Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998)

A book covering 9 topics with stories of people . Freedom of Speech: Tom Paine, Thomas Erskine, William Lloyd Garrison, Elijah Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips.Freedom of Religion: Roger Williams, Puritans, Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, Thomas Jefferson. Freedom from Slavery: William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, Levi Coffin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln. The Rights of Children: Hans Chritian Andersen, Richard Oastler, Lord Anthony Ashley, Charles Loring Brace, Jane Addams, UNICEF. The Right to Learn: Friedrich Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, Domingo Sarmiento, Nicholas Svend Grundtvig, Christen Kold, Yang Chu Yen, Dr. Frank Laubach, The Rights of Women: Elizabeth Cody Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan Anthony, Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, Elizabeth Blackwell, Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Carrie Chappman Catt. The Right of Asylum: The Huguenots, Fridtjof Nansen, Israel. Fair Trial: Magna Carta, Voltaire, John Quincey Adams, Emile Zola. The Declaration of Human Rights: Eleanor Roosevelt . Very Readable book. I thought the writing style was great for children. My only negative was that he did not always clearly describe the ideas the person put forth.… (més)

In this short "study", Commager tackles his own subject. Without actually citing any other teaching disciplines, only his own, he declares that "History, it seems, is more self-conscious than other disciplines" and the historian "more introspective". To his credit, his compass of his own discipline and its leading scholars is nonpareil. I am just sort of disappointed that he cites none outside his siloh of information--other than two ancient theologians (Plutarch and St. Augustine).

This work focuses on How historians can question themselves and "get on with the job of study and teaching and writing". He does not linger on the unanswerable -- "we cannot answer ultimate questions". He does formulate approaches to questions about the uses of history and what it is as a subject.

"Rightly studied," answers to elementary questions about the nature and uses of history, can "illuminate our understanding and broaden our sympathies".

This book is a collection of five short essays:
Ch. 1 The Nature of History.
Ch. 2 The Varieties of History
Ch. 3 The Study of History
Ch. 4. Some Problems of History.
Ch. 5 History as Law and as Philosophy.

In his Chapter 4 are four subheadings in which Commager wrestles with:
--Limitations on the Historian
--The Trouble with Facts
--Interpretation--and Bias
--Judgment in History.

To pull out a few highlights --not summarizing -- from this important section:

--Limitations on the Historian
Quoting Veronica Wedgewood: The historian "ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance."

--The Trouble with Facts.
"First, a paradox. There are too few facts, and there are too many."
--Interpretation--and Bias
"There is one bias, one prejudice, one obsession, so pervasive and so powerful that it deserves special consideration: nationalism." This is a disease, really, of the eye.
--Judgment in History.
The idea of a moral function was well-stated by Lord Acton in 1895--he exhorted students of history "never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standards of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong." [63]… (més)