Is Historiography Valued?

The Sunday NYT Book Review (19 July 2009) published a review of Margaret McMillan's Dangerous Games - The Uses and Abuses of History by David Kennedy. Kennedy writes,

MacMillan ends by asking whether we would be worse off not knowing any history at all.... [She concludes] that history's ultimate utility does not lie in its predictive or even its explanatory value, but in its ability to teach humility, to nurture an appreciation of the limits on our capacity to see the past clearly or to know fully the historical determinants of our own brief passage in time. "If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skpeticism and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful"....

From Kennedy's review, it sounds like an interesting read. Check out his entire review online at the NYT site.

And just on the heals of that review comes this out of Russia: President Dmitry Medvedev has proposed that "questioning the Soviet victory in World War II" become a criminal offense. He has created a commission to deal with "counteractin attempts to falsify history that are to the detriment of the interestss of Russia." Orlando Figes prize-winning book on Stalinist Russia, originally slotted for publication in Russia, has now been cancelled.

MacMillan may be correct in her conclusions.