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Reading history requires examining multiple perspectives to gain a comprehensive understanding of events. Even when limited to a single account, history holds significance because it shapes future actions and provides insights into current events. While history is tied to specific events, good historical narratives possess a universality, offering timeless lessons and influencing how we understand the world.

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How to Read History

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causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so mani- fold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motiva- tions that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened. Because theories of history differ, and because a historian's

theory affects his account of events, it is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it. Indeed, this is the first rule of read- ing history. And it is all the more important if the event in which we are interested has practical significance for us. It is probably of practical significance to all Americans that they know something about the history of the Civil War. We still live in the backwash of that great and sorry conflict; we live in a world it helped to make. But we cannot hope to understand it if we look at it through the eyes of only one man, or one side, or one faction of modern academic historians. The other day we opened a new Civil War history and noted that its author offered it as "an impartial, objective history of the Civil War from the point of view of the South." The author appeared to be serious. Maybe he was; maybe such a thing is possible. At any rate, we would admit that every narrative history has to be written from some point of view. But to get at the truth, we ought to look at it from more than one viewpoint.

The Universal in History

We are not always able to read more than one history of an event. When we are not, we must admit that we do not have much chance of learning the truth of the matter in ques- tion-of learning what really happened. However, that is not the only reason to read history. It might be claimed that only the professional historian, the man who is writing a history himself, is required to cross-examine his sources by exhaus- tively checking one against the other. He must leave no stone unturned if he is to know what he ought to know about his subject. We, as lay readers of history, stand somewhere between the professional historian, on the one hand, and the irrespon- sible amateur, on the other hand, who reads history only for amusement.

Let us take the example of Thucydides. You may be aware that he wrote the only major contemporary history of the Pelo- ponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.c. In a sense, there is nothing to check his work against. What, then, can we expect to learn from it?

Greece is now a tiny country; a war that occurred there twenty-five centuries ago can have little real effect on our life today. Everyone who fought in it is long dead, and the specific things for which they fought are long dead, too. The victories are now meaningless, and the defeats without pain. The cities that were taken and lost have crumbled into dust. Indeed, if we stop to think of it, almost all that remains of the Pelo- ponnesian War is Thucydides' account of it.

Yet that account is still important. For Thucydides' story -we might as well use that word-has had an influence on the subsequent history of man. Leaders in later eras read Thucydi- des. When they found themselves in situations that even faintly approximated that of the tragically divided Greek city-states, they compared their own position to that of Athens or Sparta. They used Thucydides as an excuse and a justification, and even as a pattern of conduct. The result was that by ever so little, perhaps, but perceptibly, the history of the world was changed by the view held of a small portion of it by Thucydi- des in the fifth century B.C. Thus we read Thucydides not be- cause he described perfectly what happened before he wrote his book, but because he to a certain extent determined what happened after. And we read him, strange as this may seem, to know what is happening now.

"Poetry is more philosophical than history," wrote Aristotle. By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal. A good poem is true not only in its own time and place, but in all times and places. It has meaning and force for all men. History is not quite so universal as that. It is tied to events in a way that poetry is not. But any good history is also universal