The Story of America [antikvár]

I '. ' ' Foreword By Alistair Cooke A German philosopher once wrote, "History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there." A lot of famous people have held an equally low opinion of histo-^ Ah ry, mainly, I think, because it often doesn't support their pet theories and political prejudices. But history is not a theory or a political platform. Studying it is a continuous attempt to find out what happened, how, and why. There used to be a law professor at Columbia University who was well known for his course on "Evidence." One day, while he was lecturing to a class of new students, three people—two men and a woman—dashed into the classroom. One of them fired a gun at the ceiling. The three of them then rushed from the room. As you might guess, the class was in an uproar until the professor quieted them. He then revealed that he had arranged the whole incident. "Imagine yourselves," he said, "in a court of law. You are called on as a vsdtness. You must tell exactly what you saw." He called on a dozen students whose versions of the incident were wildly different. Some said there had been two women and one man. Some said there were three men, that two people had fired guns, that there had been three shots or four. Some said the shots had been fired at the professor or at the windows. And so on. This Uvely incident was meant to teach the students not to trust too much the testimony of eyewitnesses. In one of the most famous incidents in American history, scores of bystanders dictated to lawyers what they swore had happened on a snowy March day in 1770, when the Boston Customs House was guarded by a single British sentry. Somehow, a gun went off. The onlookers panicked. More soldiers came running, and some people were killed. The incident became knovra as the Boston Massacre. A highly imaginative engraving of the incident, made by a man who had not been there, provoked indignation from Massachusetts to South Carolina. And the Revolutionary War was not far off. You might like to look sometime at some of these eyewitness accounts and guess what the outcome might have been if a different story of the incident had been circulated. To me, the main fascination of history is the fun of playing detective. Nobody has ever defined the historian's job better than an old Greek, Polybius, who wrote, more than 2,000 years ago, "It is natural for a good man to love his country and his friends, and to hate the enemies of both. But when he writes history he must abandon such feelings and be prepared to praise enemies who deserve it and to censure the dearest and most intimate friends." As an amateur historian for more than 50 years, let me tell you that history is a very exciting hobby.