Summing it all

Who’d have guessed it was Irving Fisher who summarized it all?

Of all the great mysteries the greatest to me is the mystery of history. Science explains the conditional, what would happen under different circumstances, but it does not explain the actual, what does and did happen. When and how was the great machine we call the Universe set going and why was it prearranged in the particular way it was, so that out of it must have come all that did come out and will come out down to the minutest details…. Whatever its meaning, of one thing I am convinced: That it is for us to approve and not to disapprove….. What we call mistakes are deviations from our provisional programs…. And so let be all the illness and disappointments with which my cup of Fate has been filled, and so let come what will come!

Quoted in Dorothy Ross (1991), The Origins of American Social Science, p.185

Choosing to remember

Kathryn Harrison writes in the New York Times a review of Laurel T. Ulrich’s Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Having not read the book - a three part historical essay about women’s reflection on history and its male biases - I was interested by a quote mid-way in the review. Ulrich writes that history “‘isn’t just what happens in the past,’ but what we choose to remember.”

Having collected and used oral histories, this passage speaks to me. It suggests that history may be a cognitive science of sorts. We want to find out how the record is made in the minds and in the library shelves.