Question

How is the history of past relevant to an understanding of present?

Answer 1

Ideally, the lessons of our history help us understand what is going on in the world today and help us to cope with the problems that we encounter.  For example, we can hope that history will tell us how to deal with problems that seem to recur.  We might hope that we would learn how to deal with insurgencies in countries like Iraq because we have seen many countries try to deal with insurgencies like that.

The problem is that history is not clear -- it does not teach us unambigious lessons.  Instead, every situation is a little different from those in past times.  In addition, there are many possible historical lessons to be learned.  Because of these problems, it is much harder for us to learn from history than it seems like it should be.