How to read history

Advice for non‑specialists

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. [L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953]

We all were sea-swallowed, though some cast again,
And by that destiny to perform an act
Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
[Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, sc1]

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
[Martin Amis, Lecture given at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 30 January 1997]

We only know what we know because of the past actions and bequests of those who went before us. This is a truism; we are cultural beings and we interpret our world within the contexts of our milieu, our upbringing and our society. It could not be any other way. And yet, we cannot understand the past unless we can understand what things meant to those we study or recall. This is a long-standing (i.e., a century and a half; only long to non-historians) issue in the methods of historical inferences.