History Today – And Tomorrow (ebook)

From the publishers:
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, once said that the single most valuable course he had taken as a student was a short one on the history of calligraphy.

Calligraphy may seem an eccentric choice, but it equipped Jobs with the skills to build one of the design and technology leaders of the 21st-century.
 
There could be no better example of how history remains as vital and relevant today as it has ever been.
 
And yet it is precisely course such as those that are under threat as educational authorities become obsessed with 'relevance'.
 
In this challenging, thought-provoking essay, Paul Lay, the editor of History Today, sketches a manifesto for the study of the past in today's world. Too much history, he argues, has retreated in a comfort zone of nostalgia and domesticity. It has become insular and parochial, concerned more with Georgian bathrooms than the Congress of Vienna, with china rather than China.
 
But in difficult times history should step out of its comfort zone and become once again what it was: a disturbing, challenging discipline that leaves no stone unturned, that embraces the different, the strange, the exotic and the perverse, to reveal in full the possibilities of human existence, a discipline that is not afraid of casting a cold eye on the great conflicts and themes of our times.