“Guard It Well”

Why history and historians matter

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Friday night is a special time in our household. No matter how busy we may be, my family and I carve out time to celebrate Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. When our kids were little, my wife and I would place our hands on their heads and say a special prayer for them. The line I love the most reads: “A noble heritage has been entrusted to you. Guard it well.”

Though the prayer is specifically Jewish, I think it has significance to those of us who love, study, and teach history, particularly American history. In embracing history as a field, as a passion, and perhaps even as a career, we accept a tremendous responsibility. We have been entrusted with this extraordinary gift. We must guard it well. But how?

In our future-oriented and career-obsessed culture, history often gets maligned as impractical. “What are you going to do with a history degree?” anxious parents wonder when their child confesses that they want to study history. The question usually comes across as: “What could you possibly do with a history degree?!?”

To such skeptics, I say, “Are you kidding?” History is useful everywhere, every day. In a digital world awash in information, history is an island of coherence, a place where we learn to appreciate patterns, nuance, and context. Studying history helps us understand power and perceive folly so we can become better thinkers, communicators, and democratic citizens. These are critically important – and practical – skills.

But we all know that that is not what people mean when they say that history is not “practical.” They mean that knowing history won’t get you a “good” (read: lucrative) job, that you won’t be able to pay your bills, that your kids will be barefoot and ragged. History and the humanities? Those are depleted soils! Far more fruitful (and safer!) to plow your energy into health care, AI, and other fertile fields of the future.

Maybe.

But our country needs people who will guard our heritage well, people who will dedicate their lives to learning and sharing the past, regardless of whether doing so is safe or lucrative or politically palatable. We need people who will tell the full story of America, in all its richness and complexity, with all its triumphs and failures.

There are many ways for those of us who believe in the power of history to find meaningful work sharing our passion with others — as a professor or a teacher or a filmmaker or policymaker or librarian or writer or parent . . .Perhaps I’m optimistic not just because I love history, but because studying history has helped me lead the kind of life I want to lead, even if that life is not quite the standard for historians. I’m a professor now, but I have spent most of my professional life outside the academy, mostly in creating and running nonprofits organizations. History taught me about inspiring people who helped push our country forward toward its ideal of a “more perfect Union.” Their stories encouraged me to pursue those things I’m passionate about, from civil rights to public service to immigration.

I believe that to guard our heritage well, we must pursue it with passion and use what we know in the world around us. But we must beware, too— although our passion should fuel us in our study of history, we don’t want to let it fool us. We must take care to get the story right, as right as we possibly can. And that sometimes means going against our emotions and our passion and even our allies in the world today. Respecting the craft of history means dealing honestly and forthrightly with all the evidence, even when it leads us to uncomfortable conclusions.

Doing history well is hard. It’s humbling. And it’s humanizing. Like great literature, history shows humanity in all its maddening and beautiful complexity. History is – literally and figuratively – story, our stories, how we explain our world to ourselves. How we tell those stories both reflects and shapes who we are, and it can inspire us to reshape the world around us.

Storytelling is fundamental to the human condition. Not every society has patent attorneys or real estate moguls or IT consultants, but every society has historians, griots, and storytellers – people who understand and interpret the past to help us figure out how to live meaningfully in the present. By studying and sharing history, we become part of that tradition. Being able to learn history, to appreciate it, to enjoy it, to respect it, to share it . . . that’s a gift. Guard it well.