How We Interpret Our Past Will Determine Our Future

From statues to schoolbooks, how we interpret the past will decide what kind of nation we become.
How We Interpret Our Past Will Determine Our Future
Detail from “Clio, Muse of History,” 1800, by Charles Meynier. Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public Domain
Jeff Minick
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In his Introduction to his 11-volume “The Story of Civilization,” Will Durant wrote: “Civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.”
Teacher and historian Wilfred M. McClay delivers a similar warning more bluntly in his “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” “A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized,“ he writes, ”even if it is technologically advanced.”
Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.