Why Bother with History?

This text looks at the debates concerning the value of history, it offers perspectives from across the centuries. It covers ethical lessons from history, education and schooling and shows how various regimes have used and abused history for their own ends.

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. Why Bother With History?
argues for an increasingly important role for a revitalised historical study. Examining the motivations of past historians, the author rejects the ancient aspiration to a 'history for its own sake' and argues that historians' importance lies in their own adoption of a moral standpoint, from which a story of the past can be told, that facilitates the attainment of a future we desire.
Inevitably controversial, in that it challenges many of the assumptions of modernist history, this is an interdisciplinary book, which draws in particular on psychology and literature.