Good quote: > One of the real lessons the study of the past has to teach us is – to quote L. P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differe

Good quote: > One of the real lessons the study of the past has to teach us is – to quote L. P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” What I mean by that is that so much of how we assume all societies work and all people think is just how our society works and we think. Properly done, the study of the past can disabuse us of this silly notion and show us that smart people in different times and different places did things all sorts of different ways. But this lesson is ruined if we construct caricatures of the past wherein people living long ago were just big stupid brutes with big stupid weapons.