Knowing Who We Are

Lord Bolingbroke, who was an 18th-century political philosopher, called history “philosophy taught with examples.” An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. We’re raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them.

The task of teaching and writing history is infinitely complex and infinitely seductive and rewarding. And it seems to me that one of the truths about history that needs to be made clear to a student or to a reader is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point, just as your own life can. You never know. One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences. These observations all sound self-evident, but they’re not — and particularly to a young person trying to understand life.

And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, those who went before us didn’t either. It’s all too easy to stand on the mountaintop as a historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not there inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know — as those who preceded us were.

Nor was there ever a self-made man or woman, as much as we Americans love that expression. Everyone who’s ever lived has been affected, changed, shaped, helped, or hindered by others. We all know, in our own lives, who those people are who’ve opened a window, given us an idea, given us encouragement, given us a sense of direction, self-approval, self-worth, or who have straightened us out when we were on the wrong path. Most often they have been parents. Almost as often they have been teachers.

Stop and think about those teachers who changed your life, maybe with a single sentence, maybe with one lecture, maybe by just taking an interest in your struggle. Family, teachers, friends, rivals, competitors — they’ve all shaped us.

And so, too, have people we’ve never met, never known, because they lived long before us. They, too, have shaped us — they who composed the music that moves us, the painters, the poets, those who have written the great literature in our language. We walk around every day, every one of us, quoting Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pope. We don’t know it, but we are, all the time. We think this is our way of speaking. It isn’t our way of speaking — it’s what we have been given.

The laws we live by, the freedoms we enjoy, the institutions that we take for granted — and we should never take for granted — are all the work of others who went before us. And to be indifferent to that isn’t just to be ignorant, it’s to be rude. And ingratitude is a shabby failing.

How can we not want to know about the people who have made it possible for us to live as we live, to have the freedoms we have, to be citizens of this greatest of countries? It’s not just a birthright, it is something that others struggled and strived for, often suffered for, often were defeated for and died for, for the next generation, for us.

Unfortunately, we are raising a generation of young Americans who are by and large historically illiterate. Innumerable studies have been made and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk I had given at a college in Missouri to thank me for coming to the campus, because, she said, “until now I never understood that the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast.”

Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this fine young American, a student at a good college, not know that?

I taught a seminar at one of our Ivy League colleges of 25 seniors, all majoring in history, all honor students. The first morning we met, to get things going, I asked, “How many of you know who George C. Marshall was?”

Not one. There was a long silence. Finally one young man asked, “Did he maybe have something to do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that was a good way to begin talking about George Marshall.

We have to do several things. First of all we have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears — and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents — did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away. If you don’t care about it — if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it — you’re going to lose it.

We have to do a far better job of teaching our teachers. The great teachers — the teachers who influence you, who change your lives — almost always, I’m sure, are the teachers who love what they are teaching. It is that wonderful teacher who says, “Come over here and look in this microscope; you’re really going to get a kick out of this.”

There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland. I wish her ideas were better known. She said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has enthusiasm for the subject at hand, the student catches that, be it in second grade or graduate school. She said, “Show them what you love.”

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught, read, or encouraged only because it will make us better citizens. It will make us a better citizen, and it will make us more thoughtful and understanding human beings. It should be taught for the pleasure it provides. The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists in an expansion of the experience of being alive, which, indeed, is what education is largely about.

And we need not leave the whole job of teaching history to the teachers. The teaching of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home.

We who are parents or grand­parents should be taking our children to historic sites. We should be talking about those books in biography or history that we have particularly enjoyed, or those characters in history who have meant something to us. We should be talking about what it was like when we were growing up in the olden days. Children, particularly young children, love this. And in my view, the real focus should be at the grade-school level. We all know that those young children can learn languages so fast it takes your breath away. The fact is they can learn anything so fast it takes your breath away. And the truth is they want to learn. They can be taught to dissect a cow’s eye. They can be taught anything.

There’s no great secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: story.

And what’s a story? E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition to it: If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story. That’s human. That calls for empathy on the part of the teller of the story and of the reader or listener to the story.

We ought to be growing, encouraging, developing historians who have heart and empathy enough to put students in the time and circumstances of those before us who were just as human and real as we are.

We’ve got to teach history and nurture history and encourage history because it’s an antidote to the hubris of the present — the idea that everything we have and everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.

We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saying about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better. Why in the world did we do that? What could we have been thinking?

Samuel Eliot Morison said we ought to read history because it will help us to behave better. It does. And we ought to read history because it helps to break down the dividers between the disciplines of science, medicine, philosophy, art, music. It’s all part of the human story and ought to be seen as such.

From The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For by David McCullough. Copyright © 2017 by David McCullough. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC

This article is featured in the November/December 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.