History

Huge collection of history book.

Do the lessons passed down to us by history, lessons whose origins may lie hundreds, even thousands, of years in the past, still have value for us today? Is Santayana's oft-repeated saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" merely a way to offer lip service to history as a teacher—or can we learn from it? And if we can, what is it that we should be learning? Professor J. Rufus Fears believes that not only can we learn from history—we must. In The Wisdom of History, his newest course for The Teaching Company, he draws on decades of experience as a world-renowned scholar and classical historian to examine the patterns of history. Ignoring them, by choice or because we've never learned to see them, is to risk becoming their prisoner, repeating the mistakes that have toppled leaders, nations, and empires throughout time.

Seth Lerer is the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He served as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 1997 to 2000. Dr. Lerer earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Prior to taking his position at Stanford, he taught at Princeton University. In 1996, he was the Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Lerer's research interests include medieval and Renaissance studies, Early Tudor literary culture, textual criticism, and Old and Middle English literature. Professor Lerer has published six books, including Chaucer and His Readers, and Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII. He is the author of more than 40 scholarly articles and reviews.

History is not truth. While it forms the backbone of our knowledge about the world, history is nevertheless only a version of events. History is shaped by the interpretations and perspectives of the individual historians who record it.