The End of the World

So what, then, should history be? And its best history is a way of understanding ourselves, fathoming the human condition, through an intense and close engagement with our ancestors, be they ever so remote as the ancient Persians were as close as the Doughboys of World War I. This should never be confused with ancestor worship, since histories incorruptible virtue is that it more often produces nasty surprises “See Thucydides” rather than consolatory pieties. To make that engagement serious and persuasive, effectively written history must have the power to tear the reader from his own time and place and deposit him into another they different, even alien world with the narrator as his only guide and scout. That world might be Jefferson’s Virginia, the Mughal court of the emperor Akhbar, or the Hawaii of Kamehameha; but for the duration of the book, it should become more real and immediate to the reader than the commuter train or the corporate meeting. The past should get under our skin, working its way still fully into our cultural bloodstream, its transformation of our knowledge of who we are having the stealthy potency of poetry or philosophy. From the introduction by Simon Schama