_John Gardner_: “In the renewing society the historian consults the past in the service of the present and the future.” But, like so many philosophical sayings, these aphorisms are somewhat cryptic. We understand them, but they require some elaboration, and possibly some interpretation. Many academic historians would insist that history doesn’t need to have a use. Its existence is as inevitable as life itself; as last night’s sunset, this morning’s sunrise. These scholars feel that the study of the events which make up history is rewarding in itself without any further direct use. It is a part of the well-educated man or woman. There are other people, of course, who would insist that—save for the scholars who teach it—history has no more utility than knowledge of Latin and Greek. Having found no adult use for the contents of their history textbooks, such people might be pardoned for feeling that history is merely the useless foible of educators. (I leave it up to you whether it is appropriate to apply the same logic to the so-called dead languages.) Yet, if there is any validity to what I said earlier about history being the memory of human society—and of individual humans as well—I suspect that history has had some utility—direct and indirect—to even the most pragmatic amongst us. Certainly _something_ of what was taught us in our history courses has entered our memories, even if subconsciously so. Otherwise we could not have any opinions about it. It is even more certain that the reader of a daily newspaper will retain _some_ recollection of what he has read in that paper, and then will relate these recalled events to what he does, what he thinks, what he talks about, and what he reads in the next day’s newspaper. These events, recorded in the newspaper, are as much history as events which happened in the days of Roman power, as recorded by Julius Caesar, Livy, and other writers of those times. Thus the man who reads a daily newspaper, or a weekly newsmagazine, is making definite use of history—otherwise he wouldn’t bother to read! Equally, events which happened to us in our daily work last year, last week, even today, are as much historical events as things which occurred centuries ago. These events are experience, and our recollection of these day to day events are used by all of us in planning and doing things in subsequent days. Deprived of this memory, we would be both useless and helpless. The same is true of society as a whole. Recognizing this, there are economic and social historians who concentrate their efforts on events of the very recent past, in order to provide useful inputs to the memories of scholars, policy makers, and others who are concerned with modern economic or social affairs. It is beside the point whether or not we believe the job could be done more systematically.