Selling Ronald Reagan by Gerard DeGroot
“We mine the past for insights into our world, lessons that might make the confusing events of today more understandable or manageable. To do so, however, is dangerous, misleading and often facile. The effort to extract lessons relevant today usually means imposing the present upon the past. Factors that render a bygone event unique to its own context are ignored so that it can be shoehorned into preconceived notions of how we wish to see our world today. Drawing profound conclusions from contrived comparisons might suit the fairground fortune teller, but not the serious historian.”
-Gerard DeGroot, 2015
