ABSTRACT
It was a politician, not a historian, who offered the most persuasive rationale for studying history. Addressing the Roman Senate nearly a century before the birth of Christ, Cicero proclaimed: "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." Cicero's dictum provides a challenge to the modern psychologist, who must possess boundless energy merely to keep up with psychology's current developments, not to mention the effort required to gain an awareness of the past. Psychology's progress breeds an ineluctable presentism, a condition that blurs work older than a decade and nearly obliterates everything before that.
