On life and history...
I spent most of my life being a historian - teaching, practicing, and writing history as well as advocating for history and the historical profession. In recent months I've been trying to leave the "work" part of that life behind me, but friends inevitably call with ideas or I read something here or there that sparks my interest.
Today two things happened.


Back in the day, when I was writing a lot about energy history, he had me up to give a talk to the PUC staff. Now he called just to say he still looks at my book - got important stuff in it that you just can't find anywhere else. Dan made me feel pretty good about myself, which is a hell of a nice gift for someone to give someone else.
When he asked if I'd been doing more, the best I could do was point him to a little essay on the history of energy on the Franklin Institute website.

"A public debate more informed by the complexity of family stories and actual practices of our past would be a better debate, but settling for that is a cliché. If ... the take home lesson for historians was that we should be presenting the public with the facts about past immigration laws and the experiences of past immigrants because this would lead to more informed and better decisions, then [we] would come perilously close to what I have come to think of as the Millard Fillmore fallacy. Whenever I hear someone complaining about Americans' ignorance of history, I think of Millard Fillmore. Would this be a better country if every American knew about Millard Fillmore? I may be going out on a limb here, but I don't think so.
"But we might be a better country, and better citizens, if we spent less time thinking about easy principles and more time thinking about complicated practices. The best source of complicated practices is the past. History is a habit of mind and not a collection of facts. ... The hard part is figuring out how to put this knowledge into collective public practice."
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