Is history relevant to our recent torments? I think it is. I am not suggesting there is a precise parallel, still less of predictive value; analogies are treacherous. Pearl Harbor is a popular comparison because it represents a sneak attack on America, but understanding what drove the Japanese to unleash Kido Butai—or their surprise destruction of the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904—does not much help us unravel the psychology of the suicidal fundamentalist in the first-class cabin or drain the swamp that spawned him. I don’t know enough about Japan’s Kamikaze pilots, but I suspect, again, that the circumstances and cultural attitudes are so different we might not be helped much.

When I am asked what history can tell us about how we can get through the time ahead, I think of Sir Frederic Maitland’s remark that it is very hard to remember that events long past were once in the future. The historian always has to be sensible of this, recognizing that the first task is to re-create the facts and the feel of an episode, a period, an era, the illusion of a life actually lived, so that we may more easily understand why people did what they did and why events unfolded as they did. Why was it that Neville Chamberlain thought he could deal with Hitler? Why did America stand on the sidelines so long in the thirties when the Fascist menace grew so exponentially with every year that it threatened civilization? What drove us to the excesses, as they seem now, of the McCarthy era?

The world was very dark indeed to the Americans who endured the long years of the Cold War, when mutually assured destruction threatened the planet, but so it was for the Americans of the twenties afflicted with anarchist bombings, the Americans of the thirties, when farms were turned to dust and the Great Depression got deeper and deeper. We were just as baffled by the economies of slump as we were by the enigmas of the Kremlin or as we are today by those mullahs who can so pervert Islam as to incite mass murder. A fine writer may present a new generation with a vivid reconstruction—I have just reread Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery , and the shadow of Dallas is on every page—but however well the writer does something like that for us today, all the past dramas are in soft focus, pale things by comparison with the clear and present danger we feel with our every breath.

Every generation’s crises will inevitably loom larger, seem more menacing, more perplexing than anything that went before. A reading of history can help us keep the oppressive nature of the present in perspective. That is some comfort, I think. It cannot of course guarantee that all will be well. Dr. Pangloss has no place here. Those few who were accused of worrying too much