The phrase “fundamentalist imagination” is, to begin with, a challenging idea. The ministers, theologians, and laymen who joined forces against theological liberalism, in a movement that began after the Civil War and gathered force in the early twentieth century, were serious people. They were proud to stand unapologetically for what they were convinced was Christianity unadorned and pure, nothing more and nothing less than the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.”Footnote 1
Nor does fundamentalism suggest poetry. In fact, in 1876 St. Louis pastor James Brookes, editor of a journal simply named Truth, specifically warned his readers against metaphor and simile. (Hyperbole was equally suspect.) These were the classic evasions of unbelievers, he said, reducing the clear commands of scripture to ancient myths, luring the believer into a world of falsities, and bringing nothing but trouble. It was a small step, Brookes declared, from poetry to “soul-destroying novels that abound like the frogs of Egypt,” and to the artificial “glitter of the ball-room and theatre.” But poetry was not the only danger. As Grant Stroh, author of a regular column on “practical and perplexing questions” for the Moody Monthly advised in 1921, careful Christians even stayed away from biblical dramas, however pious their intent. “So far as we know Christ never impersonated anybody,” he reminded his readers, “We are commanded to ‘preach the word,’ not to . . . act it out in a play.”Footnote 2
These same people, however, were wholeheartedly apocalyptic. They gloried in lurid scenarios of end times destruction, and kept their eyes and ears locked heavenward, “listening for sounds,” I.M. Haldeman wrote in 1901, “the sounds of [Christ's] voice, and the trump which shall summon [them] to meet Him.” Theirs was a “yearning to be caught up in the air,” “pleading for ascension” into Christ's eternal “banqueting house,” sitting forever under “His banner of love.”Footnote 3 Earnest liberal talk about making the world a better place, gradually establishing God's earthly kingdom through resolutions, policy statements, and ecclesiastical initiatives was a drab alternative to being suddenly whisked into the stratosphere to meet Jesus Christ in person. True believers lived in an alternative world, no longer prisoners, as Boston pastor A.J. Gordon told his flock in 1887, of “that little Island called ‘now’.”Footnote 4
In between these two imperatives, the unadorned reality of the present and an impending miracle, fundamentalists imagined themselves into time and history, and in a way, clarified the movement's disparate impulses. They drew allegorical pictures of enormous Babylonian idols lying sideways, chopped into segments that marked out the progress of time and fulfillment of prophecy. They pondered chronologies parsed from intense scrutiny of sprawling color-coded Bibles. They countered Darwinism with elaborate alternative theories, fantastic scenarios of worldwide floods and conspiracies hatched by cabals of godless scientists. These were not colorful speculations, created just to frighten sinners or fascinate saints; their energy and purpose suggest that timekeeping was a core passion in fundamentalism's formative years—certainly about the future Second Coming but as much or more about the meaning and measure of the past.Footnote 5
Historians should pay attention too. This fervent attention to history and time reveals an inner logic within American protestant fundamentalism, a movement notoriously difficult to define. Even in the early twentieth century, after the name “fundamentalist” came into use, the perimeters seemed to shift constantly. Fundamentalism was simply the opposite of the latest enemy: it stood for old-fashioned heartfelt piety against what they saw as the cold rationalism of liberals, and for logical consistency when they believed their opponents drifting toward Unitarian pieties.Footnote 6 Fundamentalists were rugged individualists but also the most faithful company men, the truest Baptists and most loyal Presbyterians.Footnote 7 They stood for historic orthodoxy, while, they charged, liberals pursued the latest theological fad; or they were open to the spirit and their opponents were intellectual dinosaurs, trying to bring back old-fashioned paganism.Footnote 8
It all held together in a particular fundamentalist understanding of history and time, one that framed the way they saw themselves and the world around them. This understanding was, moreover, behind the movement's public rhetoric as well as its social agenda. It also instilled a powerful sense of difference from their liberal protestant peers, who were sorting through their own issues with history, time, and tradition. In fact, the drama of turn-of-the-century American protestantism, it seems clear, was not between one group striving to maintain historic orthodoxy and the other slouching toward relativism. It was about different visions of the past and its power over the present.
A fundamentalist sense of history survives within contemporary evangelicalism, far more powerfully than we might want to admit. True, most evangelicals today worship in gleaming sanctuaries devoid of any reference to historic denominational ties, and they sing praise songs from power point projectors, not old-fashioned hymns from hardback books. Yet for every one of the elegantly crafted works of Mark Noll or George Marsden there are millions sold by Republican activist David Barton, with his ersatz reading of the founding fathers, his insistence that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Boxes full of bowdlerized textbooks are heading toward public schools across the country as we speak. Historians today are well beyond the academic complaint that people today do not value the past when in many ways they understand its power more than ever.Footnote 9
This topic—the ways in which people of faith understand and use history—has become important to me, and I hope to historians in general, because of what I see every day at the Congregational Library, people fascinated by the past but not sure what to do with it. We are living in an age that discards its ancestors—sometimes in the milder form of razing old buildings and putting new condominiums in their place, but also in premeditated acts of violence. Religious extremists in Syria are literally blasting the past into oblivion, targeting “long dead civilizations that present no threat, no rivalry to any version of Islam.”Footnote 10 We are also living in an age mortally confused about the connection between dreams and reality, adept at identifying and denouncing wrongs but far less sure about what to do next. And so as historians and as citizens of the twenty-first century we might well ask what “the past” has come to mean, how those dedicated to resisting and controlling change understand its workings.Footnote 11
I. Fundamentalist Time
One of the most obvious characteristics of turn of the century fundamentalism was its terrible sense of brevity, an urgency which impelled an ambitious agenda of missions and evangelism, and also governed the rhythms of daily life. As a visitor to Chicago's Moody Bible Institute noted approvingly in 1900, “[E]verything is done on time. The bells ring, meals are served, lectures begin and end” precisely on schedule. Fundamentalist pastors boasted of torrid work schedules, years without vacations or meaningful rest, demanding that their followers do the same—“work, work, work.” Sacred time was money. “The Christian worker must emulate the merchant who is quick to seize every bargain that is passing before him,” Moody Bible Institute's William Evans advised in an article about “personal soul-winning.” “When we let an opportunity to speak to a soul go by we let Satan take the time from us, and thus we contract a debt.” Better, he said, to “get a corner on time and buy up every opportunity for Christ.”Footnote 12
In this sense, fundamentalists were no different from other people of their age, coming to grips for the first time with the imperatives of train schedules and the wrist watches, living under the absolute sway of a clock somewhere in Greenwich, England, that regulated the seconds, minutes, and hours of people across the entire globe, from Timbuktu to Tulsa. Forward-moving inexorable time became official in 1884, when a Prime Meridian Conference convened in Washington, D.C. dividing the earth into twenty-four time zones, each an hour apart. Time became officially simultaneous in 1912 when an International Conference on Time synchronized time-keeping around the world with a signal emanating from the Eiffel Tower. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as never before, time was ever-present and demanding.Footnote 13
The imaginative possibilities were endless. This was the era of mass production and time management studies, of regulation and efficiency and control, but it was also the era of Proust and James Joyce, of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and that famous picture of Dorian Gray.Footnote 14 History was becoming an academic profession, but it also haunted the lives of homesick immigrants, utopian Marxists, and Southerners steeped in the lore of the Lost Cause. The new sense of temporality could also be frightening. The western world was also coming to grips with a Darwinian past that was far more enormous than anyone had suspected, infinitely long and alien. Instead of a comfortably recent creation—approximately 6 p.m.in the evening of October 22, 4004 B.C., according to Bishop Ussher—the western world now contemplated millennia upon millennia of perfectly empty time populated only by strange creatures scuttling through ancient oceans. The present was also far larger than most had imagined, even scant decades before. In 1912, while the Titanic was in its final throes of destruction, wireless instruments were transmitting news of the terrible event up and down the Atlantic coast and across to Europe. The vast simultaneity posed new and unsettling moral challenges. While you were enjoying a quiet cup of tea in your living room, you knew for a fact that thousands of desperate souls were sinking to watery graves in the north Atlantic.Footnote 15
Fundamentalists partook in all of this, the imperatives as well as the imaginative potential. They were in their own way, confidently modern, thriving on the new rational order of schedules and calendars, readily adopting the relentless whirl of new technologies. This was even true of dispensational premillennialism, the complex theological framework fundamentalists used to understand the disparate prophecies and pronouncements of the Bible, and to gauge the time of Christ's second coming. Did some of those texts apply only to the ancient Israelites and others only to Christians, or were they meant for both? Dispensationalism assigned each to different successive time periods, beginning with the Garden of Eden and continuing on to the present, and of course the looming future. Yet what might seem an arcane science of biblical esoterica fit modern sensibilities, as Brendan Pietsch has so elegantly explained, measuring, mapping, classifying, and extrapolating. Above all, he writes, dispensational premillennialism was a “technique for managing temporality.”Footnote 16
Still, fundamentalist time was different from ordinary time. Suspended between the first and second comings of Christ, the church was, as James Brookes described it, “dateless,” like a “perfect sphere,” he said, not directed by earthly “times and seasons.”Footnote 17 Certain amounts of time were weighted with special theological significance—seven, one hundred forty four, and 1,260 years—these were numbers understood only by the faithful.Footnote 18 Time could hold invisible continuities, millennia drawn together in one thread, the miraculous survival of the Jews and their role in salvation history.Footnote 19 And it could hold secret meanings, as for one young man from Ohio, an invalid attending a Victorious Life Conference in 1922. His birthday, he confided, fell on the seventeenth day of the month—what month he refused to say—and he marked every seventeenth day of every month in the year with a personal celebration, receiving special blessings by looking up chapters of the Bible and reading the seventeenth verses.Footnote 20 Though fundamentalists made peace with modernity, in other words, something sharp and angular remained, a sense of difference that reverberates even today.
II. Fundamentalist History
Long ago historian Winthrop Hudson coined the term “historylessness” to describe American protestants. Sects and denominations grew at such an astounding rate, he said, because they were not limited by traditions from the past; each could write its own brand new story.Footnote 21 Historylessness worked famously well, but by the late-nineteenth century, it was a luxury that the churches could no longer afford. The new modern order was not just about tight schedules and Greenwich Mean Time—modern time was also secular time, scrubbed clean of sacred meaning. The new challenge for religion was not time packed too tight with urgent demands; it was emptiness, time that simply continued toward the future, without pause or interruption for liturgical observances, feasts and fasts. In this sense the turn of the century was not so much a time of “spiritual crisis,” forever crippling belief, but a moment for protestants of all sorts to orient themselves in history.Footnote 22
They took on a difficult challenge, as some of their contemporaries recognized. A century ago, historian Arthur O. Lovejoy found the connection between religion and history so powerful and so counterintuitive that he wondered what an educated alien—one with a background in theology and the liberal arts, of course—would make of it. Here was on the one hand, Christianity, a system dealing with universal, ultimate, and “cosmic” truths, the meaning of the universe and the destiny of humanity—all of that—resting entirely on what he called the “occurrence or non-occurrence of specific local and temporal events.” As Lovejoy and his alien visitor saw it, the entire belief system of Christianity teetered on a first-century event, whether Jesus Christ had actually lived and died as told in the gospels, proven at best only as probability. “Our Martian,” said Lovejoy, would shake his head in disbelief, “wondering why intelligent humans had not dissolved this “ancient and entangling alliance.”Footnote 23
History was an uncertain ally, but it was also unavoidable. Much has been written about liberal protestants and their ongoing quest for the “historical Jesus.” As we understand their challenge it was not so much reconciling ancient texts and inscriptions with Christian orthodoxy as it was dealing with new categories of thought, a different take on reality itself. Historical thinking—the idea that everything is the result of cultural processes, of human-induced change over time—was, as social theorist Ernst Troeltsch described it, nothing short of “a transformation in principle of our entire mode of thought.” Christianity itself was a product of history, perhaps not supernatural and certainly no longer the sole property of those in the present. “No one has done it, and every one has done it,” Adolf Harnack wrote in 1899. The historical sense has brought “a revolution in the history of mankind no less great than has been produced by the discoveries of natural science.”Footnote 24
But historicism was not an air-tight box, allowing no room for myth or miracle, dooming the liberal quest from the outset. Somewhere beyond the learned discussions of seminary and university faculty, in ways both complex and subtle, laypeople and local clergy were finding their way. We could say that in a sense the project for people in mainline church pews was to renegotiate old obligations to their spiritual ancestors, all the way back to biblical times. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, for example, protestant church architecture cut loose from the demands of both chronology and theology, as plain-spoken Baptists and Congregationalists began worshipping in Gothic churches with naves, altar rails, and split chancels—everything their seventeenth-century founders had come to North American shores in order to avoid. “We have come . . . to a larger liberty in the interpretation of historic symbols,” a vested Congregational pastor explained to his congregation in 1926. Indeed, here was an achievement worth celebrating. As one of his colleagues put it, “We have gone back to the Cathedral-like temple,” he said, “from which [the Puritans] fled in fear.”Footnote 25
These old-line protestants also enjoyed religious dramas, adding characters and plot lines to the familiar stories in the original autographs. Even staid Congregationalists discovered the fun of dressing up as their puritan ancestors—no longer poring over their texts and tomes, but inhabiting the seventeenth-century past through elaborate tableaux and pageants, posh trips to Europe with visits to historic places like Plymouth and Scrooby, but also German spas and Parisian hotels. In fact, one could argue that all of the many differences between mainline liberals and fundamentalists might be boiled down to one question, whether or not it was all right to impersonate someone else, whether a long-dead puritan or Jesus Christ himself.Footnote 26
Much has also been written about fundamentalism's problem with history, its weakness for essentializing truth into formulas impervious to changing times or circumstances.Footnote 27 And the charge is certainly true. The scriptures are “not mere records of the past,” James Brookes declared, because they have “the germ of Divine life in them,” and thus “the stamp of perpetuity.”Footnote 28 Even Jesus was only historical to a point, a proposition so central that its defenders were willing to risk a brush with gnostic heresy. “Our Lord was not a product of his age,” A. C. Dixon declared at a meeting of his fellow Baptist fundamentalists in 1922. “He came down from God.”Footnote 29
Yet even while fundamentalists denied history, they depended on it more and more to defend the Bible. In an age when the history of the ancient world was being rewritten by archaeological discoveries, this faith seems paradoxical, if not an outright risk. After all, from John Calvin on down, protestants had staked the infallibility of the Bible on internal proofs—it was true because of what it taught, not what outsiders thought about it.Footnote 30 But even as history's challenges to biblical narratives grew steeper, fundamentalists staked their claim all the more boldly—taking, of course, the same turn as their evidence-demanding liberal counterparts. “It is a singular fact,” Wheaton College president Charles Blanchard agreed in 1917, “that up to this present hour no tablet, mountain inscription, monumental inscription, nothing of the kind revealed by pickax and spade has been found to contradict a single Biblical statement of fact.”Footnote 31 “The Bible narrative is truthful throughout,” a contributor to James Brookes's Truth wrote in 1894; “the incidents related are all actual events,” and the story told is “a true history of what took place at the time and in the place stated.”Footnote 32 If not faith came to nothing. “If the story of Abraham is a product of the imagination,” an article in The Bible Student warned in 1900, then “the God of Abraham is just as imaginary as Abraham himself.”Footnote 33
History was critically important, but it was history of a sort, without process or development. Fundamentalism was about the power of beginnings, of “first things.” It demanded a particular kind of fidelity to origins, and to particular rules of change. Take for example James M. Gray's address to Moody Bible Institute's graduating class of 1922, a talk entitled “The Static and the Dynamic.” Nothing illustrated liberalism's emptiness and failure more, Gray warned, than its cavalier attitude to the past. At the time, after nearly a century of delays and false starts, Episcopalians in New York City were making a final push to complete the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and some, like controversial Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, saw an opportunity to improve on the original design. Why not? What the fathers began, we must finish, said Fosdick, but we have the freedom to do it on our own terms, to imagine something new. “I submit,” countered Gray, “that if they [wish to] honor their fathers . . . they will finish it in strict accordance with the original plan.” The beauty and perfection of that completed cathedral “will depend,” he said, “upon the fidelity in which every pillar or arch, colonnade or portico, tower or dome, reflects the thinking of the architect who conceived it.”Footnote 34
Morally sound change, in other words, had only one trajectory. For all the imaginative energy fundamentalists put into their understanding of history, the basic idea was very simple—a direct linear extrapolation from beginning to end. Just as the past was an “orderly unfolding of creation and revelation of the Creator,” James E. Blackstone wrote in Jesus is Coming, a seminal classic in dispensational theology, “so shall the future be, not a limitless aion called eternity, but a limitless succession of aions measuring infinite duration.”Footnote 35
But where to begin? Fundamentalists were not primitivists in the usual sense. American protestants had long yearned for the purity of a mythical golden age—specifically Christianity yet untainted by Roman Catholicism. The standard of perfection (for them) was set by the earliest churches as described in the book of Acts—curing the work of time by “going back” to the beginning, the “strong time,” as Mircea Eliade has described it.Footnote 36 Fundamentalist dispensational teaching, however, did not allow for any kind of perfection in the earthly church, even the first century one. For one thing the first Christians thought that Christ would be returning soon, despite all the biblical evidence to the contrary. “Had they studied the prophecy of Daniel,” F.W. Farr wrote in the Christian and Missionary Alliance paper, they would have waited more patiently.Footnote 37
In fact, if any group in the early-twentieth century protestant world yearned for Eden, it was the one that irritated fundamentalists the most. Pentecostals, as Grant Wacker writes, believed that “God had expressed His will with clarity in the apostolic age.” God, of course had not changed, and thus twentieth century Christians lived according to the original blueprint, “the book of Acts re-enacted.” This meant not just church order but all the signs and wonders and miracles of those early days.Footnote 38
In many ways, fundamentalist history was less concerned about actual beginning points than about a principle of change, and in that sense it rested on another set of ideas, well-established in American protestant thought but increasingly risky in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commonsense rationalism insisted that the world we see is real and fully explainable to everybody at every time, and that it was logically consistent. Religion was a series of propositions to be analyzed, facts to be assembled in various ways; nineteenth-century protestants unpacked ideas, they did not invent them. Human history followed this same inductive principle. As Andover Seminary's William G.T. Shedd explained in a series of lectures in 1856, history is simply “a continuous line of connections.” “Everything advances with a tranquil uniformity that precludes startling and unexpected changes,” he said. Thus acorns necessarily and always turn into oak trees, not crocodiles or finches. What we perceive as “the growth of a germ,” Shedd explained, is “merely the expansion of a substance already existing.”Footnote 39
The problem with evolution was obvious—not just the arrogance of scientists or the role of providence, but the actual mechanism of history. Certainly for fundamentalists, the rock-bottom problem was and would always remain its challenge to biblical authority: Genesis and Darwin did not match. But the other issue was the mode of change itself. History was not endless creation of new forms, the product of random matings and mutations. “With consummate skill and wisdom a model was so planned,” wrote Boston University's Luther Townsend, that it “could be used over and over again as the basis of all subsequent creations that have appeared in the sea or on the land—fish, reptile, quadruped, ape and man.” The original form, said Townsend, “was introduced on earth to stay,” and will remain “long after the earth shall disappear.”Footnote 40 The alternative was ludicrous. “How could one come from another and the first remain?” demanded Guy Fitch Phelps, writing for the Bible Institute Colportage Association in 1925. “If man came up through fishes, amphibians, wolves, apes, etc., how is it that these forms are still in existence and as perfect as at first?” The model of original completeness even helped explain to fundamentalist men how women came to be. Writing in the Bible Champion in 1916, William H. Bates mused about the Hebrew word for rib, noting that it could also mean “side.” Perhaps, he wondered, the original human pair merely split off from each other like starfish: chop one in half and it automatically regenerates into two.Footnote 41
Understood properly, biological diversity operated under the same principles as individual conversion. Like always produces like, Rev. J.C. Allen explained to readers of the Bible Champion in 1917, and though scientists cannot determine whether or not the “little speck” they see under their microscope will become an apple or a dog, each one operates by a different “life principle.” “If the principle of bird life is introduced, a bird is the result. If the principle of monkey life is introduced, the result is a monkey—but never a man.” In the same way Christ introduces the life principle of salvation into the original soul and produces a Christian, saved by grace.Footnote 42
Ultimately, fundamentalist history had little room for the mysterious, as ancient certainties crowded out any room for contemporary doubts. “When one reads the epistles of John,” Minnesota Baptist William Bell Riley wrote in 1909, “he is profoundly impressed with the thought that the Spirit of God anticipated some of the most hurtful heresies of these latter times and answered them entirely, two thousand years before they were born.”Footnote 43 The unfolding was inexorable and clear, history full of inevitabilities, even for God. In 1881, when president James Garfield was gravely wounded by an assassin, soon to die, James Brookes explained why despite all of the prayers offered on his behalf, he would not recover. “Never perhaps in the history of our race,” he said, “has so much earnest, believing, importunate prayer ascended in behalf of one man as has gone up during the last eighty days.” Certainly God heard these prayers, but did not answer them. He could not, Brookes said: “The recovery of the President might have broken a link in the chain of causation, that hastens the coming and crowning of the Son of His Love, who bring a final end to assassinations, and infidelity, and crime, and sin in all of its hideous shapes.”Footnote 44
Fundamentalists lived by the principle of “first things,” and accepted its limitations. Take, for example, their continuing insistence on the subordination of women, a rule that was both counterproductive to evangelism and all but impossible to police. By the early twentieth century the vast majority of American protestants had come to understand the biblical texts on women's role as one step within an unfolding revelation. As if what St. Paul said to “a few dancing Greek and Asiatic women,” one irritated Victorian declared, “could be meant in all coming time, for all countries of the world.”Footnote 45 True, God had cursed Eve and all women after her to domination by men, but all that had been overturned after the coming of Christ and his new law of love. Fundamentalists took the minority view here, however, arguing that women's subordination was etched into God's original ground rules, amplified by the curse of sin, and impervious to change, even by Christ himself. God's original decrees, according to theologian J. M. Stifler, could “no more be changed by man than he can change the course of the sun.”Footnote 46
III. Fundamentalist Traditionalism
This principle of first things is one reason why labels like “conservative” or “traditionalist” are such inadequate descriptions of American fundamentalists, and their evangelical heirs as well. They did not necessarily hate or fear change—as long as it followed a specific path, the end absolutely consistent with the beginning. This is a reason why the founding fathers are so important to David Barton—if they established the United States as a Christian nation, then all of the religious pluralism in the world can and should not change that. It explains, at least in part, why when disgruntled evangelicals look to the past for guidance they go so quickly to the second century, the “paleo-orthodoxy” of the Church Fathers, the Eastern Orthodox tradition. It is part of evangelical reasoning about abortion. The fetus is not a potential human being, some day a person if given the right nourishment and care. It is already complete, a full human being in the womb. One could argue that the same logic of permanence applies to sexuality, the insistence that each adult is as given at conception, completely male or completely female. No one really “discovers” him or herself to be gay in the course of life.
History's power, for fundamentalists and their fundamentalist-inflected evangelical descendants, is its immediacy. In fact, this idea is central to understanding the movement's distinctives, as it took shape a hundred years ago and as it has continued to thrive into the present. Fundamentalists and their heirs do not read the Bible “literally,” as if every word has to be obeyed; they read it as if time did not exist. The ancient scriptures are for them completely contemporary, and speak to every one of us, unmediated by specificities of time and place. This much was unmistakably clear to anthropologist Tanya Lurhman, in her perceptive study of evangelical spirituality. The Bible studies she attended were in many ways thought experiments, “imagining what God is feeling when the elder brother rebels, trying to hear God's voice in prophecy, pretending that you and God are drinking coffee together at your table.” Even the most obscure historical texts, about the violent exploits of Joshua and the Judges, the kings of Israel and Judah, have direct spiritual application to the lives of twenty-first century accountants, web designers, and hedge fund managers.Footnote 47
For fundamentalists and many evangelicals history matters up to a point. People from the past can be spiritual role models, even friends. They help explain how the world came to be and assist in political or cultural causes. They can even add their voices to ours, deploring the wrongs of the present. But history has no depth or traction. It is simply parenthesis, a time of waiting.
Fundamentalism's legacy, especially within the tangle that is the modern evangelical world, is a contentious and fairly tortured question. The two are not synonymous, by any means. But they can rhyme, and they often resonate. Fundamentalism survives today, especially in contemporary political rhetoric, as a deep sense of impatience. It is enough, if not everything, to shout at things, to denounce and deplore the sins of modern culture, as if, in the words of sociologist James Davison Hunter, “social change can be willed into being.”Footnote 48 It is enough to expose the original sin and let nature take its course, toward a good but mostly unspecified end, without final responsibility for the consequences.
Sometimes the best reason for studying, teaching, and disseminating history is its tediousness. Historians are often chided for tending to minutiae, tiny little episodes and arguments that matter only to a select few. But that is because many people today have grown so impatient, and do not have a sense of how much work change requires. Lost in grand visions of the future are all of the tiny and incremental ways that good or bad things happen, how important small attitude adjustments can be. Historians do.
Change happens when the past matters, and it matters the most when it is confusing, riddled with mistakes and blind alleys, hard-won achievements and unfinished business, ultimately mysterious. It matters when we treat it with curiosity and respect, and understand that it is inhabited by human beings every bit as complicated as we imagine ourselves to be.
