History can be our guide

How many times have you heard some flavor of "If you don't know history, you are doomed to repeat it?" Like most overused clichés, there is a lot of truth to the statement. History is not a static, one-dimensional discipline consisting of memorizing dates and old white men. History is dynamic, it changes as we come to know more as time passes and we are able to add more context to "what went on." What will historians of 2075 say about America in the early 2020s? It will probably be a lot different than if any of us wrote about what happened last year. But can the 1960s tell us anything about today? Can our knowledge of the history of that era prevent us from making the same mistakes as were made then? Yes. If we are open. The problem, as I see it, is that most people in the United States see "history" as a boring, static, set of stories (mostly about old white men). The History Channel and popular documentary film producers like Ken Burns are doing great jobs of expanding the audience for learning our past. But we have to do more to make history more engaging and useful to the average American. As a historian I love to tell stories about how history has changed as we come to learn more facts. I will use this space to write about cool stories that enable us to think about the past in a new way, and possibly help us to use the past to see our current situations through a new lens.