Volume 53, Number 7 · April 27, 2006

History and National Stupidity

By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

History is not self-executing. You do not put a coin in the slot and have history come out. For the past is a chaos of events and personalities into which we cannot penetrate. It is beyond retrieval and it is beyond reconstruction. All historians know this in their souls. 'There is no such thing as human history,' one historian has told the New-York Historical Society.



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