From Melvyn Bragg’s “In our time” newsletter:
“After the programme a lot of the talk was about a word new to me: ‘presentism’. This is the burden under which historians who teach say that they labour increasingly, ie: everything in the past (more than 10 or 15 years ago) has to be described first in terms of the present.
The idea of a century or even a previous generation being radically different from our own in its political structure, its transport structure, etc, is, I was told, increasingly hard to grab hold of.”
Petafloptimism 
Am I reading that correctly? That history students are unable to grasp history? That they are unable to imagine that there are/were people who lived in circumstances other than the one(s) they themselves live in? Eeek…
By looking at the very small, we can see the very big. I was accidentally emailed by the Freemasons of Honolulu. Then I saw the code in Wargames. CPE 1704 TKS. John Locke died in 1704, Locke whose philosophies underpin Freemasonry. Look for patterning. I looked for patterning, and I found it everywhere. But deye mon, gen mon. Behind the mountains, there are more mountains: http://www.venusberg.org/2004/07/this-is-test.html#109025669091833798