The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 52, No. 1, Ed. 1 Monday, September 14, 1964 Page: 1 of 12
twelve pages : ill. ; page 21 x 14 in.View a full description of this newspaper.
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HOUSTON,
TEXAS
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EDITION
Why History?
Reflections for freshmen-
and, others, by Francis L. Loewenheim
VOLUME 52—NO. 1 HOUSTON, TEXAS MONDAY, SEPT. 14, 1964
About this issue...
There is no news as such in this issue of the Thresher.
Rather, an attempt was made to relate the paper exclusively to
the situation of the Freshman class during the very important
first week at Rice.
The chief articles are those of three faculty members who
were invited, toward the end of the summer, to contribute
articles generally related to their fields for this special edition.
We wish to extend our thanks to Professors Bourne, Loewen-
heim and 0'Grady, who performed brilliantly under a tight
deadline.
Elsewhere, Tom Schunior, President of Will Rice College,
discusses some aspects of the College System on page four.
The Thresher's Charles Demitz expounds his somewhat mystic
weltanshauung on page seven. A course preview prepared by
the staff of the Thresher begins on page nine, as well as a
y discussion of college admissions, CEEB examinations and other
questions, by the Thresher Associate Editor.
The next regularly scheduled Thresher will appear Sept. 24,
and will revert to the conventional format, with news, sports
and other regular features.—Ed.
In an age increasingly dominated
by the progress of nuclear science,
the achievements of space tech-
nology, and the marvels of automa-
tion of all kinds, entering univer-
sity students—and others also—
might well ask why they should be
expected to devote themselves with
much care or concern to a subject
which, to all intents and purposes,
seems to have little use or rele-
vance for the world in which they
expect to live. It is a good and per-
tinent question. It deserves to be
answered, and I should like to sug-
gest some possible answers here.
Let me say at the outset that
I believe that history—our knowl-
edge and study of the past—is
and must be something intensely
personal, and that there may well
be some historians, even some of
my colleagues, who will disagree
with what I have to say here. But
I would hope that we could all
agree upon the importance of his-
torical study, and upon the im-
portance of making it, in all pos-
sible ways, as meaningful as we
can to all students of the past,
young and old, beginner and grad-
uate.
In answering the question—
"Why history?"—perhaps the first
thing for the historian to do is to
avoid the pardonable temptation
to claim too much for his subject.
There is really no need for him
to do so. Perhaps the second thing-
for him to do, therefore, is to stress
the things that history cannot do
—and cannot be expected to do.
For instance: History will not save
the world. A knowledge of the past
will not make people richer or
happier (it may, indeed, have a
very depressing effect). It will not
make them social successes. In
short, it has really none of the
obvious advantages of, say, the
natural and biological sciences.
More important yet, history is a
cumulative, not a predictive, sub-
ject. History never repeats itself:
only historians do. Moreover, his-
torians cannot recreate the past;
they can only reconstruct it—
something, very different. Finally,
as in the case of the sciences
(though for somewhat different
reasons), some of its most import-
ant problems remain unanswered
generations, even centuries, after
the event. Why, for instance, the
decline of the mighty Roman Em-
pire? Why the disintegration of
Christian unity in the sixteenth
century? Why the failure of the
Western democracies to resist the
Nazi tyranny until it was almost
too late? It is not too much to
say that we know a great deal
more about all of these historic
questions than was known at the
(Continued on Pag>e 7)
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Kelly, Hugh Rice. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 52, No. 1, Ed. 1 Monday, September 14, 1964, newspaper, September 14, 1964; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth244919/m1/1/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.