John CareyOne of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.
About This Quote
The great historian and philosopher, Arnold J. Toynbee, wrote: "History is but a succession of biographies." He was saying that history is composed of the stories of the lives of whole peoples and that we learn from their struggles and experiences. War is one of the greatest sources of this kind of learning. We can learn from anachronisms like slavery or terrorism because they are so obviously wrong, but war is something we don't see happening any more.
World War I was a conflict in which no living persons participated. It was a war between forces from across time and space that were fighting for reasons that were at best unclear, and at worst simply incomprehensible to people in the 20th century.
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