Please excuse the geek reference for a moment, but there is a recurring line in Battlestar Galactica (the recent remake of the series), a quote from their sacred texts, that goes somewhere along the lines of, "This has all happened before, and will all happen again."  That is kind of how I think of history, and why I think the study of history is so important -- there are so many parallels that we can draw to the past, and perhaps lessons that we can learn to avoid making the same mistakes again.

The other night, my husband and I watched a lecture by J. Rufus Fears on Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Learning from the mistakes in history is one of the central themes to his lecture on this lengthy work.  At the time that it was written, America was fighting for freedom from Britain, and the author, Edward Gibbon, actually served on Parliament for a while.  His papers and his works on Rome actually indicated what he thought that England should learn from the history of Rome's decline: among other things, the importance of setting up fair governments in one's colonies.

Fears also draws from the work some lessons that were especially pertinent at the time of the lecture (when we were going to war in Iraq).  One crucial factor in Rome's downfall was trouble in the Middle East -- Rome became so focused on this trouble that she blinded herself to the corruption that was undermining her interior affairs.  In fact, when Professor Fears describes the political climate in Rome at the time, it sounds so familiar that if you were to substitute "the United States of America" every time he says "Rome," you would think he was talking about us.

I think one of the most fascinating things about reading history is seeing the recurrence of problems that we usually consider unique to our age!