Can we learn from history?
What can we learn from history? Can understanding history help us address the challenges we face today? Should we remember the terrible events of the past, to stop them from happening again? These are some of the questions that were discussed at Nexus events over the years.
Some of the world’s great contemporary historians, philosophers and political thinkers came to Nexus to give their thoughts on history, from Francis Fukuyama and Simon Schama to Ágnes Heller and Bernard-Henri Lévy. View some of the videos below, or watch the full playlist here.
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Nexus Lecture ‘History Lessons’ by Simon Schama
The science of history has a wonderful tradition of storytellers: historians such as Jules Michelet, Edmund Wilson, Richard Cobb and R.G. Collingwood, who made history palpable with their evocative style and broad perspective. But today, storytelling has fallen into disfavour at universities. Historians of today write dry, detail-oriented studies with no panoramic view and a preference for diagrams rather than drama. It is time to reverse this turnaround, otherwise history itself will be in jeopardy.
‘And now, the dismal part of what Nietzsche called the gay science: what in hell has happened? What has happened to those legions of writers; to the unabashed public historians; to the servants of Clio?’
– Simon Schama, Nexus Lecture 2014, ‘History Lessons’.