The Past is a Foreign Country: Visit it!

As the king of sarcasm Ambrose Bierce once wrote, history can be defined as, “An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” Burn!

Jokes aside, one of the best ways to understand the past is to read those "false" and "unimportant" accounts for yourself. It's all too easy to assume that people who lived in the past are just like us, that they hold our values, beliefs, likes, and understanding. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially now that we live in a digital world buttressed by advanced and ubiquitous technology.

To quote author L.P. Hartley, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Thus the best way to understand the past is to "visit" it like you would a foreign country: read as many sources as you can and hear historical people speak for themselves. You might not always understand what they're talking about and certainly historical people will hold opinions that you do not like at times. But you have to take history on its own terms because otherwise, you're not understanding the past as it really was.

To that end, here's a list of primary sources that Dr. D recommends as a great place to start. If you read these, listed in chronological order of publication, you can not only read some of the most famous primary sources ever written but you can get a great sense of the past across across time. Note though that these all relate to European/Western historical tradition, and focus more on the philosophies that have underpinned the Western tradition than everyday accounts of life within it. Still, this is a great place to start!

• Herodotus, Histories (c.430 BCE)

• Plato, Republic (4th cent. BCE)

• Plato, Dialogues (4th cent. BCE)

• Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars (58 – 50BCE)

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (161 – 180CE)

• St. Augustine of Hippo (4th – 5th cent. CE)—any compilation of his publications

• Guibert of Nogent, A Monk’s Confession (c.1115)

• Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c.1230)

• Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (c.1308 – 1321)

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (13th cent. CE)

• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) (or any compilation of his publications)

• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637)

• René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)

• René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644)

• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

• Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)

• John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/1690)

• John Locke, Letters Concerning Tolerance (1689-1692)

• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689)

• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)

• Voltaire, Candide (1762)

• Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 – 1787)

• Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791)

• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

• Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)

• Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

• G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)

• Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

• Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel (1920)