Author: Hazlitt Alva Cuppy

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-01-22

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780483647084

Excerpt from Our Own Times, Vol. 1: A Continuous History of the Twentieth Century History is the record of human experience. It is the one great text-book. The only way to understand the present is to know the past; and to us of to-day, who are face to face with immediate prob lems, the history of the immediate past is more important in its de tails than the events of centuries that have long been mustv. We may read in the Older generations the great tendencies that lead straight to the center of present-day energies. Given those tendencies, our chief concern is with their results to-day. And as we Observe those results we gain some inkling of what lies ahead. Some historians have argued that the long perspective of a hundred years is essential to accuracy in the selective judgment of events; that he who writes in 1900 should lag behind the period at least as far as the Battle of Waterloo; that it is impossible for him to write judicially the history of the Victorian era in England, the American Civil War, or the foundation of the new German Empire. The point is well taken in one regard, namely, that the final word can never be said of the past as long as there continues to be a present and a pos sible future. The book of history is never finished; and we must continue to revise Old estimates to make them consistent with the latest entries. Two hundred years from now the American Civil War may be seen to have a meaning which at present we cannot suspect. Yet the fact that our View of that conflict is bounded by a horizon which must expand as the decades go by is no reason why the history of the war should not be written; nor is it good ground for refusing to make interpretation of the events recorded. We do well to studv recent history for what it means to us, rather than to ignore it because it may mean something different to our great-grandchildren. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.