which have got nothing to do with them at all. It all seems too remote to have any real interest to their own lives. But then as people get older, they sometimes find the history which used to be dull starts becoming a little bit more interesting.
They start noticing, for example, that people, their contemporaries, some of them are doing very well in life, perhaps unexpectedly well. Others who had such promise to begin with have fallen by the wayside. And it's very difficult to explain why some have done so well and others not so well.
And it's fascinating to watch the way in which the world is changing. Once you're in your 40s and once you're a parent and once your own children are studying history, then very often you'll have the experience that you're not alone. that your children will say that they're studying some aspect of history in which you yourself were involved.
And then you realize history isn't just all finished once and for all. It isn't closed up in those books. It's continuing right up to the present, and we're part of it.
And as you begin to describe to your children the world that you grew up in, very often they find that fascinating. It's easier for them to connect with than with descriptions of what the presidents did or the great wars and so on. on.
Now, as you describe your life, or as I describe my life, I was born in the late 1950s. I described to my child a world of astonishing hardships when we didn't have personal computers and we didn't have cell phones. And when, if we wanted to make a phone call, we actually used a heavy object which was wired into the wall and with which we had to do a cumbersome rotary motion to get the number.
We wrote with pens and we listened to music on record players with delicate needles. And the kids say, Wow, that sounds so primitive. How did you manage in such a world?
To which, of course, your answer is, it didn't seem the least bit primitive at the time. It seemed absolutely normal. Now, you also realize that you've been present at the creation of some technologies which have since become entirely commonplace.
For example, I was a graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley, starting in the late 70s and into the early 80s. I had a girlfriend who was working as a temp at a law firm. And one day, she came back from work and said to me, they've got this incredible thing at work.
It's like a typewriter attached to a TV. And when you type the words in, there's no paper. When you type the words in, the words come up on the TV screen.
And if you miss a word, you can make it happen so that the other words move aside and create a place for this word to get out. go in. And we looked at each other in absolute astonishment at the concept of a machine like that. And of course, a few years later, we'd all got one.
And now the idea of living without one does sound like extraordinary hardship. Now, you often hear politicians saying, history teaches us that, and as soon as you hear a politician say that, you know that the next thing he says is going to be false. Just as when you hear a...
Politicians say, the American people, as soon as you hear that, you also know the next thing is going to be false. Because, of course, different people want different things, and they disagree very profoundly. But it's widely imagined that historians are clairvoyants.
study of the past enables them to understand what's going to happen in the future. I give talks often, and usually my audience listens respectfully to my description of some historical episode, but then when it comes time for questions and answers, they nearly always say, what's going to happen in the future? Now, I'd like to be able to tell you that this man is a history teacher, and that what he's doing with these equations is putting in all the relevant historical data to show us what's going to happen next. But actually, he's not a history teacher. history teacher and the history of the attempt to predict the future is a history of uninterrupted failure Now, one of the particular pleasures of studying history in the United States, to which obviously I'm an immigrant, is that it's possible in America to study history in a very, very self-satisfied, moralizing way.
And it goes like this. Perhaps you learned American history like this as well. Back in the 1700s, America had a problem. And the problem was the wicked, wicked British. But then it overcame that problem in the American Revolutionary War and lifted itself up onto a superior moral plane.
And then, in the 19th century, America had a problem. It was the problem of slavery. But then it overcame that problem in a great civil war and lifted itself onto a higher moral plane.
And in the 20th century, America had a serious problem, the great tyrants and dictators. But it overcame them. First Hitler. then the Soviet Union, and lifted itself onto a still higher moral plane. Now that's a very, very emotionally gratifying way of studying history, isn't it?
Because it implies that history is the struggle of right against wrong, in which right dependably wins. Have you ever had this experience? In fact, I hope you've had it when you're reading a good book or watching a good movie. You get to the end with a feeling of very, very profound cathartic satisfaction. The couple get married, or they overcome the obstacles to their love, or the bad guys are defeated by the good ones, and you're left with a feeling, ah, yes, it happened the way it was supposed to.
Now, that's all right in fiction, but if you have that feeling after watching a historical documentary or reading a history book, it probably means that it's a very bad book or a very bad documentary. Because history is not like that. It won't give us satisfying lessons with a tidy moral. History is much more complicated than that. You couldn't possibly study this very, very sort of satisfying upward ascent if you're studying the history of Poland or Ireland.
The history of Poland is almost uninterrupted tragedy. You could say the same for most of Irish history too. Now and again, glimmers of light break out, but they're quickly snuffed out by horrible circumstances. But of course, Poland and Ireland are just as real as America. And their historical experience is just as valid for people who are trying to actually understand what the world is like.
Now, isn't it equally true that when we're studying history, just as when we're reading fiction or watching movies, we want to take sides. And we want to take sides with the ones whom we perceive to be morally superior. For example, the way in which the American Civil War is now taught, almost universally, is that the Union was right. because it was against slavery, and the Confederates were wrong because they were in favor of slavery.
And I sometimes say to classes, when was the last moment that the Confederacy could realistically have expected to win the Civil War? And I've had students say, but the Confederates were the losers, almost as though they'd marched into battle saying, we're the losers. You've only got to think about this for a moment to realize That it's not the conflict of right against wrong, it's the conflict of right against right. Not in the sense that we think the Confederacy was right, but in the sense that we've got to understand that they thought so.
That they marched into battle with a strong conviction that they were right, and that they were justified, and that they were even willing to risk dying for it. If you don't understand that, if you don't provisionally put yourself in the shoes of the Confederate soldier, You're never really going to be able to understand what happened. At least as they're taking places, historical conflicts are always the conflict between right and right, because nobody's willing to say, this is a bad cause and I'm willing to die for it.
And in fact, even though as a historian, obviously you've got to follow the rules of the evidence, you've got to follow where the documents take you, nevertheless, you've got to be capable of flights of imagination. You've got to be able to stand in the shoes not only of the Union soldier and the Confederate soldier, but in the shoes of the abolitionist, a man like Frederick Douglass, or in the shoes of the slaves themselves. What did the world look like to them? What were they thinking about and what were they hoping for?
And in the shoes of Abraham Lincoln. And in Northerners, the shoes of Northerners who said, the Confederate states have seceded, we should let them go. You need to be able to understand all of them. and then you need to be able to show how they came together.
Now, as I mentioned a moment ago, it would be nice to think that history taught us tidy lessons, and that after studying an episode, you could say, this is what happens, here's what it meant, and here's the lesson that it teaches. Now I want to show you with a little sample from the 20th century how difficult it is to do that. The lessons of the First World War, which broke out in 1914 and raged across Europe until 1918. involving the Americans during its last two years. Now, when the war had finally finished, and the dazed survivors looked about and reckoned with the fact that 20 million people had been killed, they said to one another, why did it happen?
What did we do wrong which caused it to happen? And the answer that many of them came up with was this. In a highly mechanized world, which has got railroads and trucks and machine guns and all kinds of powerful technology, aircraft, submarines. Everyone was on a hair-trigger alert. Everyone thought the war would be short if it broke out at all, and that therefore, to mobilize first and to get into the field quickly would give us an overpowering advantage.
So everybody rushed to combat. Let's make sure that we don't do that again. After the Second World War in 1945, when more than 60 million people were killed, The survivors looked about themselves and said, how did it happen?
How did we come into this war? And what can we do to make sure that something like that never happens again? And the answer they came up with was this.
We were too slow to resist Hitler. We saw his growing menace across Europe, the Anschluss, the occupation of the Sudetenland, his gradual exertion of more and more power for Germany and Central Europe. But instead of fighting him quickly, we waited.
The responsible politicians of Europe said, we need to appease Hitler. Why did they say that? Because they wanted to prevent what they understood to be the unnecessary circumstance of war, such as it had happened back in 1914. Of course, there were people like Winston Churchill who said, we're going to have to fight him sooner or later, we might as well do it sooner. When Churchill was saying that in the mid and late 1930s, he sounded like an old dinosaur.
completely superannuated by time, though, of course, he turned out to be absolutely right. Now, to make matters worse, there's the question of atrocities. During the First World War, after the German army invaded Belgium and northern France, atrocity stories circulated in Britain and France and then in America, that the Germans, as they advanced, had crucified Belgian prisoners of war, that they'd raped the Belgian nuns, and that they were laying a path of horrifying cruelty and destruction before themselves. When the Americans entered the war, it wasn't only propagandists who believed these stories. It was also ministers of the gospel.
And many ministers went up into their pulpits and said, it's true that Jesus was a pacifist, but that's only because he didn't have an enemy as evil as the Germans. If Jesus was alive today, he'd... pick up a bayonet and drive it into the body of the first German he met. It's a religious duty to fight against the enemy.
Now, when the First World War finished, it turned out that nearly all these stories were completely false. And the clergy felt a very deep sense of shame that they'd let themselves be taken in by it and said to themselves, we're not going to let that happen again. If we hear such stories. will remember the experience we had here in order that it won't happen twice. Which is why when in 1940 and 41 and 42, stories started to come out from Germany about the fact that the entire Jewish population was being rounded up and put into slave labor camps and then systematically exterminated, many of them said, we heard such stories before, and we believed them, and we were wrong to believe them.
And the result is, of course, that when the camps were finally liberated in 1945 by the Allied armies, they realized with a horrified sense of recognition that they'd been wrong twice. They were wrong the first time for being too credulous, and they were wrong the second time for being too skeptical. That seems to me like a very, very vivid demonstration of the fact that it's difficult to draw the right lesson from history. Which lesson should we apply?
Every subsequent foreign policy crisis has been confronted by exactly this question. Here's a wonderful photograph, a harrowing photograph from Vietnam. Now the American policy makers who took the Americans into Vietnam were remembering the lesson of the Second World War. You've got to fight the enemy early when he's far away and weak, because if you don't, you're going to have to fight him later when he's stronger and closer.
Yeah, that was the lesson which they derived from the events of the late 1930s and Hitler's rise to power. And it seemed like a very, very persuasive and powerful lesson. It wasn't that they were mad or reckless or hadn't studied history enough.
They knew a lot about it, and yet they still made what nearly all of us, I think, would regard as a terrible mistake. That's one of the great paradoxes we need to come to terms with. Now the next thing I'd like to talk to you about is how hard it is to predict the future. And in the 1950s, lots of magazines had articles saying, what's life going to be like in the year 2000?
Here's one from Popular Mechanics, and it shows an American farm from the year 2000, in which each ear of corn is big enough to load down the truck, and you've got a cosmic ray distributor and various other useful devices to help along the way. And here's a good one as well. Popular Mechanics magazine, it said, what's the world going to be like in the year 2000? Well, every workday, dad's going to go to work in his nuclear-powered auto gyro. And mom's going to stay at home in her nuclear-powered kitchen.
In other words, every single interesting thing which actually happened in the period between 1950 and 2000 didn't get mentioned. And the reason they didn't get mentioned was because they hadn't happened. Nothing about the trip to the moon.
nothing about the civil rights movement, nothing about the women's movement, nothing about miniaturization, nothing about computers, all the stuff which actually happened. And of course that's true, because predictions are far, far too difficult to make. Predictions tell you a lot about the time that the prediction was made.
In other words, by studying these predictions, we can know what was on the mind of people in 1950, but we can't know anything at all about the year 2000. And of course, now that we've gone past the year 2000, it's simply a source of fun to look back and say, how wrong could they possibly be? I also found this picture. This is from a French prediction in 1900 of what the year 2000 is going to be.
Isn't that lovely? You know, the whale-powered bus. I mean, it's true that we do now have submarines, but I think they got that slightly wrong in one particular, perhaps more than one particular. And from that same French series, since I'm an educator, I took a lot of pleasure from this one as well. This is the imagination of the schoolroom of the year 2000, in which the teacher there, on the right, is loading textbooks into the hopper, and one kid, you know, the eraser monitor kid, is sort of grinding the handle, and somehow the information is always being transmuted into sparks, which then flow into these headsets and straight into the students'heads.
Isn't that super? That's the 1900 idea of what the year 2000 is going to be like. So my conclusion is actually a rather cautious one.
It's this, that we've got to study history to have any idea at all about what the world is like. Without it, we're blind and groping in the dark. But even when we do know a lot about history, we're still circumscribed by the complexity of humanity and the complexity of historical circumstances such that we can't... possibly know what's going to happen in the future.
Thank you very much indeed.