"First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past"
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McCullough’s line is a historian’s sleight of hand: he denies “the past” in order to rescue it. The provocation turns on a grammatical trick. “The past” sounds like a sealed country you could visit, a museum diorama with rope barriers. McCullough punctures that abstraction with an almost stubbornly plain reminder: people only ever inhabited a present tense. They didn’t wake up thinking, I’m living in History; they worried about rent, illness, pride, weather, ambition. The effect is to drag our gaze from the comforting distance of hindsight back into the uncertainty that actually governs human life.
The subtext is a warning against the smugness that historical storytelling can smuggle in. Once we label events “the past,” we’re tempted to treat outcomes as inevitable and actors as either enlightened or benighted, as if they had access to the same moral vocabulary and information we do. McCullough, who built a career on narrative history that reads like lived experience, is arguing for empathy as method: not excusing people, but understanding the limits of their knowledge and the pressures of their moment.
It also doubles as a critique of present-day punditry that raids history for ready-made analogies. If nobody “lived in the past,” then history isn’t a storage closet of lessons; it’s a record of former presents, each as messy and contingent as ours. The line quietly insists on humility: we are not outside the story. We are merely the next present that will be misremembered as “the past.”
The subtext is a warning against the smugness that historical storytelling can smuggle in. Once we label events “the past,” we’re tempted to treat outcomes as inevitable and actors as either enlightened or benighted, as if they had access to the same moral vocabulary and information we do. McCullough, who built a career on narrative history that reads like lived experience, is arguing for empathy as method: not excusing people, but understanding the limits of their knowledge and the pressures of their moment.
It also doubles as a critique of present-day punditry that raids history for ready-made analogies. If nobody “lived in the past,” then history isn’t a storage closet of lessons; it’s a record of former presents, each as messy and contingent as ours. The line quietly insists on humility: we are not outside the story. We are merely the next present that will be misremembered as “the past.”
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