The doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense,” Crane Brinton observed in his classic, The Anatomy of Revolution. Indeed, as every history teacher knows, similar situations do keep recurring, in politics, international relations, social standards, personal behavior, and a host of other areas. Today’s headline-grabbing news story may well have its counterpart twenty, fifty, two hundred, or even two thousand years ago. Of course it is true that no two situations are ever exactly alike, for the players themselves are different and may perform and react in diverse ways. But the parallels are surely there. Mark Twain said it for all time: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

History teachers should not fail to point out this “rhyming” to their students, who will forever demand that the study of history be made “relevant” to their world and their lives. Surely if the teacher can demonstrate similar recurring situations and problems, it will help students to gain perspective on their own times, to realize that some of the dilemmas their generation faces have appeared before and have been either overcome or endured, and to realize that present-day crises may not be as critical or cataclysmic as the daily drumbeat of news would have us believe.

Below, in roughly chronological order, are some suggested parallels in history that may be introduced at appropriate points into lectures and to stimulate classroom discussions. Some are commonly recognized by historians; others may not be. Although specialists may challenge the validity of some of the selections, teachers should not hesitate to employ them. If on deeper examination two seemingly parallel situations turn out not to be very much alike after all, that too may be a valuable learning experience.

1. Throughout history, rulers wielding absolute power have displayed a penchant for magnificent building projects. Certain Egyptian pharaohs—such as Ramses II in the thirteenth century B.C.—built pyramids, temples, and monumental palaces. Louis XIV had his Versailles. Adolf Hitler oversaw the construction of numerous impressive public buildings in Berlin. There is even an American example: Governor Huey Long of Louisiana built a new state capitol, as well as roads and bridges, and he greatly expanded facilities at Louisiana State University. It has been said that “Architecture is the message a civilization sends about itself to the future.” Perhaps there is an unconscious need in such rulers to leave behind something beautiful and enduring to offset their otherwise mixed reputations.
2. In 478 B.C., after the last of the Persian invasions, the Greek city-states formed the Delian League in order to provide mutual security in the future. Such an alliance bears resemblance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Teachers can point out the major roles of Athens and the United States in their respective organizations, and the stresses and strains that often enter into such collective security pacts.
3. Wars produce strange alliances, and wartime coalitions often disintegrate as soon as the danger is past. Athens and Sparta turned to fatal squabbling as soon as they ousted the Persians. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the major powers of Europe entered into a Quadruple (later Quintuple) Alliance to preserve the Vienna settlement and keep the peace. Five years later it was practically defunct. The breakdown of the Soviet-American World War II alliance into the Cold War is only a more recent example. History is cluttered with many others.
4. Instructors faced with making Socrates meaningful to today’s students could compare him with Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Nelson Mandela. Socrates’s imprisonment and death, Solzhenitsyn’s exile, and Mandela’s imprisonment all raise the eternal question of the relationship between citizen and state.
5. Western civilization instructors might find it fruitful to compare Alexander the Great and Napoleon, not just as military leaders but as bearers of their societies’ culture to alien and conquered lands. How lasting or transitory such efforts are is a question worth investigating.
6. On Christmas Day, 800 A.D., while Charlemagne was in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III placed a crown on his head, declaring him the new Roman emperor. A millennium later, in 1804 and also in December, Napoleon Bon-aparte, perhaps with a knowledge of history and certainly with a flair for the dramatic, arranged to have Pope Pius VII present as he crowned himself Emperor of the French.
7. While there may be no absolute laws in history, “Thou shalt not invade Russia by land” comes close. The physical vastness of the country and the severity of its winters have spelled doom on three occasions. In 1708 the youthful and overconfident King Charles XII of Sweden hurled an army against his Russian foes in the Great Northern War and met disaster. Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion a century later is, of course, legendary. Most recent was Hitler’s reckless plunge into Russia in 1941, with equally fatal consequences.
8. Popular thinking has it that “bad” governments eventually get overthrown. However, it seems to be true that weak governments are more likely to be toppled than strong or even tyrannical ones. Indeed, the overthrow of a “strong” government is contradictory in itself. Governments on the eve of revolution show common traits of flabbiness and indecisiveness. Examples include Britain in the 1770s, the French monarchy in 1789, and the Russian tsarist regime early in the twentieth century. The parallels between the characters of Louis XVI and Nicholas II are numerous. (Carl G. Gustavson’s A Preface to History [1955] has a superb chapter on this subject.) Moving closer to home, the crumbling of the once-feared and monolithic Soviet Union in the 1980s did not come about until the regime displayed fatal weaknesses, as with its defeat in Afghanistan.
9. As every American history survey course notes, in 1773 the financially beleaguered but politically influential East India Company appealed to the British Parliament for help, and received a monopoly on tea exports to the colonies, thereby hastening the coming revolution. In case this appears to students as a foolhardy act on the part of the British government, they may be reminded of the United States government’s loan guarantees to the Lockheed Corporation some years ago, a company apparently considered as vital to the United States as the venerable East India Company was in its day to England. The Chrysler Corporation received a similar guarantee. These parallels illustrate well the political and economic influence of large businesses.
10. The written word can, at times, sway mass thinking. At certain critical junctures in history a piece of writing has galvanized public opinion. Good examples of this are Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The first two came in the midst of great debates over burning contemporary issues—independence and slavery, respectively. Both appeared on the eve of military conflicts. The Jungle drew public attention to an issue of universal concern, the public food supply. All stirred public opinion to a decisive degree. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, while it did not have as electrifying an impact immediately, did give shape and motivation to the entire modern environmental movement.
11. In case students get the idea that the streaking craze of the 1970s was something new and different, instructors may remind them that in 1776, during the American Revolution, General Nathanael Greene had to rebuke colonial soldiers in New York, who were bathing in a pond and running naked to nearby houses, much to the alarm and outrage of local residents.
12. The bellicose newcomers to the Congress of 1810 who have been dubbed the “War Hawks” might, without too much historical license, be compared to more recent anti-Communists, particularly of the 1940s and 1950s. While such politicians undoubtedly perceived a genuine threat emanating from abroad, surely some of their extreme stands included a dose of political posturing, designed to strengthen their position with their constituents.
13. Henry Kissinger’s significant diplomatic achievements have a nineteenth-century reflection. Teachers can provide perspective here by noting the intellectual and personal parallels between Kissinger and Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Klemens von Metternich. Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation and some of his published work is on Metternich’s post-Napoleonic diplomacy, which stressed a balance of power and the concept of mutual “legitimacy” among nations. This study shaped Kissinger’s guiding philosophy as a diplomat. Even in their personal lives there is a parallel: both Metternich and Kissinger (prior to his second marriage) had reputations as “ladies’ men.”
14. Two individuals worth comparing are Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt on the eve of the wars through which they guided their nation. Both have been charged with maneuvering or provoking their enemies to strike first (at Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor, respectively). While little solid evidence exists to buttress either case, the subject could stimulate provocative class discussion.
15. Russia, during the First World War, and the Confederacy, during the American Civil War, present many parallels. Each was a nation of farmers unable to feed themselves in wartime. Both suffered from inadequate and inefficient rail transportation, and both were blockaded from the sea by their antagonists. It might be argued that the final collapse of each was due as much to civilian suffering and exhaustion as to military reversals. Incidentally, the thirteen colonies during the American Revolution provide another example of a hungry army defending a nation of farmers.
16. The cases of Alfred Dreyfus and Sacco and Vanzetti present a familiar and long-recognized parallel—defendants on trial more for their background, their convictions, their religion or nationality—thus who they were—than for the strength of the evidence against them. In both cases the societies were experiencing intense social and political stresses, conducive to the suppression of minority rights. The Scottsboro case of the early 1930s in Alabama was a similar episode.
17. Students should be aware that the Vietnam imbroglio was not the first jungle war in Asia for the United States. There are remarkable parallels with the Philippine insurrection of 1899-1902, which in some respects might be called America’s “first Vietnam.” American troops encountered guerrilla warfare, booby traps, and a population where it was hard to tell friend from foe. Soldiers carried out search-and-destroy missions, burned villages, and herded natives into “safe” compounds. As more and more troops were committed, the army kept insisting that one more contingent would do the trick. Racist overtones appeared; American soldiers called the Filipinos “niggers” (as compared with “gooks” in the Vietnam war). At home, critics denounced the war as a gross betrayal of American ideals and principles. Supporters responded that such protests strengthened the enemy and prolonged the conflict; moreover, American prestige would plummet if the United States failed. Unlike Vietnam, in the Philippine conflict the United States did salvage a victory of sorts, as the insurrection was largely snuffed out by 1902, and President Roosevelt exulted that American honor had been upheld (as with the 1973 “peace with honor” proclaimed by President Nixon). Bluster seems to accompany ignominious withdrawals from foreign wars.
18. If the Philippine insurrection was the United States’ “first Vietnam,” the American Revolution was “England’s Vietnam.” The British had to fight a war across an ocean on strange terrain against an enemy who could be friend in a face-to-face encounter and foe behind their backs. Hostile European nations made England’s task more difficult. Yet the Crown pressed on, confident at the beginning that the Americans could not stand up to British military superiority and fearful that a loss would trigger independence movements in other British colonies, a kind of “domino theory.” Foreign troops even had to be hired (compare with Australians and South Koreans in Vietnam). A resistance to fresh thinking permeated Lord North’s ministry, the will of the over-taxed British public finally broke, and the war effort collapsed.
19. Late in his presidency, as Teapot Dome and other scandals were beginning to close in, Warren G. Harding was urged by his commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, to go public and expose the whole situation. Harding refused, with results disastrous to the reputation of his administration. Likewise, when he was Secretary of the Treasury, John Connally is reported to have urged Richard Nixon to air the Watergate affair and save his presidency while there was still time. Nixon also refused, with equally dismal consequences.
20. Sometimes even presidents who are considered nonentities or second-rate serve a useful purpose. Consider Calvin Coolidge and Gerald Ford. Both came into office after major presidential scandals; both were decent and honorable men; both restored respect and integrity to an office badly in need of it.
21. The architects of the massive American involvement in Vietnam—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and many others, civilian and military—may have been influenced in part by what they witnessed as younger men, the spectacle of unchecked Nazi aggression in Europe in the 1930s. There have been strong arguments that Europe in the 1930s and Asia in the 1960s are in no way analogous situations. Nevertheless, this question may serve as a springboard for class discussion.
22. A new American president taking office sometimes faces plans elaborately conceived by the previous administration that are difficult to undo. The abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba tarnished the early days of the Kennedy presidency. Students should be reminded, however, that the undertaking was planned in the last year of the Eisenhower administration. Similarly, when Harry S. Truman took office in April 1945—although he himself knew next to nothing about the Manhattan Project—it would have been nearly impossible for him to put the brakes on the use of the atomic bomb, given the enormous amount of effort and money plowed into the project by that time.
23. And finally, the sexual transgressions of President Clinton: these have unquestionably been more publicized than those of some of his predecessors. But jaded or cynical students can be reminded of the extramarital liaisons of Presidents Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy. Rather than comparing simply who did what with whom, instructors can draw out meaningful lessons from the different eras on the public mood and the role of the media. The fact that all four men were popular in their own times may have helped shield them from greater public wrath (although it is true that Harding’s peccadilloes were fully revealed only after his death).

From ancient Egypt to the 1990s, from Alexander the Great to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, history instructors will never lack for meaningful and instructive parallels to enlighten students on the enduring traits of human nature. And surely the new millennium will provide its own examples as well.

William F. Mugleston is chair of the Social and Cultural Studies Division and professor of history at Floyd College in Rome, Georgia. He has recently co-authored “Quality Control in Distance Learning: Producing and Teaching a U.S. History Telecourse” in Teaching History (Spring 1998) and Perspectives on America: Readings in United States History Since 1877 (1998).