Comment on Washington Post Book Review Pieces

A lesson taught by the March 16 Book World is that although we must learn from history we should avoid accepting instantaneous interpretations made by too many news accounts of today’s events.

The teaser on the cover of that issue of Book World about Iraq, a review of a 1964 book on the American Revolution inside, and the piece by Jonathan Yardley on the theory of history held by Gordon S. Wood tie together nicely.

Wood is precisely right about “presentism” when he writes, as quoted by Yardley. “Insofar as it teaches any lessons, [history] teaches only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected.”

The cover blurb states, “IRAQ. Six books on the lives lost, the money spent and the opportunities squandered. Pages 4-9” Certainly, that’s a summation of “present-mindedness” of recent military history.

Thomas E. Ricks in his review on page 8 of “The War for America, 1775-1783” notes that leadership in London failed to sustain its support of colonists loyal to the crown although those loyalists were vital to the plan for victory. Ricks compares British 18th century strategy in the American colonies with 21st century U.S. strategy in Iraq. An editor underscores the review using images of George III and George W. Bush along with a cutline that doesn’t appear in the piece, “These two wartime leaders might end up having more in common than just their first names.”

Yardley reviewed Wood’s “The Purpose of the Past, Reflections on the Uses of History.” His review of the book -- which is a compilation of Wood’s essays about histories by fellow academic historians -- concludes that “…deeply informed and resolutely fair-minded, it is essential reading for anyone who cares about history and the uses and abuses to which we subject it.”

Thesix inside pages, which we are encouraged by the cover’s squib to read, surely are examples of “instantism,” even though the history covered is contemporary. Wood is quoted as opining that historians should know “about the past and to be able to relate it without anachronistic distortion to our present” which to him means “having a historical sense.”

News writing is not history despite its later help to historians --- historians deserving the title.