I worry constantly about our future, but I am optimistic about our history.

I do not mean to indicate that there are wells of goodness and civility and beauty back there in time waiting to be discovered and celebrated—that if we look hard enough and long enough, we’ll find some paradise that we might some day regain.  Indeed, there is very little room for optimism in the cold fact of recorded events: though punctuated by moments of levity, love, and selflessness, it’

s not hard to admit that fear, hatred, greed, violence, insecurity, and venality have more or less carried the day, every day, into the trackless past.

But that’s the past—

history is another thing entirely.  As the set of stories that we tell ourselves about the people and places and events and institutions that have come before us, our history is in constant flux.  Indeed, for all of its backward-looking pretense, the discipline of history only makes claims about the past to serve the needs of the present and the future: it organizes temporally distant culture so that we can organize our own.

In this subjective space, the hope: I am convinced that we can tell better stories about our antecedents.  Not happier or sunnier stories—my optimism is precisely the opposite of Pangloss’s and Pollyanna’s—but better stories.   With new research methods and new evidence and new notions of what counts as evidence and as historical inquiry, we can make our stories of brutality more subtle and more forceful; more cerebral and more visceral; more particular and more universal.  In better translating and relaying that catalogue of the past’s horrors and depredations, we can do a better job of making them real and present—

and therefore more difficult to repeat.  We can do more to capture individual lives and to delineate the ideological structures that shape them; in so doing, we might give practical advice to those looking to remake their world.

Put another way: Our history is ours; if we write it well and use it wisely, the future can be ours too.