Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world. Picking up on a related theme, the late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian, Librarian of Congress, and griend of mine, wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best. Today, the new generation of young Americans are like a field of cut flowers, by-and-large historically illiterate. This does not bode well for our future.
After delivering a talk at the University of Missouri, I spoke with a young woman who said that until my talk she had not known that all of the original 13 colonies were on the east coast. How could a student at a fine university not know this, I wondered. On another occasion, I taught an honors seminary to 25 history majors at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. The first morning I asked if anyone could identify George Marshall. Not a single person raised their hand. After a long silence, one young man asked tentatively if he had something to do with the Marshall Plan. Yes, I said. And that’s where we started talking about the General who supervised the U.S. Army during World War II and later received the Nobel Prize as Secretary of State. We cannot, however, blame these students for their lack of understanding and awareness of history.
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