Annual Address of President Robt. W. Furnas

Authors

Date of this Version

1885

Comments

Published in Transactions and Reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society, Volume I (Lincoln, NE, 1885).

Abstract

“The study of history deserves serious attention, if only for a knowledge of transactions, and inquiry into the eras when each of them happened. Yet it does not concern us so much to know that there was once such men as Alexander, Cǽsar, Aristides, or Cato, or that they lived in this or that period; that the empire of the Assyrians made way for that of the Babylonians, and the latter for that of the Medes and Persians, who were themselves subjected by the Macedonians, as those were afterward by the Romans. But it is of high concern to know by what methods those empires were founded; by what steps they rose to that exalted pitch of grandeur which we so much admire; what it was that constituted their true glory; and what were the causes of their declension and fall .”