https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1988/11/why-study-history/670027/
The plain fact is that American history is not intelligible, and we are not intelligible to ourselves, without a firm grasp of the life and ideas of the ancient world, of Judaism and Christianity, of Islam and Christendom in the Middle Ages, of feudalism, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of the English Revolution and the Enlightenment. The first settlers did not sail into view out of a void, their minds as blank as the Atlantic Ocean. They were shaped and scarred by tens of centuries of religious, social, literary, and political experience. Their notions of honor and heroism were learned from Greco-Roman myth and history, from the Bible and the lives of the saints of the Church, from stories of knights and Crusaders, explorers and sea dogs of the Renaissance, soldiers and martyrs of the wars of religion. Those who sailed west to America came in fact not to build a New World but to bring to life in a new setting what they treasured most from the Old World
Studying history, said the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, helps students to understand themselves and “otherness,” by learning how they resemble and how they differ from other people, over time and space; to question stereotypes of others, and of themselves; to discern the difference between fact and conjecture; to grasp the complexity of historical cause; to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive explanation; to respect particularity and avoid false analogy; to recognize the abuse of historical “lessons,” and to Weigh the possible consequences of such abuse; to consider that ignorance of the past may make us prisoners of it; to realize that not all problems have solutions; to be prepared for the irrational, the accidental, in human affairs; and to grasp the power of ideas and character in history.
英美同一个体系，跟欧洲大陆的思路有一些差别，但都很有意思。
十年前我迷上了美国开国史，就当传奇看。近几年迷上了英国史，从玫瑰战争，到Tudors, 到Stuarts, 跟我们的传统文化天差地别
