This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 30th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Doing history well requires some idea of what makes these facts and not those facts is central to crafting a clear

picture of the past.

Michael Duma is co-editor of What is Classical Liberal History?

We discussed why and how liberty and the individual

matter in making history. For people who aren't historians or don't study

history a lot I think there is a sort of a convenient trap that people fall

into and that is to view history is just one thing and that history is just

here's what happened here's the things that are most important about what happened,

here's what these events led to, and these are the lessons that we ought to take from today and that's it.

That there aren't these, I don't know, many ways to look into a prism of the past and say,

and draw conclusions about groups of people, about great men, about social movements, and about individuals just trying to live their lives.

So, you know, there are these many different ways of looking into history and classical liberals as you point out in one of your books,

the classical liberal tradition of history is underutilized? So tell me about what what is classical

liberal history and how does it distinguish from these other ways of looking

at history. Okay the the first point I should make to follow up on your comments here is that there's a difference

between history and the past, right?

So the past is what happened.

History is the study of the past and I think a lot of times a lot of us

we have these assumptions that this is the way that it happened if others disagree with us

they're wrong you know not that there can be multiple ways of interpreting the game that we watched this last Saturday let alone some historical

...