History: What lessons from the past can serve us?
Friday, 28 October 2022
12:00 h
The famous historian Tony Judt, in his work On the Forgotten 20th Century, warned us not to worry about remembering the past. He warned us of the risk of taking the 20th century lightly and leaving it behind with too much confidence and too little reflection: “a world that has just been lost and is already half forgotten”. He warned us that the greatest danger of ignoring what happened lay in the interpretation of the present as an unprecedented time, in which the past has nothing to teach us. In Judt's words, what "the past can help us understand is the perennial complexity of issues." Thus, as Yuval Noah Harari points out in his work Homo Deus, knowledge of the past allows us to understand how the course of events has shaped our technology, our politics, our society, even our thoughts, fears and dreams.
SPEAKERS
- Martin Baumeister, historian, director of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom.
- Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, historian and writer, professor of History Contemporary of the University of Santiago de Compostela, author of Guaridas del lobo. Memorias de la Europa autoritaria and Volver a Stalingrado.
- Heidi Cristina Senante, Jean Monnet Professor of History and Institutions of the Union European.
