Photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa

It’s been my experience that when the tests are over and the school year is winding down, librarians want a nonfiction author to charge up the students, and a Common Core speaker to share insights with the staff. So, all through May and June, my calendar is full.

Very often, the day includes a lunch session with a small group of students, that has an opportunity to gab with me over sandwiches. During one such get-together, a brave 8th grader asked, “Why should we care about history, anyway? It’s over.” She was straight talking, direct, and I thought she probably spoke for many of the others present. I gave her the answer I give myself: she and her peers live in the eternal now—perhaps teenagers always have—but popular culture, the media, social networking, and an array of electronic devices make it easy to be inside whatever is trending at the moment. I’ve learned that Internet trends follow the same spike-and-crash arc, and that many of today’s teenagers live within that 24-to-48 hour-blast-and-demise of rumor, hit, meme, song, and video. Surely that must-know imperative has always been with us—whether the information was whispered among friends, shared along on a village path, or written in a letter. Now, however, there appears to be no push back from our surrounding culture, no sense that the immediate world, however compelling, is of less weight than centuries of accumulated knowledge, art, culture, or history. So what could I say to that teen?

I took a plate and held it horizontally: “This,” I said, “is your world. You live in the eternal now.” Then I took a second plate, and placed it vertically, beneath the first: “This is what you stand on.” History is that column, that pillar, on which the present rests. As we investigate the past, as we ask new questions, as we line up cause and effect in new ways, our present changes. Indeed, as we begin to see how easily events could have been different or altered, we begin to see that we can influence the present and craft a new future.

We study history not out of reverence for the past, but to give us the tools to make a better future. Living in the eternal now, how will we ever know if we are just refashioning old mistakes? (I ran across exactly this idea in the work of William Crary Brownell, Edith Wharton’s first book editor, and the subject of my doctoral dissertation.)

All of this, however, is background to another recent experience I had in a school. I decided to make a PowerPoint presentation on the book my wife, Marina Budhos, and I are writing: The Eyes of the World: How Three Friends (Two Lovers), and a Camera Tried to Fight Fascism (Holt, 2014) The book is about Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour (Chim) during the period of the Spanish Civil War.

There are many hooks for readers in this story, and one huge problem: few, if any, teenagers know or care about the Spanish Civil War. So what could I do to engage the students I was visiting? I decided to draw a parallel between nations’ choices about getting involved in the conflict in Spain in 1936 and our choices now about Syria. The parallels are striking: two clear sides, one we support and one we oppose, and a situation in which there are so many crosscurrents and dangers, few want to get involved. I crafted my PowerPoint and the kids responded positively. And then I read an article by Harvey Morris on The New York Times website, in which many scholars were drawing precisely the same parallel.

Why read history? Because we face terrible choices today, and we have the past to study—not as a lessons about right and wrong, but as a mirror that allows us to examine our actions and ourselves more closely. History matters because it is us—deepened, scrutinized, enriched in contemplation. It provides us with an opportunity to pause, weigh, consider, and reflect before we act. That is what I had to offer the questioning teen. I suspect she left with an inkling that I just might be right.

That sounds nice, but fairly innocuous. It’s what we tell our students to do with research assignments—build on what you know, and when you’re uncertain, look for more evidence while acknowledging your sources and the limits of your knowledge. But in this case, the author is talking about the venerable Bede, a monk and historian who lived in the seventh and eighth centuries. And, as the essay goes on to say, “he is sure about the all-embracing character of the biblical story and about living in the last days of the world.” For Bede, the bible is unquestionably true—it’s a factual account of historical actions by people he needs to track down. Now consider us and our students: What are the unquestioned truths of their lives, which they begin with, before they start their research?

See the problem? In teaching students how to be historians, we need to train them to question their own assumptions as well as the topics they’re investigating. Yes, like Bede, they need to look for evidence in areas they are unsure of. But unlike Bede, they also need to question what they have not previously questioned: the assumptions behind what they are “sure” is true.

For example, is it really true that a young person who’s the same age and gender but lives in another time and place is “just like me”? Is it true that a slave holder who claims to be fighting for democracy is a hypocrite? Is it true that their idea of “normal” is normative throughout this country, throughout the world? The challenge of being a historian is that you have to keep examining yourself as well as your evidence—where are you biased, where do you jump to conclusions, where do you believe ideas because they match your preconceptions, where does “rooting” for someone you like or a cause you support cause you to blur, ignore, or dismiss counterevidence?

Science uses the principle of the repeatable experiment as one test. If I claim doing X under Y conditions will bring Z result, you can test that by following the same steps and comparing the answers. By changing variables and observing outcomes we narrow the possible causes. But with history, that’s harder to do. The events are in the past, so we can’t perform tests on them. But we can do something similar by being fair and open. So long as the next guy can see exactly how I arrived at a particular judgment, he can check my sources. OK, that’s fine for sources, but what about assumptions? What makes me believe someone a thousand years ago would “obviously” have thought this, felt that, or been ready to fight for something else?

Rowan Williams’s essay on Bede explores how the monk poured the details he had gathered about British history into the biblical narrative he was certain was true. And that meant he told a story of a chosen people living out the example of the Jews, only this time it was the Christians on their island in the far north who carried that sacred mission, against their enemies—the parallel to the Philistines who opposed the biblical Jews. Of course, it’s exactly that narrative that the Puritans brought with them to North America, and has remained part of our own national mythology—sometimes in explicitly Christian terms, sometimes in a more generalized image of the United States as the leader of the Free World, the standard-bearer of Democracy bringing the benefits of freedom to the entire planet.

The United States did bring a new form of democracy to the world; we have indeed fought wars against dictators and tyrants. But does that make us exceptional? Different? Are we sure of that? Are we as sure of our truths as Bede was of his biblical truth? This is how history can help us—by holding up an unsparing mirror. What others didn’t see in themselves, we have the chance to observe in ourselves—that’s their gift to us. But we have to remember to teach our students to look at themselves as they look back on former times—that’s the true glory of history.