Outline
I. "History.  What are you going to do with that?"
II. Utilitarian assumptions and aesthetic defiance
III.  Trevelyan's romantic fascination with the past
IV. David Hume's view of history as science
V. Objections to Hume's optimistic approach
VI.  Between naïve optimism and radical scepticism
VII. History as preparation for citizenship
VIII.  History as preparation for the "real world"

Terms from today's class
utilitarian
utilitarianism
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962)
romanticism
memento mori ("reminder of death")
David Hume (1711-76)
Enlightenment
George Santayana (1863-1952)
déjà vu
Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)
"wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." ("as it actually happened")
Voltaire (1694-1778)
 

History is more or less bunk.
        -- Henry Ford, 1916
 

You, the philologist, boast of knowing everything about the furniture and clothing of the Romans and of being more intimate with the quarters, tribes and streets of Rome than with those of your own city?  Why this pride?  You know no more than did the potter, the cook, the cobbler, the summoner, the auctioneer of Rome.
        -- Giambattista Vico
 

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own
thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cock-crow.
         -- G. M. Trevelyan, 1949
 

Would you know the  sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the  French and English: You cannot be much mistaken
in transferring to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of
nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and
situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour. These records of
wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as
the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.
          -- David Hume, 1748
 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
         -- popular saying, often falsely attributed to George Santayana
 

"History is but a pack of tricks we play on the dead."
          -- attributed to Voltaire