"The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes." –Adolph Hitler
In school, I saw little value in studying history. I wish I would have had a better understanding that history is necessarily bound to the future. Nobody ever explained that to me. Instead, history class was something to be endured with the hope that I could remember facts and quotes long enough to pass the next test and then move on to the next set of facts and quotes.
I wish I had known that the study of history is the study of worldviews—those that failed and those that succeeded. I wish I had understood that a nation who doesn't know her history has no sense of what made her great (or evil) and without any anchor to the past, nations drift with each passing generation from one convoluted worldview to the next.
In recent years, I've been educating myself about history—reading and talking to others about things I should have learned long ago. A few weeks ago, I received a link in an e-newsletter to a great website that is helping me in my journey. The website is called American Rhetoric and one of the pages on the site includes the text (and often the actual audio) of what it considers to be the 100 best speeches of the 20th century.
I've been listening to some of the various speeches as I work each morning and I'm really enjoying it. If you get a chance, check it out.
