Cicero suggested that "to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it be woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
History is both a discipline and a story, both an interpretation and a series of events. It is not simply chronology - one damn thing leading to another - as the ideas we have, and the kind of possibilities they allow, lead people to lean one way or another against the course of events. "The study of the past is always inspired by the need for light in the present" (Pierre Rosanvallon).
"Doing justice to the reality of history is not a matter of noting the way in which the past provides a background to the present; it is a matter of treating what people do in the present as a struggle to create a future out of the past, of seeing that the past is not just the womb of the present but the only raw material out of which the present can be constructed." (Philip Abrams).
Our current projects are in three areas:
Historical Libraries Project
School Books
Historical Population
“I have often thought how ridiculous it was that a nation, whose ancestors knew so well the value of liberty as to have maintained it with the last drop of their blood should be instrumental in enslaving a race of people whose only crime, if I judge right, is that the same Being which created them, for reasons beyond the capacity of mortals, made them black instead of white ...” Richard John Uniacke (1753-1830)
