Real Moms Speak Out:  Heart to Heart

How We Study History

by Tari Cartwright

We study everything as theory and from different perspectives (understanding
history is written by the victor), much from autobiographies (see my book
list) and yes, from books from the prophets. We teach "some say this" and
"some say that" and "now we have discovered thus". I love the Anglo Saxon
point of view found in GA Henty but am not naive to believe it to be truth
except from the English Christian perspective. I have not found a history
text that doesn't teach untruth except for the Book of Mormon and the Pearl
of Great Price.

Certainly, we all understand we are a product of our rituals, our social engineering, our propaganda, the "precepts of men" being very strong in our society. Being tuned into the Spirit is the only way to learn and to teach. Only the Lord can give us pure truth and only the Spirit can witness of that to us. No one curriculum in history or science is going to give us everything we need to learn or all truth. As for our family's teaching and learning, the basis of our curriculum is the standard works, the teaching of Joseph Smith, then autobiographies and writings and discoveries from FARMS. We love Hugh Nibley and Cleon Skousen but realize that these may contain some untruth.

Hugh B. Brown in "The Abundant Life" and suggests Talmage and Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History. He speaks of the works of Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, Wycliffe and that we understand their differences and their work on the earth. He also suggest reading the history of Abraham Lincoln written by Carl Sandburg. He then suggests: "It would be well for us to read the writings of men like Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson, to know something of Thomas Edison and other inventors, to become familiar with philosophy. Here you will do well to read Will Durant's Introduction to Philosophy. Become acquainted with James, Overstreet, and St. Augustine. In short, view the gospel through the eyes and lives of great men...we should not overlook the poets, for the poets have been and are, in a real sense, prophets. We should become familiar with the great poems, the epic poems, and the more recent writings of the best poets we have today." (The Abundant Life).

I really get into Hugh Nibley and particularly enjoy "Ancient Documents and the Pearl of Great Price", "The Ancient State" and reading the books cited in bibliographies. I believe that our journals are of great importance to our children and grandchildren because they will tell the truth of what happens to us from our perspective in our time. History is revised by each political regime everywhere in the world and in addition, each time new evidence is uncovered history is again rewritten.

High Nibley said, "within the last five years [1988], with the discovery of a single inscription, a whole world of Greek myth and legend has been transmuted into the category of flesh and blood reality. Within the same short period the
decipherment of the Minoan Script B has with a single sweep rubbed out two
hundred years of the Homeric problem and shown us the Greeks writing good
Greek a thousand years before anyone had credited them with literacy. At the
same time the mystery of Etruscan has been solved, and the true nature of the
mysterious Runic writing of our Norse ancestors explained. Today nearly all
scholars accept the original identity of the Hamitic, Semitic, and
Indo-European languages--a thing that the less informed and more opinionated
gentlemen of a few years ago laughed at as a Fundamentalist dream."

The point is, that history is ever being reevaluated and rewritten based on new
discoveries and evidences much like science. Over the weekend FARMs reported
on the years discoveries of ancient Abrahamic records and artifacts and what
they mean in the rewriting of history. So, history as we know it on the
earth, is every changing, evolving with new understandings hand in hand with
science and scientific advances. In history and science we trust in the
writings of the prophets and revelations of God. Then we study everything
else we can in light of revealed truth and through the Spirit.

Tari
 

Above quotes from SaintsandScholars