Liberty advocates attending free-market conferences like Cato University have met heroic professors like Steve Davies, who teaches history with a devastating context unlike any of the boring recitations of names and dates with which we suffered in high school or college. George Orwell called history one of the most important disciplines, for how it shaped our understanding of the present by explaining how it came about from what was there before.

At one time many historians approached the study of the past from a distinctively classical liberal perspective, exposing avaricious individuals or institutions cynically seeking power versus creative icons significantly easing the challenges of life. Professor Davies will make the plea that a revival of this school of history is critical to hope for any improvement in the future.