There’s No Such Thing as Ancient History

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
  - Edward Gibbon

Now, that may sound like a provocative statement, but it’s true.  History affects individuals, families, tribes, groups, countries and the world.  Every act of the past has had some effect on the present.  Don’t believe me?  Let’s take one example to illustrate.

This year marks the centennial of the beginning of the First World War.  It was a war that had its causes going back as far as you want to look.  But its effects are very much with us today.  

At the individual level, a soldier died who might have had a child or children.  They won’t be now.  Or he might have done great things in art or politics or science.

Families had their lives changed because a husband or son was killed, or was seriously injured so that he had to be cared for for the rest of his life. A woman met a soldier from another country and married him – someone who she would never have met otherwise.  Families were uprooted, some who would never return, in the war torn areas such as France or Serbia or Russia. 

Tribes or ethnic groups were uprooted, torn apart, displaced or put under new government as a result of the war and particularly because of the peace treaties that followed.  As a result of Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on self-determination, the political face of Europe was significantly changed.  As a result of competition between France and Britain, the middle-east was divided up with no thought of self-determination. 

Countries were, of course, changed.  New ones created such as Czechoslovakia and Iraq.  Others were changed, such as Germany and Austria-Hungary.  Not only were there changed boundaries but changed forms of government.    And of course Russia underwent the largest transformation from Czarist to Communist. In Africa, colonies changed hands or were redefined, for better or for worse. The only countries that were left alone in that war were in Latin America and China. As I have said before, at least one belligerent in a war goes in to protect the status quo; they never succeed. They certainly didn’t succeed in the First World War.

And for the world, that war led to a new world order.  The United States became a world player, a role it had never undertaken before.  Europe as a whole was inexorably changed and those changes are largely with us today.  The Ottoman Empire was gone and we still suffer from the tensions built up in the middle-east created by the artificial borders set up by the winning powers.  

But the First World War was itself a product of the history that had gone before.  It was influenced by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 which was influenced by the Napoleonic Wars and the changes the French Revolution wrought in France.  Go away back and the differences between France and Germany can be traced to the Roman Empire and its triumph over the tribes of Gaul and its failure to conquer the Germanic tribes beyond the Rhine.  And how did those tribes arrive in their respective locations in Europe?  And so history goes.  The first act of what we now call human beings is a part of our history.

History is constantly changing.  Everything we do every day contributes in some small or large way to the changing history.  

So when you children or grandchildren ask you why they have to study history at school, or why you are always reading history book, remind them of what I have just said.  And for who believe in the words of Henry Ford, history is not bunk.

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.
  - William Gibson