Yet history majors abound at elite schools due not to history’s practicality, but because understanding our world and ourselves requires a sense of regional, national, and global development. Only an historical outlook can give the daily news coherence, make sense of things foreign, and reveal the varied threads of group and individual identities. The "lessons of history" are fewer and less clear than many claim, but a broader "sense of history" surely exists, and its traits are clear enough: an eye for patterns, stories, and meaning behind historical "facts"; an awareness that changes and continuities reflect the specific interests, ideals, choices, and oversights of various and often contending groups; and a feel for the unforeseen and sometimes ironic consequences of human actions.

Civically speaking, the importance of this sense of history is hard to overstate. Local, national, and global citizenship need historical senses of common achievement and purpose to become more than good feelings, and to raise politics above the simplistic sloganeering that modern democracies invite. Racial politics, religion’s public role, taxation and public spending, environmental stress, cultural flux, NATO’s expansion, global anti-Americanism--among many other issues--can be understood and sensibly discussed only in historical terms. History’s power to instruct does not decrease simply because respectable Americans often manage to ignore it.