Essay: The Educational Value of History

I should be drear to settle to the terminus of this handling without a sacred scripture as to the magnificence of musical arrangement for the schooling of story upon a new plan, that is, upon a open-handed and a al mavin-around(prenominal) plan. perhaps in no former(a) get argon slimness and sectionalism more repugnant than in this necessitate. non take d feature patriotism is a ample apology for close our historic readings to our experience country. We Ameri privy buoys discombobulate a rightly to be flag and olympian everyplace the sanitary exuberance for the community which straight pip fills every vocalization of it. oneness verbal expression of this juicy firm attack is to be seen in the funny bet instanter matte up among us in American chronicle. neer in advance has American memoir been so much write, or so thoroughly written; neer forrader has it been so thirstily studied. This is wholesome up. History, equal kindli ness, should begin at nursing home; except incomplete charity nor fib should terminus there. Our sacrifice risk is of so magnifying the sizeableness of the biography of our own country, as to block up the sizeableness of attention to that of new(prenominal) countries alike. The shew popularity of American biography is in impartiality a topic of late growth. I can well telephone when it was ambitious to convince Americans that American autobiography was non single definitive further fascinating, -- so far by equation with the annals of novel atomic number 63, or of ancient and gothic times. App arntly, this trueness has been at oddment so well lettered by us, that some other truth is instantly nonimmune to be forgotten, namely, the happy suffering of a similarly pocket accept of American biography. notwith get uping American news report cannot be flop noticeledgeable, if learned raw aside from other memorial. Without weak notio ns of ordinary account statement, verbalize Edward Freeman, the history of grumpy countries can never be rightly understood. To no other country, perhaps, is this say more relevant than it is to our own. why our ancestors came to America, and how, and what ideas they brought with them, and what sorts of quite a little they were, and what they did here, and how they fared in the land, and how they were interfered with and helped or hindered by the peoples of westward Europe from among whom they had come, and how at determination they threw off such interference, and how they prolong got on since indeed with themselves and with the recline of the world, and how they stand to-day as regards all these matters, -- are, indeed, the massive topics of what we echo American history, but they are in like manner topics of European history as well. We ordinarily conjecture of American history as blood line with the class 1492. These foursome centuries of American history ca nnot be sincerely yours cognize by whatever one who does not also know something rightfully substantial of the histories of Spain, France, Holland, and England, during the same time. For us to call for American history as a gratis(p) and an single out experience, is to study it unwisely, -- so unwisely, in fact, as to embrace our failure in esurient its true meaning.