Susan Ferber on How History Makes Us Think Differently About the Present

Susan Ferber, the executive editor of American and world history at Oxford University Press, has written a wonderful piece for Perspectives in History on her experience without electricity or water in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.  It is a much-needed reflection on the differences between the present and the past and how we should think about our relationship to both. I encourage you to read the entire essay, but here is a small taste to whet your appetite:

Much discussion about history education revolves around the quest for a "usable past," often referring to books and public history sites that explicitly stress how the past can be used to shape an understanding of the present. I have resolutely stood as someone who instead wants to appreciate history on its own terms, without it having to generate a contemporary lesson, to value the storytelling aspects of history without that narrative necessarily having direct, present-day applications. Before this autumn, though, I had never realized how fully my scholarly training and my profession have caused me to think about and experience the present differently and how they have affected my ability to the live in the present and think about the future.

Bill Powers wrote, "The future is full of promise, but we have to focus on the present, how we're living, thinking, and feeling right now." I will always love history but I think that, after Sandy, I may spend more time in the present and a little less time wishing I was living at some time in the past. If that is an enduring lesson from the hurricane, and the nor'easter that followed, then perhaps I will have taken something meaningful away from what felt like a grim situation without end. I try to remember this now that the power and water are back and life as I knew it—with its attendant "urgent" demands—has resumed.