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  3. Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remem

Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remem

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问题     Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.【F1】As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. "The longer you look back," said Winston Churchill, "the farther you can look forward."
    Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are continuously revised by the urgencies of the present.【F2】When new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian ’ s spotlight shifts, probing at last into the darkness, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had carelessly erased from the collective memory. New voices ring out of the historical dark and demand to be heard.【F3】One has only to note how in the last half-century the movements for women’s rights and civil rights have reformulated and renewed American history. Thus the present endlessly reinvents the past. In this sense, all history, as Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history. It is these adjustments of consciousness that make history so endlessly fascinating an intellectual adventure. "The one duty we owe to history," said Oscar Wilde, "is to rewrite it."
    【F4】We are the world’s dominant military power, and I believe a consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation possessed of overwhelming power. History verifies John F. Kennedy’s proposition, stated in the first year of his thousand days: "We must face the fact—that we are only 6 percent of the world’ s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
    History is the best cure for illusion.【F5】Self-knowledge is the indispensable beginning of self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives. History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.
【F1】
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答案如同失去记忆的个人会失去方向、迷失自我、不知道自己身在何地要去何方一样，一个拒绝认识过去的国家将会丧失处理当前及未来事务的能力。
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