knew everything he ever wanted to know about beetles. He compares himself to Thomasina Coverly, the girl genius in the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia , who obsessed about the life cycles of grouse and other creatures around her Derbyshire country house. Stoppard’s character had the disadvantage of living a century and a half before the development of chaos theory. “She gave up because it was just too complicated,” Turchin said. “I gave up because I solved the problem.”

Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical   /   Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field, although he would continue to draw a salary as a tenured professor in their department. (He no longer gets raises, but he told me he was already “at a comfortable level, and, you know, you don’t need so much money.”) “Usually a midlife crisis means you divorce your old wife and marry a graduate student,” Turchin said. “I divorced an old science and married a new one.”

One of his last papers appeared in the journal Oikos . “Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different. Pine beetles reproduce, run amok, and ravage a forest for pine-beetle reasons, but that does not mean mosquito or tick populations will rise and fall according to the same rhythms. Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology. After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said. Turchin proposed, for example, that populations of organisms grow or decline exponentially, not linearly. This is why if you buy two guinea pigs, you will soon have not just a few more guinea pigs but a home—and then a neighborhood—full of the damn things (as long as you keep feeding them). This law is simple enough to be understood by a high-school math student, and it describes the fortunes of everything from ticks to starlings to camels. The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings. He’d long had a hobby­ist’s interest in history. But he also had a predator’s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce on the weakest prey. “All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

Historians read books, letters, and other texts. Occasionally, if they are archaeologically inclined, they dig up potsherds and coins. But to Turchin, relying solely on these methods was the equivalent of studying bugs by pinning them to particleboard and counting their antennae. If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.

“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.” Turchin founded a journal, Cliodynamics , dedicated to “the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.” (The term is his coinage; Clio is the muse of history.) He had already announced the discipline’s arrival in an article in Nature , where he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science. While historians dusted bell jars in the basement of the university, Turchin and his followers would be upstairs, answering the big questions.

To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data. The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.) But once the data are entered, after vetting by Turchin and specialists in the historical period under review, they offer quick and powerful suggestions about historical phenomena.

Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before. As the database expands, it will attempt to remove more questions from the realm of humanistic speculation and sock them away in a drawer marked answered .

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”

Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a “sui generis event.” The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a statistician, “trimming outliers” is standard practice. Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—­because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends.

Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians. (The most famous of these was the assassination of James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, by a lawyer who had demanded but not received a political appointment.) It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.

This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction. In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.

Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them—while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.

How to do that? Turchin says he doesn’t really know, and it isn’t his job to know. “I don’t really think in terms of specific policy,” he told me. “We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects. He recalled a story he’d heard back when he was still an ecologist: The Forest Service had once implemented a plan to reduce the population of bark beetles with pesticide—only to find that the pesticide killed off the beetles’ predators even more effectively than it killed the beetles. The intervention resulted in more beetles than before. The lesson, he said, was to practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.

Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster. He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.

Historians have not , as a whole, accepted Turchin’s terms of surrender graciously. Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones. (As Jo Guldi, a historian at Southern Methodist University, put it to me, “Some historians regard Turchin the way astronomers regard Nostradamus.”) Instead, each historical event must be lovingly described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance to other events. The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.

One might even say that what defines history as a humanistic enterprise is the belief that it is not governed by scientific laws—that the working parts of human societies are not like billiard balls, which, if arranged at certain angles and struck with a certain amount of force, will invariably crack just so and roll toward a corner pocket of war, or a side pocket of peace. Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity. Consider, he says, the concept of temperature—­something so obviously quantifiable now that we laugh at the idea that it’s too vague to measure. “Back before people knew what temperature was, the best thing you could do is to say you’re hot or cold,” Turchin told me. The concept depended on many factors: wind, humidity, ordinary human differences in perception. Now we have thermometers. Turchin wants to invent a thermometer for human societies that will measure when they are likely to boil over into war.

One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist. (He earned a doctorate modeling carrot-weevil population dynamics before earning a second doctorate in Chinese political sociology.) “I came from a natural-science background,” Zhao told me, “and in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”

Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs. “Biological species don’t strategize in a very flexible way,” he told me. After millennia of evolutionary R&D, a woodpecker will come up with ingenious ways to stick its beak into a tree in search of food. It might even have social characteristics—an alpha woodpecker might strong-wing beta woodpeckers into giving it first dibs on the tastiest termites. But humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”

Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past. He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians. Few would dare to write a history of the United States, let alone one of human civilization. Turchin’s approach is also Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.

Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,” Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin’s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate. The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment. Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.

Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods. He is skeptical of Turchin’s claims about historical cycles, but he believes in data-driven historical inquiry. “Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets. Pinker thanks traditional historians for their work collating these data sets; he told me in an email that they “deserve extraordinary admiration for their original research (‘brushing the mouse shit off moldy court records in the basement of town halls,’ as one historian put it to me).” He calls not for surrender but for a truce. “There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”

Guldi, the Southern Methodist University professor, is one scholar who has embraced tools previously scorned by historians. She is a pioneer of data-driven history that considers timescales beyond a human lifetime. Her primary technique is the mining of texts—for example, sifting through the millions and millions of words captured in parliamentary debate in order to understand the history of land use in the final century of the British empire. Guldi may seem a potential recruit to cliodynamics, but her approach to data sets is grounded in the traditional methods of the humanities. She counts the frequency of words, rather than trying to find ways to compare big, fuzzy categories among civilizations. Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians, who deny that the subject to which they have devoted their lives can be expressed in Excel format. Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.

Yet 200 lifetimes is at least more ambitious than the average historical purview of only one. And the reward for that ambition—­­in addition to the bragging rights for having potentially explained everything that has ever happened to human beings—includes something every writer wants: an audience. Thinking small rarely gets you quoted in The New York Times . Turchin has not yet attracted the mass audiences of a Diamond, Pinker, or Harari. But he has lured connoisseurs of political catastrophe, journalists and pundits looking for big answers to pressing questions, and true believers in the power of science to conquer uncertainty and improve the world. He has certainly outsold most beetle experts.

If he is right, it is hard to see how history will avoid assimilating his insights—if it can avoid being abolished by them. Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit. Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong.

This article appears in the December 2020 print edition with the headline “The Historian Who Sees the Future.” It was first published online on November 12, 2020. ​​ When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

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Why Study History? (1998)

In 2020, Peter N. Stearns revisited his “Why Study History? (1998)” essay with “ Why Study History? Revisited ” in Perspectives on History .

By Peter N. Stearns

People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?

Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is.

Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline. History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.

The Importance of History in Our Own Lives

These two fundamental reasons for studying history underlie more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives. History well told is beautiful. Many of the historians who most appeal to the general reading public know the importance of dramatic and skillful writing—as well as of accuracy. Biography and military history appeal in part because of the tales they contain. History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding. Stories well done are stories that reveal how people and societies have actually functioned, and they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the "pastness of the past"—the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives—involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.

History Contributes to Moral Understanding

History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration. "History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.

History Provides Identity

History also helps provide identity, and this is unquestionably one of the reasons all modern nations encourage its teaching in some form. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion. For many Americans, studying the history of one's own family is the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts about genealogy and (at a slightly more complex level) a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Family identity is established and confirmed. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, such as ethnic groups in the United States, use history for similar identity purposes. Merely defining the group in the present pales against the possibility of forming an identity based on a rich past. And of course nations use identity history as well—and sometimes abuse it. Histories that tell the national story, emphasizing distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.

Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship

A study of history is essential for good citizenship. This is the most common justification for the place of history in school curricula. Sometimes advocates of citizenship history hope merely to promote national identity and loyalty through a history spiced by vivid stories and lessons in individual success and morality. But the importance of history for citizenship goes beyond this narrow goal and can even challenge it at some points.

History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. History provides data about the emergence of national institutions, problems, and values—it's the only significant storehouse of such data available. It offers evidence also about how nations have interacted with other societies, providing international and comparative perspectives essential for responsible citizenship. Further, studying history helps us understand how recent, current, and prospective changes that affect the lives of citizens are emerging or may emerge and what causes are involved. More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple observer.

What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?

What does a well-trained student of history, schooled to work on past materials and on case studies in social change, learn how to do? The list is manageable, but it contains several overlapping categories.

The Ability to Assess Evidence . The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence—the sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the most accurate pictures of the past that they can. Learning how to interpret the statements of past political leaders—one kind of evidence—helps form the capacity to distinguish between the objective and the self-serving among statements made by present-day political leaders. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of data. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.

The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations . Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations. Understanding how societies work—the central goal of historical study—is inherently imprecise, and the same certainly holds true for understanding what is going on in the present day. Learning how to identify and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an essential citizenship skill for which history, as an often-contested laboratory of human experience, provides training. This is one area in which the full benefits of historical study sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the past to construct identity. Experience in examining past situations provides a constructively critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.

Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change . Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of change means developing some capacity for determining the magnitude and significance of change, for some changes are more fundamental than others. Comparing particular changes to relevant examples from the past helps students of history develop this capacity. The ability to identify the continuities that always accompany even the most dramatic changes also comes from studying history, as does the skill to determine probable causes of change. Learning history helps one figure out, for example, if one main factor—such as a technological innovation or some deliberate new policy—accounts for a change or whether, as is more commonly the case, a number of factors combine to generate the actual change that occurs.

Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the promotion of that elusive creature, the well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual information about the background of our political institutions and about the values and problems that affect our social well-being. It also contributes to our capacity to use evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze change and continuities. No one can ever quite deal with the present as the historian deals with the past—we lack the perspective for this feat; but we can move in this direction by applying historical habits of mind, and we will function as better citizens in the process.

History Is Useful in the World of Work

History is useful for work. Its study helps create good businesspeople, professionals, and political leaders. The number of explicit professional jobs for historians is considerable, but most people who study history do not become professional historians. Professional historians teach at various levels, work in museums and media centers, do historical research for businesses or public agencies, or participate in the growing number of historical consultancies. These categories are important—indeed vital—to keep the basic enterprise of history going, but most people who study history use their training for broader professional purposes. Students of history find their experience directly relevant to jobs in a variety of careers as well as to further study in fields like law and public administration. Employers often deliberately seek students with the kinds of capacities historical study promotes. The reasons are not hard to identify: students of history acquire, by studying different phases of the past and different societies in the past, a broad perspective that gives them the range and flexibility required in many work situations. They develop research skills, the ability to find and evaluate sources of information, and the means to identify and evaluate diverse interpretations. Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential. Historical study is unquestionably an asset for a variety of work and professional situations, even though it does not, for most students, lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do some technical fields. But history particularly prepares students for the long haul in their careers, its qualities helping adaptation and advancement beyond entry-level employment. There is no denying that in our society many people who are drawn to historical study worry about relevance. In our changing economy, there is concern about job futures in most fields. Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.

Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. Studying history can help us develop some literally "salable" skills, but its study must not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history—that confined to personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—is essential to function beyond childhood. Some history depends on personal taste, where one finds beauty, the joy of discovery, or intellectual challenge. Between the inescapable minimum and the pleasure of deep commitment comes the history that, through cumulative skill in interpreting the unfolding human record, provides a real grasp of how the world works.

Careers for History Majors

Through clear graphs and informal prose, readers will find hard data, practical advice, and answers to common questions about the study of history and the value it affords to individuals, their workplaces, and their communities in Careers for History Majors . You can purchase this pamphlet online at Oxford University Press. For questions about the pamphlet, please contact Karen Lou ( [email protected] ). For bulk orders contact OUP directly . 

What You'll Learn with a History Degree

What do history students learn? With the help of the AHA, faculty from around the United States have collaborated to create a list of skills students develop in their history coursework. This list, called the "History Discipline Core," is meant to help students understand the skills they are acquiring so that they can explain the value of their education to parents, friends, and employers, as well as take pride in their decision to study history. 

How to Write a History Essay with Outline, Tips, Examples and More

Before we get into how to write a history essay, let's first understand what makes one good. Different people might have different ideas, but there are some basic rules that can help you do well in your studies. In this guide, we won't get into any fancy theories. Instead, we'll give you straightforward tips to help you with historical writing. So, if you're ready to sharpen your writing skills, let our history essay writing service explore how to craft an exceptional paper.

What is a History Essay?

A history essay is an academic assignment where we explore and analyze historical events from the past. We dig into historical stories, figures, and ideas to understand their importance and how they've shaped our world today. History essay writing involves researching, thinking critically, and presenting arguments based on evidence.

Moreover, history papers foster the development of writing proficiency and the ability to communicate complex ideas effectively. They also encourage students to engage with primary and secondary sources, enhancing their research skills and deepening their understanding of historical methodology.

History Essay Outline

The outline is there to guide you in organizing your thoughts and arguments in your essay about history. With a clear outline, you can explore and explain historical events better. Here's how to make one:

Introduction

• Hook: Start with an attention-grabbing opening sentence or anecdote related to your topic.
• Background Information: Provide context on the historical period, event, or theme you'll be discussing.
• Thesis Statement: Present your main argument or viewpoint, outlining the scope and purpose of your history essay.

Body paragraph 1: Introduction to the Historical Context

• Provide background information on the historical context of your topic.
• Highlight key events, figures, or developments leading up to the main focus of your history essay.

Body paragraphs 2-4 (or more): Main Arguments and Supporting Evidence

• Each paragraph should focus on a specific argument or aspect of your thesis.
• Present evidence from primary and secondary sources to support each argument.
• Analyze the significance of the evidence and its relevance to your history paper thesis.

Counterarguments (optional)

• Address potential counterarguments or alternative perspectives on your topic.
• Refute opposing viewpoints with evidence and logical reasoning.
• Summary of Main Points: Recap the main arguments presented in the body paragraphs.
• Restate Thesis: Reinforce your thesis statement, emphasizing its significance in light of the evidence presented.
• Reflection: Reflect on the broader implications of your arguments for understanding history.
• Closing Thought: End your history paper with a thought-provoking statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

References/bibliography

• List all sources used in your research, formatted according to the citation style required by your instructor (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago).
• Include both primary and secondary sources, arranged alphabetically by the author's last name.

Notes (if applicable)

• Include footnotes or endnotes to provide additional explanations, citations, or commentary on specific points within your history essay.

History Essay Format

Adhering to a specific format is crucial for clarity, coherence, and academic integrity. Here are the key components of a typical history essay format:

Font and Size

• Use a legible font such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri.
• The recommended font size is usually 12 points. However, check your instructor's guidelines, as they may specify a different size.
• Set 1-inch margins on all sides of the page.
• Double-space the entire essay, including the title, headings, body paragraphs, and references.
• Avoid extra spacing between paragraphs unless specified otherwise.
• Align text to the left margin; avoid justifying the text or using a centered alignment.

Title Page (if required):

• If your instructor requires a title page, include the essay title, your name, the course title, the instructor's name, and the date.
• Center-align this information vertically and horizontally on the page.
• Include a header on each page (excluding the title page if applicable) with your last name and the page number, flush right.
• Some instructors may require a shortened title in the header, usually in all capital letters.
• Center-align the essay title at the top of the first page (if a title page is not required).
• Use standard capitalization (capitalize the first letter of each major word).
• Avoid underlining, italicizing, or bolding the title unless necessary for emphasis.

Paragraph Indentation:

• Indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inches or use the tab key.
• Do not insert extra spaces between paragraphs unless instructed otherwise.

Citations and References:

• Follow the citation style specified by your instructor (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago).
• Include in-text citations whenever you use information or ideas from external sources.
• Provide a bibliography or list of references at the end of your history essay, formatted according to the citation style guidelines.
• Typically, history essays range from 1000 to 2500 words, but this can vary depending on the assignment.

How to Write a History Essay?

Historical writing can be an exciting journey through time, but it requires careful planning and organization. In this section, we'll break down the process into simple steps to help you craft a compelling and well-structured history paper.

Analyze the Question

Before diving headfirst into writing, take a moment to dissect the essay question. Read it carefully, and then read it again. You want to get to the core of what it's asking. Look out for keywords that indicate what aspects of the topic you need to focus on. If you're unsure about anything, don't hesitate to ask your instructor for clarification. Remember, understanding how to start a history essay is half the battle won!

Now, let's break this step down:

• Read the question carefully and identify keywords or phrases.
• Consider what the question is asking you to do – are you being asked to analyze, compare, contrast, or evaluate?
• Pay attention to any specific instructions or requirements provided in the question.
• Take note of the time period or historical events mentioned in the question – this will give you a clue about the scope of your history essay.

Develop a Strategy

With a clear understanding of the essay question, it's time to map out your approach. Here's how to develop your historical writing strategy:

• Brainstorm ideas : Take a moment to jot down any initial thoughts or ideas that come to mind in response to the history paper question. This can help you generate a list of potential arguments, themes, or points you want to explore in your history essay.
• Create an outline : Once you have a list of ideas, organize them into a logical structure. Start with a clear introduction that introduces your topic and presents your thesis statement – the main argument or point you'll be making in your history essay. Then, outline the key points or arguments you'll be discussing in each paragraph of the body, making sure they relate back to your thesis. Finally, plan a conclusion that summarizes your main points and reinforces your history paper thesis.
• Research : Before diving into writing, gather evidence to support your arguments. Use reputable sources such as books, academic journals, and primary documents to gather historical evidence and examples. Take notes as you research, making sure to record the source of each piece of information for proper citation later on.
• Consider counterarguments : Anticipate potential counterarguments to your history paper thesis and think about how you'll address them in your essay. Acknowledging opposing viewpoints and refuting them strengthens your argument and demonstrates critical thinking.
• Set realistic goals : Be realistic about the scope of your history essay and the time you have available to complete it. Break down your writing process into manageable tasks, such as researching, drafting, and revising, and set deadlines for each stage to stay on track.

Start Your Research

Now that you've grasped the history essay topic and outlined your approach, it's time to dive into research. Here's how to start:

• Ask questions : What do you need to know? What are the key points to explore further? Write down your inquiries to guide your research.
• Explore diverse sources : Look beyond textbooks. Check academic journals, reliable websites, and primary sources like documents or artifacts.
• Consider perspectives : Think about different viewpoints on your topic. How have historians analyzed it? Are there controversies or differing interpretations?
• Take organized notes : Summarize key points, jot down quotes, and record your thoughts and questions. Stay organized using spreadsheets or note-taking apps.
• Evaluate sources : Consider the credibility and bias of each source. Are they peer-reviewed? Do they represent a particular viewpoint?

Establish a Viewpoint

By establishing a clear viewpoint and supporting arguments, you'll lay the foundation for your compelling historical writing:

• Review your research : Reflect on the information gathered. What patterns or themes emerge? Which perspectives resonate with you?
• Formulate a thesis statement : Based on your research, develop a clear and concise thesis that states your argument or interpretation of the topic.
• Consider counterarguments : Anticipate objections to your history paper thesis. Are there alternative viewpoints or evidence that you need to address?
• Craft supporting arguments : Outline the main points that support your thesis. Use evidence from your research to strengthen your arguments.
• Stay flexible : Be open to adjusting your viewpoint as you continue writing and researching. New information may challenge or refine your initial ideas.

Structure Your Essay

Now that you've delved into the depths of researching historical events and established your viewpoint, it's time to craft the skeleton of your essay: its structure. Think of your history essay outline as constructing a sturdy bridge between your ideas and your reader's understanding. How will you lead them from point A to point Z? Will you follow a chronological path through history or perhaps dissect themes that span across time periods?

And don't forget about the importance of your introduction and conclusion—are they framing your narrative effectively, enticing your audience to read your paper, and leaving them with lingering thoughts long after they've turned the final page? So, as you lay the bricks of your history essay's architecture, ask yourself: How can I best lead my audience through the maze of time and thought, leaving them enlightened and enriched on the other side?

Create an Engaging Introduction

Creating an engaging introduction is crucial for capturing your reader's interest right from the start. But how do you do it? Think about what makes your topic fascinating. Is there a surprising fact or a compelling story you can share? Maybe you could ask a thought-provoking question that gets people thinking. Consider why your topic matters—what lessons can we learn from history?

Also, remember to explain what your history essay will be about and why it's worth reading. What will grab your reader's attention and make them want to learn more? How can you make your essay relevant and intriguing right from the beginning?

Develop Coherent Paragraphs

Once you've established your introduction, the next step is to develop coherent paragraphs that effectively communicate your ideas. Each paragraph should focus on one main point or argument, supported by evidence or examples from your research. Start by introducing the main idea in a topic sentence, then provide supporting details or evidence to reinforce your point.

Make sure to use transition words and phrases to guide your reader smoothly from one idea to the next, creating a logical flow throughout your history essay. Additionally, consider the organization of your paragraphs—is there a clear progression of ideas that builds upon each other? Are your paragraphs unified around a central theme or argument?

Conclude Effectively

Concluding your history essay effectively is just as important as starting it off strong. In your conclusion, you want to wrap up your main points while leaving a lasting impression on your reader. Begin by summarizing the key points you've made throughout your history essay, reminding your reader of the main arguments and insights you've presented.

Then, consider the broader significance of your topic—what implications does it have for our understanding of history or for the world today? You might also want to reflect on any unanswered questions or areas for further exploration. Finally, end with a thought-provoking statement or a call to action that encourages your reader to continue thinking about the topic long after they've finished reading.

Reference Your Sources

Referencing your sources is essential for maintaining the integrity of your history essay and giving credit to the scholars and researchers who have contributed to your understanding of the topic. Depending on the citation style required (such as MLA, APA, or Chicago), you'll need to format your references accordingly. Start by compiling a list of all the sources you've consulted, including books, articles, websites, and any other materials used in your research.

Then, as you write your history essay, make sure to properly cite each source whenever you use information or ideas that are not your own. This includes direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. Remember to include all necessary information for each source, such as author names, publication dates, and page numbers, as required by your chosen citation style.

Review and Ask for Advice

As you near the completion of your history essay writing, it's crucial to take a step back and review your work with a critical eye. Reflect on the clarity and coherence of your arguments—are they logically organized and effectively supported by evidence? Consider the strength of your introduction and conclusion—do they effectively capture the reader's attention and leave a lasting impression? Take the time to carefully proofread your history essay for any grammatical errors or typos that may detract from your overall message.

Furthermore, seeking advice from peers, mentors, or instructors can provide valuable insights and help identify areas for improvement. Consider sharing your essay with someone whose feedback you trust and respect, and be open to constructive criticism. Ask specific questions about areas you're unsure about or where you feel your history essay may be lacking.

History Essay Example

In this section, we offer an example of a history essay examining the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society. This essay demonstrates how historical analysis and critical thinking are applied in academic writing. By exploring this specific event, you can observe how historical evidence is used to build a cohesive argument and draw meaningful conclusions.

FAQs about History Essay Writing

How to write a history essay introduction, how to write a conclusion for a history essay, how to write a good history essay.

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Why History Matters: Understanding Our Past to Shape Our Future

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on April 6, 2024

Categories Culture , History , Society

History isn’t just a dusty collection of names and dates from the past. It’s a mirror reflecting our societal evolution, a guidebook to our present, and a compass pointing to our future. Let’s explore why history holds the key to understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Key Takeaways

• Historical study fosters an understanding of societal trends and human nature.
• A sense of identity and a shared narrative are cultivated through history.
• History is crucial for developing analytical and critical thinking skills.

Understanding the Value of History

The value of history lies in its power to elucidate the past events, inform the present conditions, and guide future decisions. Through a structured analysis and application of historical context, one appreciates its role as an essential discipline.

Analyzing Past, Present, and Future

History provides a detailed record of past events which significantly influence present societal structures and future trajectories. Historical research identifies patterns that have shaped societies, cultures, and traditions. This analysis allows individuals to learn from past decisions and understand the possible implications for future outcomes.

The Importance of Historical Context

Understanding historical context is crucial for interpreting events accurately. It ensures a nuanced view of past actions and decisions within the context of their time. Recognizing the value of historical context prevents the misrepresentation of events and promotes a deeper appreciation for the complexities of past societies and their decisions.

History as a Discipline

Studying history as a discipline involves meticulous research and fact-checking . It equips historians with frameworks and techniques to construct accurate accounts of the past. This discipline underscores the credibility of historical narratives and validates their relevance to current understandings. It fosters an awareness that present conditions result from human choices that can be influenced by further action.

The Role of History in Society

History serves a critical role in society by fostering informed citizens, preserving the collective memory, and enhancing an understanding of cultural and religious diversity. Each of these aspects contributes to a society that values its past while shaping its future.

Developing Informed Citizens

Informed citizens are the bedrock of a healthy democracy. Historical knowledge equips them with the context necessary to understand current policies and their impact on rights and responsibilities. They learn not only about historical events but also how to engage critically with sources and discern patterns that influence modern governance. Recognizing the evolution of societal norms and laws from historical precedents contributes to a more engaged and analytical electorate.

• Key Point : History teaches critical thinking skills.
• Impact : Engaged citizens contribute to a more robust democracy.

Preserving Collective Memory

Societies with a strong sense of their history possess a collective memory that safeguards against cultural and memory loss. The preservation of this memory through documentation, oral traditions, and historical landmarks helps communities maintain a sense of identity and continuity. Without this, societies risk becoming rootless, lacking the connection to shared experiences that guide collective values and traditions.

Examples of Collective Memory Preservation :

• Historical literature

Understanding Cultural and Religious Diversity

History illuminates the traditions and beliefs of different cultures and religions, revealing the rich tapestry of human experience. By studying the historical contexts of societies, it becomes possible to appreciate the diversity of perspectives and practices that exist. This understanding fosters tolerance and can help mitigate conflicts arising from cultural or religious misunderstandings.

Benefits of Historical Understanding :

• Enhances social cohesion.
• Promotes mutual respect.

Collectively, the role of history in society is multifaceted, playing a pivotal part in shaping the narratives that societies live by, guiding principles of democracy, and contributing to the rich mosaic of human cultures and religions.

Learning from Historical Events

Historical events offer invaluable insights into the complexities of human experience, from the sobering repercussions of wars and conflicts to the transformative power of significant milestones.

Lessons from Wars and Conflicts

Wars and conflicts stand as stark reminders of both human frailty and resilience. For instance:

• The Holocaust encapsulates the extremity of human cruelty and the importance of empathy and courage. Remembering the Holocaust is essential for understanding the impact of prejudice and the necessity of standing up against it.
• Courage is highlighted by stories of resistance and survival, which provide a deeper understanding of the Jewish experience and the capacity for individuals to enact change amidst adversity.

The Impact of Significant Historical Milestones

Significant historical milestones shape the course of world history and inform current societal norms. They are moments that echo through time, prompting reflection and adaptation.

• The end of slavery in the United States marked a drastic turn in human rights and freedoms, encouraging a global reassessment of racial equality.
• Signified the end of the Cold War and the start of a new era in international relations, and it serves as a potent symbol of liberation and the desire for unity.

Connecting Personal and Collective Histories

Connecting personal and collective histories enhances understanding of societies by intertwining individual experiences with broader historical narratives. This synthesis fosters empathy and helps individuals appreciate the depth of the human experience.

Embracing a Broader Human Experience

Individuals often perceive history through the lens of their personal stories, which are fundamentally tied to the larger tapestry of society’s past. For instance, the Holocaust is not merely a chapter in a history book, but a profound part of many personal histories that still resonate today. Examining both personal memories and collective histories allows people to engage more deeply with being human. Such engagement provides grounding, as histories give context to present circumstances, ensuring that individuals are not rootless but connected to a continuum that defines cultures and communities.

The Dangers of Historical Amnesia

Forgetting or ignoring the past, a condition akin to societal memory loss, poses a significant risk to societies. It is crucial to remember the trials and lessons of history, such as the horrors of the Holocaust, to build resilience against repeating past atrocities. Neglecting to connect personal experiences with the collective memory of societies can lead to a lack of empathy and understanding. This disconnect also stymies learning and growth, as historical amnesia prevents societies from effectively rooting themselves in history, which can guide better decision-making and foster a more inclusive understanding of the human experience.

Educational Perspectives on History

The study of history occupies a crucial role in academic curriculums, offering methodologies that cross into various disciplines and fostering a wide range of competencies critical to intellectual development.

History’s Place in Academic Curriculums

History, as an academic discipline, grounds students in the temporal dimensions of human experience. Educational systems globally include history to various extents, recognizing its role in cultivating critical thinking and an understanding of how societies have evolved. The reasons to include history in curriculums hinge on its ability to provide context for current events and to enhance civic literacy .

Methodologies and Approaches in Historical Studies

Historical research harnesses diverse methodologies ranging from diachronic analysis , which tracks changes and continuities over time, to comparative historical study , which juxtaposes past and present to foster deeper understanding. The approach to studying history typically emphasizes the diachro-mesh of events, ideas, and figures, offering students a toolkit for discerning and interpreting complex narratives.

The Interplay between History and Other Academic Disciplines

History does not exist in isolation. It actively engages with and enriches other fields, like economics, literature, and political science. This interplay underscores the multidisciplinary essence of historical education, thereby illuminating the interconnectedness of knowledge and the multiplicity of perspectives. By situating historical events within broader intellectual landscapes , students learn to appreciate the nuanced interdependencies that have shaped human societies.

Economic history

The southern gap

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy

Keri Leigh Merritt

War and peace

Legacy of the Scythians

How the ancient warrior people of the steppes have found themselves on the cultural frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine

Peter Mumford

Political philosophy

Liberal socialism now

As the crisis of democracy deepens, we must return to liberalism’s revolutionary and egalitarian roots

Matthew McManus

There was no Jesus

How could a cult leader draw crowds, inspire devotion and die by crucifixion, yet leave no mark in contemporary records?

Gavin Evans

The mythos of leadership

How the biblical King David and Machiavelli’s Prince can help us understand the dominant view of leaders as individualists

Moshik Temkin

Architecture

The subtle art of elevation

Architectural drawing speaks of mathematical precision, but its roots lie in the theological exegesis of a prophetic book

Karl Kinsella

Sex and sexuality

For ages, solo sex was hardly taboo. What led to its centuries-long dry spell?

Stories and literature

A French Creole folktale nearly lost to time is given new, gorgeously animated life

Why a forcefully phallic portrait of Henry VIII is a masterful work of propaganda

Global history

Meet the jesters who’ve spoken truth to power around the globe and across centuries

Myths from Earth’s edge – what the Icelandic sagas reveal about Norse morality

Anthropology

A riveting collage portrays a century of Inuit history, and envisions a vibrant future

Chorus of testimony

Anne Frank’s diary is one of thousands of desperate, secret and vivid journals each bearing witness to the reality of war

Nina Siegal

Biography and memoir

The busboy who comforted Robert F Kennedy as he lay dying shares his story

Warfare as mercy and love

The daggers that knights carried to the crusades help us understand why they thought of holy war as an act of love

William Chester Jordan

Demography and migration

One story, in a sea of millions, of swimming from China to freedom in Hong Kong

The life of Wanda Półtawska

Her closeness to Pope John Paul furnished him with anti-abortion ideals, fuelled by her survival of the Ravensbrück camp

Joy Neumeyer

The ancient world

Guide to a foreign past

The iconoclastic French historian Paul Veyne illuminated the past by showing how deeply alien it is to the present

Carlos Noreña

Human rights and justice

Lydia Maria Child, abolitionist

Taking up arms against slavery, the famous novelist foreshadowed the vexed role of the white woman activist today

Lydia Moland

Medieval babycare

From mansplaining about breastfeeding to debates on developmental toys, medieval parenting was full of familiar dilemmas

Katherine Harvey

Archaeology

What the tablets say

Some 3,700 years ago, an enslaved girl, a barber, and a king crossed paths in a city by the Euphrates. This is their story

Amanda H Podany

Women at the barricades

The transgressions of working-class women formed the revolutionary heart of the 1871 Paris Commune

Carolyn Eichner

The politics of pain

Medical science can only tell us so much. To understand pain, we need the cultural tools of history, philosophy and art

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Geopolitics is for losers

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How exploring history can help us have a better future

They say that those who do not remember their past are condemned — to spend a lot of their time looking for their cars in crowded parking lots.

But they also are like figures in Greek mythology, who drink from a river in Hades and lose their memory. They become endless wanderers, without direction, without a past, without a purpose.

We need our historical memory, now more than ever.

For anyone who says history is not important, I have some suggestions for her or him: Tell your doctor not to look at your chart — ignore your medical history — and see how long that visit takes.

Or tell your lawyer not to look at the case law — the legal history — before he or she goes into the courtroom. Good luck winning that case.

Or if in business, never review past performances — your business history — as you decide to stock your inventory. As filmmaker Ken Burns once suggested, “The great arrogance of the present is to forget the intelligence of the past.”

More: Kentucky lawmaker back in leadership after sexual harassment case

The study of history cannot be an aside, a sidelight — it is instead vital to all of us. The reasons we study history are many. But let’s remember again just a few: First of all, history allows us to put things in context, to see things through the glasses of perspective. Visiting the past is like going to a foreign country where they do things differently, and you can come back with a different understanding of your own place, a different sense of otherness, a different perspective on your own time.

And if we can look at those of the past and put ourselves in their shoes and appreciate what motivated them, then we can better do the same with those of different lifestyles and cultures around us, in our time — thus giving us a better sense of tolerance and making us more open-minded. A knowledge of history produces better citizens, in so many ways.

Secondly, the standard reason given is we study history for the lessons we can learn —there is a New Yorker cartoon that shows two people reading and one says, “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

Or as that great philosopher Rafiki in the Lion King offers, “Yes, the past can hurt. You can either run from it, or learn from it.” Do we run from history and repeat the errors, or do we learn from our past?

Additionally, through history we share a collective recall, a sense of identity, a sense of place and time. We know we are born into a region, a state, a class, a culture, a nation, a world. History — whether local or global — thus allows us to tell a story of universal implications and wide connections. Through history we all share a common memory.

And, finally, we study history to develop critical skills — evaluating evidence, understanding multiple causation, and, most of all, becoming the historian as detective.  After all, if we think of all this as solving history mysteries, as searching for parts to the puzzle, as discovering clues to the historical riddles — as a kind of CSI history — then history can be the fun it should be.

You may like: History lost? The art of Civil War reenactment is slowly fading away

History shouldn’t be date after date, fact after fact, but rather stories that engage all of us to do more, to explore on our own, to develop an inquiring mind.  

That all is one reason my coauthor Craig Friend and I recently revised a book first published more than 20 years ago — "A New History of Kentucky" (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) — to tell the recent story, so we can learn from our common memory. For the study of the past is not static.  

In fact, history is not just about the past; it is more about that unknowing future. And understanding who we are and have been is essential to making that a better future.

In one of her stories, Kentucky writer George Ella Lyons has a son talking to his mother, saying at night, “Mama, why don’t we put our heads together and dream together?” Why not indeed? History shows us the dreams of those who have gone before. And it tells us to dream — to plan rationally but to dream grandly.

And we must do that, for we owe it to those who have gone before; we owe it to ourselves; we owe it to our children and grandchildren, all to do better. We must do better — and we can do better. But we cannot improve by ignoring history. It is our choice.

Read this: The 8 deadliest air disasters in Kentucky and Indiana history

James C. Klotter is the State Historian of Kentucky and an emeritus professor at Georgetown College. Portions of this essay are adopted from an earlier talk given at the University of Kentucky and published as "In Defense of Clio" (King Library Press).          

Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

Why Is History Important And How Can It Benefit Your Future?

Updated: February 28, 2024

Published: July 1, 2020

History is a topic that many find boring to study or a waste of time. But there is more to studying history than meets the eye. Let’s answer the age-old question: “Why is history important?”

What Is History?

History is the knowledge of and study of the past. It is the story of the past and a form of collective memory. History is the story of who we are, where we come from, and can potentially reveal where we are headed.

Why Study History: The Importance

History is important to study because it is essential for all of us in understanding ourselves and the world around us. There is a history of every field and topic, from medicine, to music, to art. To know and understand history is absolutely necessary, even though the results of historical study are not as visible, and less immediate.

Allows You To Comprehend More

1. our world.

History gives us a very clear picture of how the various aspects of society — such as technology, governmental systems, and even society as a whole — worked in the past so we understand how it came to work the way it is now.

2. Society And Other People

Studying history allows us to observe and understand how people and societies behaved. For example, we are able to evaluate war, even when a nation is at peace, by looking back at previous events. History provides us with the data that is used to create laws, or theories about various aspects of society.

3. Identity

History can help provide us with a sense of identity. This is actually one of the main reasons that history is still taught in schools around the world. Historians have been able to learn about how countries, families, and groups were formed, and how they evolved and developed over time. When an individual takes it upon themselves to dive deep into their own family’s history, they can understand how their family interacted with larger historical change. Did family serve in major wars? Were they present for significant events?

4. Present-Day Issues

History helps us to understand present-day issues by asking deeper questions as to why things are the way they are. Why did wars in Europe in the 20th century matter to countries around the world? How did Hitler gain and maintain power for as long as he had? How has this had an effect on shaping our world and our global political system today?

5. The Process Of Change Over Time

If we want to truly understand why something happened — in any area or field, such as one political party winning the last election vs the other, or a major change in the number of smokers — you need to look for factors that took place earlier. Only through the study of history can people really see and grasp the reasons behind these changes, and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society continue regardless of continual change.

Photo by Yusuf Dündar on Unsplash

You learn a clear lesson, 1. political intelligence.

History can help us become better informed citizens. It shows us who we are as a collective group, and being informed of this is a key element in maintaining a democratic society. This knowledge helps people take an active role in the political forum through educated debates and by refining people’s core beliefs. Through knowledge of history, citizens can even change their old belief systems.

2. History Teaches Morals And Values

By looking at specific stories of individuals and situations, you can test your own morals and values. You can compare it to some real and difficult situations individuals have had to face in trying times. Looking to people who have faced and overcome adversity can be inspiring. You can study the great people of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, and also ordinary people who teach us lessons in courage, persistence and protest.

3. Builds Better Citizenship

The study of history is a non-negotiable aspect of better citizenship. This is one of the main reasons why it is taught as a part of school curricular. People that push for citizenship history (relationship between a citizen and the state) just want to promote a strong national identity and even national loyalty through the teaching of lessons of individual and collective success.

4. Learn From The Past And Notice Clear Warning Signs

We learn from past atrocities against groups of people; genocides, wars, and attacks. Through this collective suffering, we have learned to pay attention to the warning signs leading up to such atrocities. Society has been able to take these warning signs and fight against them when they see them in the present day. Knowing what events led up to these various wars helps us better influence our future.

5. Gaining A Career Through History

The skills that are acquired through learning about history, such as critical thinking, research, assessing information, etc, are all useful skills that are sought by employers. Many employers see these skills as being an asset in their employees and will hire those with history degrees in various roles and industries.

6. Personal Growth And Appreciation

Understanding past events and how they impact the world today can bring about empathy and understanding for groups of people whose history may be different from the mainstream. You will also understand the suffering, joy, and chaos that were necessary for the present day to happen and appreciate all that you are able to benefit from past efforts today.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Develop and refine your skills through studying history, 1. reading and writing.

You can refine your reading skills by reading texts from a wide array of time periods. Language has changed and evolved over time and so has the way people write and express themselves. You can also refine your writing skills through learning to not just repeat what someone else said, but to analyze information from multiple sources and come up with your own conclusions. It’s two birds with one stone — better writing and critical thinking!

2. Craft Your Own Opinions

There are so many sources of information out in the world. Finding a decisive truth for many topics just doesn’t exist. What was a victory for one group was a great loss for another — you get to create your own opinions of these events.

3. Decision-Making

History gives us the opportunity to learn from others’ past mistakes. It helps us understand the many reasons why people may behave the way they do. As a result, it helps us become more impartial as decision-makers.

4. How To Do Research

In the study of history you will need to conduct research . This gives you the opportunity to look at two kinds of sources — primary (written at the time) and secondary sources (written about a time period, after the fact). This practice can teach you how to decipher between reliable and unreliable sources.

5. Quantitative Analysis

There are numbers and data to be learned from history. In terms of patterns: patterns in population, desertions during times of war, and even in environmental factors. These patterns that are found help clarify why things happened as they did.

6. Qualitative Analysis

It’s incredibly important to learn to question the quality of the information and “history” you are learning. Keep these two questions in mind as you read through information: How do I know what I’m reading are facts and accurate information? Could they be the writer’s opinions?

Photo by Matteo Maretto on Unsplash

We are all living histories.

All people and cultures are living histories. The languages we speak are inherited from the past. Our cultures, traditions, and religions are all inherited from the past. We even inherit our genetic makeup from those that lived before us. Knowing these connections give you a basic understanding of the condition of being human.

History Is Fun

Learning about history can be a great deal of fun. We have the throngs of movies about our past to prove it. History is full of some of the most interesting and fascinating stories ever told, including pirates, treasure, mysteries, and adventures. On a regular basis new stories from the past keep emerging to the mainstream. Better yet, there is a history of every topic and field. Whatever you find fascinating there is a history to go along with it. Dive a bit deeper into any topic’s history and you will be surprised by what you might find in the process.

The subject of history can help you develop your skills and transform you to be a better version of yourself as a citizen, a student, and person overall.

If you are looking to develop more of yourself and skills for your future career, check out the degree programs that are offered by University of the People — a tuition-free, 100% online, U.S. accredited university.

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Essays About History: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

History is the study of past events and is essential to an understanding of life and the future; discover essays about history in our guide.

In the thousands of years, humans have been on earth, our ancestors have left different marks on the world, reminders of the times they lived in. Curiosity is in our nature, and we study our history on this planet by analyzing these marks, whether they be ancient artifacts, documents, or grand monuments. 

History is essential because it tells us about our past. It helps us to understand how we evolved on this planet and, perhaps, how we may develop in the future. It also reminds us of our ancestors’ mistakes so that we do not repeat them. It is an undisputed fact that history is essential to human society, particularly in the world we live in today. 

If you are writing essays about history, start by reading the examples below. 

5 Examples On Essays About History

1. history of malta by suzanne pittman, 2. why study history by jeff west, 3. history a reflection of the past, and a teacher for the future by shahara mcgee, 4. the most successful crusade by michael stein, 5. god, plagues and pestilence – what history can teach us about living through a pandemic by robyn j. whitaker, writing prompts for essays about history, 1. what we can learn from history, 2. analyzing a historical source, 3. reflection on a historical event, 4. your country’s history, 5. your family history, 6. the impact of war on participating nations, 7. the history of your chosen topic.

“The famous biblical figure St. Paul came to Malta due to his ship getting wrecked and he first set foot on Malta at the beautiful location of what it know called St. Paul’s bay. St Paul spread Christianity throughout Malta which at the time has a mostly pagan population and the vast majority of Malta inhabitants have remained Christian since the days that St Paul walked the streets of Malta.”

Short but informative, Pittman’s essay briefly discusses key events in the history of Malta, including its founding, the spread of Christianity, and the Arab invasion of the country. She also references the Knights of Malta and their impact on the country. 

“Every person across the face of this Earth has been molded into what they are today by the past. Have you ever wondered sometime about why humanity is the way it is, or why society works the way it does? In order to find the answer, you must follow back the footprints to pinpoint the history of the society as a whole.”

West’s essay explains history’s importance and why it should be studied. Everything is how it is because of past events, and we can better understand our reality with context from the past. We can also learn more about ourselves and what the future may hold for us. West makes essential points about the importance of history and gives important insight into its relevance.

“While those stories are important, it is vital and a personal moral imperative, to share the breadth and depth of Black History, showing what it is and means to the world. It’s not just about honoring those few known for the 28 days of February. It’s about everyday seizing the opportunities before us to use the vastness of history to inspire, educate and develop our youth into the positive and impactful leaders we want for the future.”

In her essay, McGee explains the importance of history, mainly black history, to the past and the future. She writes about how being connected to your culture, history, and society can give you a sense of purpose. In addition, she reflects on the role black history had in her development as a person; she was able to learn more about black history than just Martin Luther King Jr. She was able to understand and be proud of her heritage, and she wishes to use history to inspire people for the future.  

“Shortly afterwards, Egyptians and Khwarazmians defeated an alliance of Crusaders-States and Syrians near Gaza. After Gaza, the Crusaders States were finished as a political force, although some cities along the coast hung on for more than forty years. The Egyptian Ayyubids occupied Jerusalem itself in 1247. The city now was not much more than a heap of ruins, becoming an unimportant backwater for a long time.”

Stein describes the Sixth Crusade, during which Emperor Frederick II could resolve the conflict through diplomacy, even gaining Christian control of Jerusalem by negotiating with the Sultan. He describes important figures, including the Popes of the time and Frederick himself, and the events leading up to and after the Crusade. Most importantly, his essay explains why this event is noteworthy: it was largely peaceful compared to the other Crusades and most conflicts of the time.

“Jillings describes the arrest of a Scottish preacher in 1603 for refusing to comply with the government’s health measures because he thought they were of no use as it was all up to God. The preacher was imprisoned because he was viewed as dangerous: his individual freedoms and beliefs were deemed less important than the safety of the community as a whole.”

In her essay, Whitaker explains the relevance of history in policymaking and attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic. She first discusses the human tendency to blame others for things beyond our control, giving historical examples involving discrimination against particular groups based on race or sexual orientation. She then describes the enforcement of health measures during the black plague, adding that religion and science do not necessarily contradict each other. From a historical perspective, we might just feel better about the situations we are in, as these issues have repeatedly afflicted humanity. 

In your essay, write about the lessons we can learn from studying history. What has history taught us about human nature? What mistakes have we made in the past that we can use to prevent future catastrophes? Explain your position in detail and support it with sufficient evidence.

We have been left with many reminders of our history, including monuments, historical documents, paintings, and sculptures. First, choose a primary historical source, explain what it is,  and discuss what you can infer about the period it is from. Then, provide context by using external sources, such as articles.

What historical event interests you? Choose one, whether it be a devastating war, the establishment of a new country, or a groundbreaking new invention, and write about it. Explain what exactly transpired in the event and explain why you chose it. You can also include possible lessons you could learn from it. You can use documentaries, history books, and online sources to understand the topic better. 

Research the history of a country of your choice and write your essay on it. Include how it was formed, essential people, and important events. The country need not be your home country; choose any country and write clearly. You can also focus on a specific period in your country’s history if you wish to go more in-depth. 

For a personal angle on your essay, you can write about your family’s history if there is anything you feel is noteworthy about it. Do you have any famous ancestors? Did any family members serve in the military? If you have the proper sources, discuss as much as you can about your family history and perhaps explain why it is essential to you. 

Throughout history, war has always hurt one or both sides. Choose one crucial historical war and write about its effects. Briefly discuss what occurred in the war and how it ended, and describe its impact on either or both sides. Feel free to focus on one aspect, territory, culture, or the economy.

From the spread of Christianity to the horrible practice of slavery, research any topic you wish and write about its history. How did it start, and what is its state today? You need not go too broad; the scope of your essay is your decision, as long as it is written clearly and adequately supported.

For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .If you’re looking for inspiration, check out our round-up of essay topics about nature .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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History and the Future od the Real World

by John L. Robinson

Introduction

The sight of a reporter in Iraq killed before our eyes on the television screen by an American helicopterlaunched missile brought back uncomfortable memories from the Vietnam war – such as pictures of a prisoner shot in cold blood and of a naked girl running screaming from a napalm attack.(continue…)

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Artificial Intelligence: History, Challenges, and Future Essay

In the editorial “A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: On the Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence” by Michael Haenlein and Andreas Kaplan, the authors explore the history of artificial intelligence (AI), the current challenges firms face, and the future of AI. The authors classify AI into analytical, human-inspired, humanized AI, and artificial narrow, general, and superintelligent AI. They address the AI effect, which is the phenomenon in which observers disregard AI behavior by claiming that it does not represent true intelligence. The article also uses the analogy of the four seasons (spring, summer, fall, and winter) to describe the history of AI.

The article provides a useful overview of the history of AI and its current state. The authors provide a useful framework for understanding AI by dividing it into categories based on the types of intelligence it exhibits or its evolutionary stage. It addresses the concept of the AI effect, which is the phenomenon where observers disregard AI behavior by claiming that it does not represent true intelligence.

The central claim made by Michael Haenlein and Andreas Kaplan is that AI can be classified into different types based on the types of intelligence it exhibits or its evolutionary stage. The authors argue that AI has evolved significantly since its birth in the 1940s, but there have also been ups and downs in the field (Haenlein). The evidence used to support this claim is the historical overview of AI. The authors also discuss the current challenges faced by firms today and the future of AI. They make qualifications by acknowledging that only time will tell whether AI will reach Artificial General Intelligence and that early systems, such as expert systems had limitations. If one takes their claims to be true, it suggests that AI has the potential to transform various industries, but there may also be ethical and social implications to consider. Overall, the argument is well-supported with evidence, and the authors acknowledge the limitations of AI. As an AI language model, I cannot take a stance on whether the argument is persuasive, but it is an informative overview of the history and potential of AI.

The article can be beneficial for the research on the ethical and social implications of AI in society. It offers a historical overview of AI, and this can help me understand how AI has evolved and what developments have occurred in the field. Additionally, the article highlights the potential of AI and the challenges that firms face today, and this can help me understand the practical implications of AI. The authors also classify AI into three categories, and this can help me understand the types of AI that exist and how they can be used in different contexts.

The article raises several questions that I would like to explore further, such as the impact of AI on the workforce and job displacement. The article also provides a new framework for looking at AI, and this can help me understand the potential of AI and its implications for society. However, I do not disagree with the author’s ideas, and I do not see myself working against the ideas presented.

Personally, I find the topic of AI fascinating, and I believe that it has the potential to transform society in numerous ways. However, I also believe that we need to approach AI with caution and be mindful of its potential negative impacts. As the editorial suggests, we need to develop clear AI strategies and ensure that ethical considerations are taken into account. In this way, we can guarantee that the benefits of AI are maximized while minimizing its negative impacts.

Haenlein, Michael, and Andreas Kaplan. “ A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: On the Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence .” California Management Review , vol. 61, no. 4, 2019, pp. 5–14, Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 25). Artificial Intelligence: History, Challenges, and Future. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artificial-intelligence-history-challenges-and-future/

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IvyPanda . 2024. "Artificial Intelligence: History, Challenges, and Future." February 25, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artificial-intelligence-history-challenges-and-future/.

1. IvyPanda . "Artificial Intelligence: History, Challenges, and Future." February 25, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artificial-intelligence-history-challenges-and-future/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Artificial Intelligence: History, Challenges, and Future." February 25, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artificial-intelligence-history-challenges-and-future/.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Labor Union — History, Functions, and Future of Labor Unions

History, Functions, and Future of Labor Unions

• Categories: Labor Union

About this sample

Words: 554 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 554 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

History of labor unions, functions and benefits of labor unions, criticisms and controversies surrounding labor unions, current challenges and future of labor unions, major milestones in the labor union movement, protection of workers' rights, advocacy for worker-friendly policies.

• Johnston, R. M. (2012). The history of the labor movement in the United States. Princeton University Press.
• Greenhouse, S. (2014). The big squeeze: Tough times for the American worker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
• Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2015). American amnesia: How the war on government led us to forget what made America prosper. Simon & Schuster.

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