History is narratives. From chaos comes order. We seek to understand the past by determining and ordering ‘facts’, and from these narratives, we hope to explain the decisions and processes which shape our existence. Perhaps we might even distill patterns and lessons to guide – but never to determine – our responses to the challenges faced today. History is the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions, and behaviors. It is so compelling a subject because it encapsulates themes that expose the human condition in all of its guises and that resonates throughout time: power, weakness, corruption, tragedy, triumph … Nowhere are these themes clearer than in political history, still the necessary core of the field and the most meaningful of the myriad approaches to the study of history. Yet political history has fallen out of fashion and subsequently into disrepute, wrongly demonized as stale and irrelevant. The result has been to significantly erode the utility of ordering, explaining, and distilling lessons from the past.
