This is a beautifully loaded question — the kind that sounds simple until you tug on it and realize it’s actually a philosophical trapdoor.

Back in the day when I was a beginning graduate student in the field of history, a professor posed that question to us. I'm paying it forward. Jot down your answer and some reasons why...I'll wait.

Ready? Let me give you an answer worthy of the way historians think about the past.

Is the history of History the future?

In a sense, yes — and not because history repeats, but because the way we tell history shapes what comes next.

Here’s the deeper truth:

1. Every generation rewrites its past to explain its present.

What we choose to remember — and what we quietly let fade — becomes the moral vocabulary of the future. The Founders did it. Lincoln did it. We do it now.

So the “history of History” is really the story of how each era reinterprets the same events to answer new questions.

2. The future is built out of the stories we decide are true.

Not “true” in the factual sense — about documents and evidence — but “true” in the sense of meaningful, binding, identity‑forming.

Lincoln’s “electric cord” [Chicago Speech, 1858] is a perfect example. He wasn’t just describing the past. He was constructing a future in which belonging was chosen, not inherited.

3. History is the raw material of national imagination.

If you want to know where a country is going, look at which parts of its past it is polishing, and which parts it is burying.

That’s the real weather vane.

4. So yes — the history of History is the future.

Because the future is shaped by the stories we elevate, the myths we dismantle, the documents we return to, and the principles that we decide still matter.

And that’s why historians' work — myth‑busting, document‑driven, morally clear — is not just about the past.

It’s about the future we’re willing to imagine.

Food for thought.

Mac