‘A history of the western tradition’
Recently, a teacher of history asked me, a former teacher of history, about ways to bring history alive for high school students. My response hasn’t varied in 40 years: “Make connections.” Students — and the rest of us as well — need to remember we live today with the consequences of events like the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Battle of Gettysburg.
Get that high school student to understand what it took for some 18-year-old from North Carolina to charge across an open field in the face of devastating enemy fire, and you’re creating an amateur historian.
I also answered with William Faulkner’s words from “Requiem for a Nun”: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Closer to home than Faulkner’s Mississippi is Thomas Wolfe’s similar vision of the past on page one of “Look Homeward, Angel”: “Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.”
Unfortunately, knowledge of their American past, and of history in general, continues to decline among students. In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress history test administered to many eighth graders across the country found only 13% of them proficient in history, with a full 40% scoring below the basic knowledge level in U.S. history.
And before any adults reading these scores begin shaking their heads and tut-tut-tutting the young, they might ask themselves some questions, like “From what ancient civilization did America’s Founding Fathers take many of their ideas for the Constitution?” or “How did the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 shape our country?”
Here’s the idea: Learning about the past shouldn’t be a study of the dead. It’s about people whose spirits still live and move in all of us, whether we know it or not.
Related Items
Lonesome road blues: New album celebrates late Haywood banjo legend
This must be the place: ‘Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one’
Toltec wisdom resonates in today’s world
Poetry reading at City Lights
Which brings me to the grandest book I’ve seen in ages: “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition” (Encounter Books, 2025, 1309 pages).
That page count is deceptive, for this volume — “The Ancient World and Christendom” — is only the first of two, with the second volume, the 900-page “The Modern and Contemporary West,” due out in December. Though billed together as the authors of this set, James Hankins of Harvard University wrote the first volume while Allen C. Guelzo of Princeton is credited with the second.
Usually, when we think of beauty, we might call to mind a sunset viewed from Mount Mitchell, or the interior of Asheville’s Basilica of St. Lawrence, or the laughing eyes of a person we love. Rarely do we consider a book as a beauty, even those of us who love books, and never, at least in my lifetime, have I ever attached the words beauty or beautiful to a textbook.
“The Golden Thread” qualifies as a delightful bump on this road of reading.
Packed into these pages are nearly 1,000 reproductions of Western painting, sculpture, buildings and more. There are some 200 inserts containing the actual words from speeches, histories and literature from the past, and more than 150 maps designed specifically for the text help explain things like cultural influences or exploration.
These treasures accompany a narrative history whose graceful, erudite prose untangles the knottiest problems of the past. Here, for instance, we learn about the Greco-Roman foundations of Western culture, the way in which the conquests of Alexander the Great shaped the ancient world, and how Christianity became core to the civilization that emerged from the Middle Ages and spawned the Renaissance.
At the end of each chapter are “Key Terms and Concepts,” “Key Persons,” and a “Timeline.” These lists will assist students looking to carry away, for example, the essence of Greek history and culture.
Yet as the publisher points out, “The Golden Thread” is “designed for students and life-long learners alike…” The authors intend their two-volumes for the edification of adults of all ages who wish to time-travel to the past, who want a handy home resource or who, like me, will let the winds take us as they will, visiting the emperor Constantine one day and the Church Fathers the next. Whatever our motives, as the authors state in their introduction, they wrote their history of the West and its cultures and traditions “for anyone who wants to understand the deep roots of the world in which we live.”
In this same Introduction, Guelzo and Hankins voice their concerns that widespread ignorance of the past, not just in the United States but throughout the Western world, are leading to an diminution, and even erasure, of the ideals and laws of that civilization. By way of example, they point out that many colleges have dropped required courses in American and European history in favor of watered-down histories or no history at all. “… We want our readers to understand just how fragile our tradition is and how many times in the three-thousand-year-long history of the West the gold thread that ties us to our past and enriches us beyond measure has come close to snapping.”
Purchase “The Golden Thread,” read it as you will, and odds are you’ll come to see that each moment, and you yourself, are “the fruit of forty thousand years.”
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
