I  blogged about our deficits in predicting the future the other day and mentioned not only our tendency to compare the present to the past, but also how we tend to get history wrong—by neglecting the impact that accidents and chance had on them. Isn’t our place in history today the result of circumstances that no one foresaw, nor could have foreseen? Isn’t it that when we look at history for lessons about the future we’re only looking at a single snapshot of what could have been?  Because our history is a contingent fact – it is what it is, but could easily have been different. So, should we disregard learning about history just because the future is unpredictable and uncertain? Certainly not. In fact, we can learn quite a lot from it—we just can’t take it too far—because history is great at teaching broader and unspecific lessons like these: 1. History is subjective: Is history a science or an art? ......