hTERvTEW WITH THOMAS D. CLARK

Born in 1903, in north central Mississippi, Clark received his B.A. from the University of Mississippi, his M.A. from the University of Kentucky, and his Ph.D. from Duke. Clark has collected thousands of documents, edited a dozen volumes, and written over 30 books and 60 articles, many of them about the South since the Civil War. Clark has served as president of Phi Alpha Theta, the Southern Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. He and his wife, Martha Elizabeth Turner, were married in 1933 and have a son and a daughter. Retiring in the 1970s after four decades at the University of Kentucky and Indiana University, Clark remains active in such historical circles as the Filson Club, where this interview was conducted in April 1991 by Roger Adelson.

THE HISTORIAN: Could you tell us about the Filson Club?

CLARK: This club is a very interesting nonprofit organization open to anyone who is interested in the history of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley. The Filson Club collects and preserves historical materials, publishes a quarterly, and maintains a library and museum. It is named after John Filson, who published the first book about Kentucky in 1784. The Filson Club was founded in the 1880s by a group of cigar-smoking and cider- drinking Louisville men, including Reuben T. Durrett, a lawyer and news- paper editor whose family fell on hard times in the 1920s and sold his magnificent library to the University of Chicago. Another Filsonian, R. C. Ballard Thruston, a Yale engineering graduate, had a library almost as great as Durrett's that he gave to the club. Thruston put up the money to buy two old downtown buildings where the club remained until it moved up here in 1986. The Filson Club's officers have been old Louisville, with genealogy as a major interest, but there is an important collection of his- torical material here for serious historical researchers in the history of the western movement, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley. I noticed on the door this morning that the Filson Club now charges three dollars for using the collection.

THE HISTORIAN: You have been collecting historical materials for the library at the University of Kentucky since the 1930s?

Professor Thomas D. Clark at the Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky, photographed by Richard Nugent

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CLARK: I still pick up books and manuscripts for the library. My career as a collector for the University of Kentucky library began in 1930 when I made a special survey of historical materials in neighboring depositories. When I joined the University of Kentucky faculty in 1931, I was employed directly by the president with the provision that I would assist in strength- ening the library's research holdings. In my earlier survey, I had dis- covered that Centre College held a nearly complete earlier United States Serial set and that this could be transferred to the university. There was friction between the president of the college and his board of trustees, and, in order to gain space in the college library, the president gave us the serial set. Another significant addition I was able to make to the library is the fine general furnishing store records. In 1942, I traveled throughout the South collecting these records. The first general store I visited was in South Carolina. It had just gone out of business, and the owner gave me its re- cords. I had planned to spend the year taking notes, but this gift changed that plan. The owner of the second store I visited also gave me its records. Thus I traveled across the South collecting the records of the old general stores that were either out of business or were on the verge of closing. Aside from this, I collected everything I could pry loose from donors for the University of Kentucky library, including southern state publications of laws, legislative journals, and special reports. I am often astonished at how little use historians have made of much of these materials.

THE HISTORIAN: You are a collector in general?

CLARK: I'm an old fashioned trash man. I have been collecting since I was a boy. To the utter dismay of my wife, I still am. A collector has to be very careful to distinguish between his responsibilities to the institution he is collecting for and his own interests, especially since there are so many temptations. I have a few fine manuscripts that I found on my own and lots of books. I have a firm conviction that children who grow up in a home where there are books will become readers later on in life. My son is an attorney, married to the daughter of a historian, and he reads all the time. My daughter is married to a historian, and she and her husband have a very good library indeed. I'm sure they were influenced by the fact that they grew up with books scattered all over the floor and that they stum- bled around them everywhere.

THE HISTORIAN: Was your own interest in reading inspired by your mother, who, instead of singing to you and your six younger brothers and sisters, used to read aloud to you?

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CLARK: My mother, Sallie Bennett Clark, had a tremendous influence upon my early education. She had gone to one of the women’s colleges that existed then throughout the South. I still have her license and a report on her teaching examination. Before she married my father, she taught at the country school that was within sight of the house where my grand- father, my father, and I were all born. Even with seven children, my moth- er continued teaching school, and she taught me herself for three of my first seven years. My mother’s family all came from South Carolina. My grandfather Bennett always gave us books as Christmas presents, and he had a small library, which I enjoyed. He died when he was 65; my grand- mother Bennett died at 97. My mother lived to be 96.

THE HISTORIAN: Could you describe Louisville, Mississippi, before the First World War?

CLARK: Louisville was the county seat, right in the heart of the yellow pine timber belt. It‘s Choctaw country, and I suppose there are as many Indians there near Louisville now as there were when I was a boy. Winston County is cotton country, and my people were all cotton folks. Besides our family Methodist church, there were two other rural Methodist churches, lots of Baptist churches, and a few Presbyterian ones. Blacks had their own churches with uninhibited preaching and shouting and marvelous singing.

We had blacks living next door to us on both sides. On one side was a landowning family; the family on the other side I continued to visit after I joined the faculty at the University of Kentucky. One of these neighbors, Hannah, would gather me up in her arms and kiss me like I was a lost son who had just come home. Arthur, her blind husband, once asked me to get him some good new crop burley tobacco, which I did; he rolled up a ball of burley, put it in his mouth, and died soon after. Somebody later told me that chewing a roll of raw burley could kill a person; I have since wonder- ed if that had anything to do with his death.

I remember a lynching when I was about nine years old. On a farm nearby, two blacks worked year in and year out for a white man who treat- ed them unfairly. He kept a bottle of strychnine to poison rats in his barn. The two blacks put the strychnine in the water bucket that the snuff- dipping white man used to wash his mouth out before eating. He spat out the strychnine-laden water, found the missing bottle, and called the sher- iff. My grandfather went over to that farm and found that a mob had al- ready hanged the two blacks. It was a shocking thing for the community. I still sense the ghosts of those two men whenever I drive by that place. To me, lynching was a sinful scar on the South that perhaps will never fully heal.

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THE HISTORIAN: What about your father and his family?

CLARK: My father's family were English who settled in Rhode Island and later in Virginia before the American Revolution. In the 1830s, four Clark brothers came out to Mississippi from South Carolina, one of whom amassed a fortune, but my family never knew anything about him. Two of my great uncles enlisted in the Confederate Army and, without any mili- tary training, fought in the battle of Shiloh. One was shot in the stomach, ran around, fell on the doorsteps of the church, and died; the other came home after the war and moved to Texas, where he left a considerably large family. My grandfather, my father, and I were born in the same room in a big, old Carolina-style double log house. If there are any people left in Winston County who remember my father, they would all say that he was a man of absolute integrity. He was a hard-working man. He wrote a beau- tiful hand, and I still have at least one letter from him when he wrote to thank me for something I had sent him. He had a keen sense of humor and a genuine love of people that I inherited from him. My father also never took chances. In 1911, when we were disastrously threatened by the boll weevil, which practically wiped us out, my father never encumbered the land with a mortgage. He had a horror of debt, a horror that I have shared. We were a bit better off economically in World War I but not a great deal better. In the early 1 9 2 0 ~ ~ when the depression hit the cotton belt before the rest of the country, we had our land and that's all we had. I can still see my father sitting on the porch reading either the Atlanta Constitution or the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which I read too. He was often searching for a way out of the southern cotton farmer's dilemma.

THE HISTORIAN: You were not in school from the age of thirteen to eighteen?

CLARK: I had to stop school to help on the farm. On my sixteenth birth- day, I signed on as a cabin boy on a dredging quarter boat until the dredg- ing machinery arrived. Then I worked as a deck hand, oiling engines and doing whatever else needed to be done for the crew of six to eight. We dredged a canal down through all that mud, which was swamped with water moccasins. After two years, I became fed up with the dredges jerk- ing the quarter boat forward every night and waking us all up; I quit and walked over to my grandmother Clark's home, which wasn't too far away. That was when I decided to return to school.

THE HISTORZAN: Was that when you went to the Choctaw Country Agri- cultural High School, a boarding school, since there were few secondary schools in rural Mississippi?

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CLARK: That‘s right. When I got off the train in Weir, Mississippi, I asked a man where I could find the school principal, and he turned out to be the principal. He looked me up and down (I was a solid 200 pounds and stood 5 feet 11 inches tall) and asked me if I played football. I did not know what a football was, but I entered school on Monday morning, went to football practice that afternoon, played in a game that Friday, and remained on the team until I graduated four years later.

THE HISTORIAN: At the age of 22, you went to the University of Missis- sippi to study law but then majored in history?

CLARK: In cotton towns, there were three professions: medicine, law, and engineering. I had no mathematical ability whatsoever, so I chose law. In my freshman year, I met Charles S. Sydnor, a very attractive young history professor who had just come from Emory University in Atlanta to head the department at Ole Miss. Sydnor encouraged me to major in history, but I did not take courses from him on the South. I had been surrounded by its history since childhood: I had heard stories told by former Confederate soldiers in the blacksmith shop I used to visit and at Confederate reunions; legends told by the Choctaws; and tales from former slaves and their chil- dren, whom I knew. Grandpa Bennett was a great storyteller, too. With this background in the days of Reconstruction, a southern boy could hardly escape having an interest in the place where he grew up.

While attending Ole Miss, I worked on a golf course. Bill Faulkner occasionally worked with me. He had heard some of the same stories that I had from his grandfather, Colonel Faulkner, and at his father’s livery stable. He translated many of those stones into wonderful written form- The Bear, for instance, evokes the woods of my boyhood with its hunting tales and innumerable snake stories.

I went to summer school one quarter at the University of Virginia. Being there and visiting the home of Thomas Jefferson was a wonderful experience for me. In my third and last year at Ole Miss, I covered the chancellor’s office for the campus newspaper. He gave me a job as a secur- ity guard on the quiet campus of about a thousand students. One day he told me that he had just returned from a meeting of associated southern colleges, where he had heard about a scholarship at the University of Ken- tucky that he thought I could get if I applied for it. I accepted the $200 scholarship the university awarded me and went to Lexington where I completed my master’s degree in one year.

THE HISTORIAN: You took your master’s degree at the University of Kentucky in 1928-1929?

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CLARK: I had only read a couple of novels about Kentucky, and I didn't know a soul in Lexington. The university then had about 2,200 students so it was much bigger than Mississippi, but research facilities at the univer- sity were poor. The library was inadequate even for undergraduates. Kentucky had four faculty members in the history department: a chairman who had been there since 1908, a homegrown instructor, a young man who had just finished his master's degree at the University of Chicago, and an associate professor who had recently been hired through a teach- er's agency. I wrote my thesis on Kentucky's trade in livestock, slaves, and hemp with the lower South based on research I did in the Kentucky His- torical Society, the state library at Frankfort, the Transylvania College Lib- rary, and the Lexington Public Library.

THE HISTORIAN: And you did your Ph.D. at Duke in two years?

CLARK: Yes. I had also applied for fellowships to Missouri, Vanderbilt, Virginia, and Wisconsin, but I accepted the one from Duke, which had just had its endowment increased and name changed because of gifts from James 8. Duke, who had made a fortune in tobacco and in hydroelectricity. I had no knowledge of the history department at Duke, which had granted only one Ph.D. before that time. There was only a handful of us working on our doctorates. My fields were Southern, British, Latin American, and Modern European history.

THE HISTORIAN. Speaking of British history, how would you account for the South's Anglophilia?

CLARK. First, a large number of Southerners are of Anglo-colonial origin, so they are pretty deeply rooted there by blood, tradition, and interest. Second, the South was homogeneous and provincial since it received fewer European immigrants than other parts of the United States. Third, the legacies of British law and literature have always strongly appealed to Southerners.

THE HISTORIAN: You wrote your dissertation and your fist two books on southern railroads?

CLARK: I wanted to concentrate on the Ohio Valley, but my major profes- sor, William K. Boyd, could not see beyond the Appalachian Mountains and insisted that I do my dissertation on the building of the southern rail- roads before the Civil War. That was a historical dead end for me. However,

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after 1 read a paper at the Filson Club on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, a publisher produced it in book form and later the University of North Carolina Press published a second book of mine.

THE HISTORIAN: In 1931, after a very brief stint of teaching at the Uni- versity of Tennessee, you returned to Kentucky as an instructor hired by the university's president, not by the history department?

CLARK: In my contract drawn up in his own handwriting, the president of the University of Kentucky stated that my job was not only to teach his- tory but also to help build up the library. The old chairman of the depart- ment was not happy about my appointment and saddled me with 15 hours of British history my first term, with 35 to 40 students in each of the 5 classes. Like other professors, I have had my share of successful students who have become leaders in business, educational, environmental, gov- ernmental, and legal fields. Since the 1 9 3 0 ~ ~ I have followed several rules in teaching. First, I never allowed myself to accumulate dog-eared lecture notes. Second, I always gave essay tests rather than the so-called objective type since the latter never, in my mind, exercised students' abilities. Third, I never let students get out of my class without requiring every one of them to write a paper. Finally, I graded my students' papers myself. It seems to me that if more professors followed these rules, the country's education would not be in the mess that it is today. In building up the li- brary, I had to foster what the English call "town-gown" relations, which meant that I had to form associations with lots of people and groups in order to gain their support for my library research collecting efforts and for developing associations for research throughout the South.

THE HISTORIAN: Your publications in the 1930s focused on Kentucky and the area along the Ohio River?

CLARK: This was a very important part of the U.S. frontier experience. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner was then much discussed. I am not a Turnerian, but I think there is much merit in his frontier thesis. Some of Turner's followers seem to have gone way beyond anything that he believed himself. My own view is that the great frontier experiment had its beginning and its seasoning in the Ohio Valley before it expanded farther south and west. Living in Kentucky and collecting materials for the uni- versity library gave me a greater sense of place, particularly with regard to the relationship between the Ohio Valley's economic and social life, which I explored in two books on Kentucky and in The Rampaging Frontier. In the latter, published in 1939, I tried to describe the gusto of frontier life along

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the rivers, down the creeks, in the canebrakes, on the prairies, the planta- tions, the bottoms, in meeting houses, and at race tracks. I did this largely by letting the actors have their say.

THE HISTORIAN: In 1942, yet another president of the University of Ken- tucky made you head of the history department, a post which you held until 1963. What were your goals as head?

CLARK: We first had to hire good, aggressive professors. Then, we had to build up the library. Finally, we had to have a university press that would offer an outlet for faculty publication. Before these things could be done, however, we had to deal with a contract that the U.S. Army had made with the university for teaching soldiers during the war, which at least one history faculty member resented as a conscientious objector. We managed to hold the history department together during the war, but we were not able to build up our faculty and graduate program until afterward because of limited resources. I personally wanted the department to be strong in two or three fields. We were good in British and in southern history, but I was unsuccessful in my effort to develop constitutional history. As chair- man of a university planning committee from 1950 to 1965, I advocated that department chairs be rotated. I had seen how some department heads either got too strong a proprietary interest in the department or fell asleep on the job. I now see that rotating chairs can sometimes mean that nobody assumes much responsibility or provides much-needed continuity of management.

THE HISTORIAN, During the two decades you headed the history depart- ment and were so involved in collecting materials for the library at the University of Kentucky, how did you manage to publish seven books, edit six volumes, and produce numerous articles?

CLARK: I write every day. Temperamentally. I write like a journalist-I can start where I have left off without any difficulty whatsoever. My col- lection and organization of research materials for the library helped my own research and publications on the South since the Civil War.

Pills, Pefticoats, and Plows focused on the southern country store. I did not undertake that study just for nostalgic reasons but because the country store was an institution as important to the rural South as the church or the Democratic party It was the means by which much of the South recovered after the Civil War. Had it not been for the country store, many regions would have been left bankrupt since the store owners acted not only as merchants but also as bankers and community leaders. My book depicts the country store as the social center where people heard news, gave advice, and talked about local affairs. The country store was

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also the rural Southerners’ link with the outside world, along with the post office, since the store usually had the only telephone and attracted north- ern drummers who sold their goods in the South. The Southern Country Editor and The Rural Press and the New South were based on more than 1,800 weeklies in 12 southern states. They describe the character of that press, the nature of its news, and the power of its editors after the Civil War. These three books came out in the 1940s.

From 1948 to 1952, I edited The Journal of Southern History. I also edited the big project on southern travel literature, which was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. This work turned out to be six volumes of annotated bibliographies published by the University of Oklahoma Press from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.

By the late 1950s, I had also published the biggest book I had yet undertaken, Frontier America, another book on Kentucky and a U.S. history textbook for high school students. I had a couple of mishaps in the 1950s before my next major undertaking. Howard Odum, the famous sociologist at the University of North Carolina who generated ideas like a Fourth of July sparkler, invited me to do a book on southern poor whites, but that project fell through, as did another one on Frederick Law Olmsted. Then, in the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, I wrote The Emerging South. I was thoroughly cognizant of the racial issues involved, and I am glad that I did that one. Although it could be revised a thousand times over, I was able to catch the South in one of its most dramatic emotional moments with the White Citizen’s Councils and other segregationists fanning the flames of resistance. I got behind those emotions by interviewing all sorts of people and considering their reactions to the Supreme Court decision.

THE HISTORIAN: Professional recognition of your contributions to his- tory came in the 1940s and 1950s, when you were elected president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, which is now known as the Organization of American His- torians?

CLARK: I’d like to talk a little about that name change. The Mississippi Valley Historical Association, a close-knit group of historians with head- quarters in Lincoln, Nebraska, had not kept pace with developments in the country and in the profession. In 1957, after my term as president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association ended, I served for six years as chairman of the executive committee during a very tense time involving issues of race, among others. After a terribly divisive meeting over the is- sue of meeting in New Orleans, I was able to get a report favoring a bira- cial organization accepted at our next annual meeting in Madison, Wis- consin, and then to persuade the manager of the Lafayette Hotel in

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Lexington to allow us to hold our first biracial meeting there. When my term as chairman of the executive committee ended, I became chairman of a special committee to consider the future of the association when we were still pondering the name of the organization and its journal. So, at the start of one meeting in Philadelphia, even before lots of members got seated, I simply moved that the subtitle of the review, Thelournd of American Hisfory, be made the new title of the journal, which it has remained to this day. It was ridiculous to continue with a regional name when the organization had become truly national. Finally, in 1965, the Mississippi Valley title was changed to the Organization of American Historians.

THE HISTORIAN: So, historians can be as narrow-minded and reaction- ary as others? From your viewpoint, has specialization helped or hindered the quality of the history being written today?

CLARK: I am saddened to see fewer and fewer historical generalists who write for the reading public and have an impact upon the public's his- torical consciousness. There used to be more of them when I was young, but now historians such as the late Barbara Tuchman are exceptional. I read the journals and reviews, but we have almost deserted the area of stylistic writing. We seem to have stocked our university press publica- tions with books that lack the breadth that the generalists gave to history.

To change this, I think historians need to remember that they are not the end of history but only agents who represent readers. Since readers have neither the dedication nor the interest to dig through all the details in the way that the professional historian does, they deserve to have the material presented in a form that is concise and readable. One of the reasons that C. Vann Woodward has succeeded is because he is an exceed- ingly fine stylist; Robert Palmer and Jack Hexter are also excellent writers. I think that younger historians are better researchers than the historians of my generation were, but I don't believe they are better writers.

I am convinced that historians should not be adversaries who ad- vocate changing society; instead, I think they should understand society as it is. To me, historians are the servants of society, not its caretakers. I am not recommending that historians' intellect be emasculated but rather that they should come to the past with a clean heart and a clean mind and let the reader decide what society should or should not do. However, I also think historians ought to get out of the university more by serving on public boards and commissions and by getting involved in current issues so that they see more clearly how things work. They should get to know politicians and all kinds of people in order to grasp how the human mind functions in everyday affairs. Historians need to gain a sense of the clich6s of society that are generated by the carload, since things do not happen as the law books say they a supposed to happen.

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THE HISTORIAN: Are you concerned that many historians are too parochial?

CLARK: Indeed, I am. I urge historians to get more international experi- ence since there is nothing like looking back on one's culture from the per- spective of another one. My teaching in Austria, Britain, Greece, India, and Yugoslavia helped me to see things in ways I had not viewed them before.

I remember a shocking experience after World War 11 when I got to know a Viennese history student who refused to concern himself with re- cent history because he believed it was politically too dangerous. That ex- change helped me understand political cowardice in Central Europe. In- ternationally experienced historians can free themselves from the one- dimensional views of historians who stay in their own country.

'IT33 HISTORIAN: How was it that you, so closely identified with the Uni- versity of Kentucky, wrote four volumes of the history of Indiana Univer- sity in the 1970s?

CLARK: One of my former students had become the president of Indiana University, and he asked me to accept an appointment as a distinguished service professor and university historian. That was a big job writing three volumes and editing a fourth of relevant documents. I did a prodigious amount of that research myself. Indiana did give me help, but I typed every page of that book, and sometimes I typed several drafts.

THE HISTORIAN: Since becoming professor emeritus, you have con- tinued to publish in the 1980s and 1990s. Could you tell us about your book, The Greening of the South, which relates to your interest in the en- vironment, particularly your own timberlands?

Cww(: I wrote that book out of the firm conviction that the South's land and renewable forest resources are its most durable birthrights.

The great forests encountered by the earliest settlers remained largely intact through the Civil War, despite the encroachments of pioneer farmers and loggers. In the 1 8 8 0 ~ ~ what I call "carpetbaggers of the woods" acquired vast acreages, made fortunes for entrepreneurs, and generated income for laborers in the logging and sawmill era. By the 1920s, much of the lowland pine belt and Appalachian hardwood forests had been de- stroyed and laid open to erosion and wildfire. Since then, there have been seeds of recovery from the forest itself, but this has been helped along by Civilian Conservation Corpsmen, public efforts at rehabilitating the ex- hausted Tennessee Valley, forest workers, and scientists. After World War 11, scientific forestry, along with new South workers, enlightened business- men, and government officials, have helped southern timber contribute to

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regional economic prosperity. Marginal croplands, once abandoned to avoid taxes, are now growing trees again, and the timber income flows out into the southern economy in general.

I really don’t know how many acres of trees I own in Kentucky and South Carolina. The management of timber and land requires one part management and four parts love of the land. I think you have to grow up on the land to acquire those five parts.

THE HISTORIAN: How did you become involved with Phi Alpha Theta, and why have you remained committed to it?

CLARK: In the 1930s, we had a very aggressive secretary in the extension division at the University of Kentucky. Her offices were just downstairs from mine, and she had taken some of my classes. She was the one who got a chapter started at Lexington, and three of us faculty members were initiated into the organization.

I quickly saw that Phi Alpha Theta was a good means for our stu- dents and faculty to get together once a month to read papers, discuss each other’s work, and to exchange views. All of our graduate students partici- pated in Phi Alpha Theta, which gave it a sense of cohesiveness not only to our graduate students but to our undergraduates as well. I’m sure that the chapter in Kentucky opened the eyes of lots of its undergraduate members to the potentials of history as a career. Carla Hay, the last president of Phi Alpha Theta and now on the history faculty at Marquette University, was a graduate student member at the University of Kentucky. Student leaders who went to the national conventions also came home with fresh ideas that they had picked up from other students around the country. Don Hoffman worked so hard promoting the organization. I almost wondered sometimes why he didn’t give it up, but I don‘t believe I ever saw him when he was pessimistic about the future of Phi Alpha Theta.

One thing happened at Kentucky’s chapter that I shall never forget. We had a student who was so nervous about reading his paper that he lit- erally passed out after he had started to read it. His professor caught him with one arm, took the manuscript with the other hand, and stood there holding the boy in his arms and finished reading the paper. When the boy came to, he was so embarrassed that he could hardly look anybody in the face. That same young man went on to become a fine history professor.

THE HISTORIAN: In a 1988 survey, one-third of all Kentuckians told a pollster that they had read at least one history book in the past year? How would you explain such interest?

CLARK: I think a considerable number of Kentuckians have a glimmer, at least, that their state has a rich historical past. They may not know many of

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the historical details, but they cherish their heritage. In recent years, the educational system has, in some measure, stimulated interest in reading. Since 1950, Kentucky has expanded and vastly improved its public lib- raries to such an extent that now nearly all of the 120 counties have a pub- lic library. They enjoy a happy patronage. Also, the state has developed a good university press, which has resulted in the publication of scores of books of varying historical interest that previously would have gone un- published. It would be ridiculous to give the impression that a large mass of Kentuckians have suddenly become book readers, no matter what a statistical survey shows.

THE HISTORIAN: Finally, how has your study of the past influenced your outlook on the world?

CLARK: I think every historian asks himself: ‘Why do I do this?” I cannot imagine civilized life without a sense of history. It would be exactly like stepping off the edge of a cliff into total darkness: you’d just land up in chaos or commit wholesale suicide.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that anything ever repeats itself in the same way or that the past always serves a practical purpose, but I do believe the lessons of the past have a very profound meaning for the present and future. If you don’t know something about past experiences, you can make some terrific political and social blunders and have to learn everything all over again.

As the twentieth century closes, present generations suffer the penalties and misunderstandings of past generations. History can give present generations not only a sense of belonging to a given political, social, and geographical area but also a sense of past human achievements, no matter how modest they might be. Everyone makes some kind of a contribution, either negative or positive, in the progress of civilization that, taken collectively, has meaning. I think understanding the historical process prevents divisive and destructive forces from overtaking us. I think there is psychological value in understanding history, as it gives us ideas of what humans are about and what differentiates them from ani- mals. Fortunately, we have a recoverable sense of what happened in the past that historians can document. I think that humanity should take some solace in understanding that every generation has had its problems, losses, calamities, disappointments, and victories. Tomorrow may be no different in that we will continue to make blunders.

Every generation is part of the historical process and searches for the facts, although what was fact yesterday can become fiction tomorrow. In a museum on the island of Crete, there is a small bronze disc with some hieroglyphics that have never been deciphered. As I stood there, looking at the disc, I asked myself ‘What kind of key does this hold to the past, if

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any?" When we cannot read the inscription, we cannot know what it means. If we did not have recorded history, we would all be in that situ- ation: we would have artifacts, but we would not know their meaning. With documents and historical interpretation, however, we have some sense of what the human community has been, and still is, all about.

THE HISTORIAN: Thank you.