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Special to the Daily Journal/Messenger

A wise man once said those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Of course, those who know their history might not be able to avoid the mistakes of the past anyway, either because of ideology or the cruel twists of fate. In the context of the historic 2008 election, it’s important not just to re-examine our history and see how we got to this point, but also to see where we might be going.

“The American Future: A History” (Ecco Publishing, $29.99), by Simon Schama, is just such an attempt to contextualize the issues of the past election within the history of our nation, showing how such concerns as war, immigration and race relations, religion and the environment can be traced back almost to the very birth of the United States. Schama goes beyond the official histories of the past to uncover some untold stories, many of which are regarded as “ancient history” when the truth is that they are anything but.

The first section of the book, dealing with the problems of establishing a standing military in a democracy, highlights the story of Union quartermaster general Montgomery C. Meigs, the founder of Arlington National Cemetery (on the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s plantation). Meigs attends West Point and becomes an engineer instead of a front-line soldier, in keeping with Jefferson’s desire that graduates become more interested in helping foster the common good of the country rather than in plotting military takeovers as often happened overseas. Meigs founds the cemetery at Arlington because his old friend Robert E. Lee has betrayed the Union which they both swore to protect, and Meigs considers the grounds a fitting resting place for all those who have died by Lee’s betrayal (including his son John Meigs). Schama connects this to war veterans of today, who feel their own sense of betrayal at the policies of the Bush Administration. The military, Schama argues, was never meant for territorial conquest of an arbitrary and despotic nature, but rather as a force to be used only as the absolute last resort of a democracy that faces no other option.

The section dealing with religion ties the purely modern American form of evangelicals with the anti-slavery and civil rights movements, which drew strength from such connections with a spiritual base. Immigration (a hot-button issue over the last two election cycles) is not a new concern, as the stories of quotas placed on those from certain “undesirable” parts of the world sound oddly familiar. And the clash between manifest destiny and ecological protection stretches back to the Mexican War, with the desire for plenty butting heads with the need to use resources wisely.

But this isn’t just history by the numbers, with important dates and names. Those do crop up, but so do the lesser-known stories of history: Mark Twain’s opposition to American imperialism in the late nineteenth century, Fannie Lou Hamer’s efforts to seat a more diverse delegation from Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Jarena Lee’s transformation from slave to abolitionist preacher, Hector de Crevecoeur’s “Letters from An American Farmer” inspiring immigrants while its author was trapped by the French Revolution, Fred Bee’s efforts to help Chinese workers abused by the railroads, John Ross’ brave but losing battle against Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy, and so on. Each of these stories, and others throughout the book, give a greater sense not just of where we’ve been as a nation, but where we need to go to give honor to those who fought and died for a better nation than the one they inherited.

Good historians open your eyes to the lost stories of the past; great historians make those stories relevant to our present. “The American Future” strives to be great history, to rescue from obscurity not just the figures that feature in its pages, but also their ideas even when (as in the case of Thomas Jefferson) the ideas don’t mesh with their authors’ reality. It’s hard to know where we’re going, but thanks to Schama and other historians, we can better understand where we’ve been.