Once again, war is on our minds. In the early hours of the morning, I reach for my phone, wondering what fresh terror unfolded while I slept. Unspeakable horror in Gaza, fear and grief in Israel, exhaustion and suffering in Ukraine. The news is never good. In times like these, I often turn to history. It’s the long view I crave, the perspective. I read about the past when I’m struggling to bear the present – in part because I desperately want to understand how and why we’ve arrived at this moment, but also because it helps me feel less alone. People in the past faced similar – or worse – historical traumas; it sounds terrible to say I take comfort from their experience, but I do. It’s a comfort we try to share with listeners during times of crisis.
In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, I was obsessed with a history of the Yalta Conference I was reading, told from the perspective of the daughters of Churchill, FDR and the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman. I remember talking in a pitch meeting about how compulsively readable it was, partly because of the setting — Crimea, once again in the news as Ukrainian troops faced off Russian warships. We wound up putting the story in the episode we were working on, "The Tangled Roots of War and Peace." In the same episode, Rebecca Solnit gave us a fresh and beautiful take on how George Orwell confronted the horrors of his own wars – by planting roses. Of course, historical memory offers no anodyne comfort – bombs are exploding in Gaza today because the past doesn’t sleep. That’s why journalism and history go hand in hand – because while the past informs the present, the present interprets the past. If you find history as fascinating as I do, take a listen to this week’s show, “How Should We Tell Our History? It’s a rebroadcast from earlier this year that feels as timely as ever.
Be well,
– Anne