David McCullough: Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are

The written version of historian David McCullough's Feb. 15, 2005 speech in Phoenix, Arizona, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar starts:

Harry Truman once said the only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know. Lord Bolingbroke, who was an 18th century political philosopher, said that history is philosophy taught with examples. An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. We’re raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them, and that’s much of what I want to talk about tonight...

The speech is published in the current issue of Imprimis.