Beneath the occasional story of suicide, murder, insanity, incest, abortion, and mental retardation are a few inquiries about the nature of history. What is history? Why does one study it? Can the past be repeated or affect the future? Being a schoolteacher himself, Tom Crick, narrator of Waterland, was very interested in history. His life goes back and forth between the eighteen and nineteenth hundreds. During the present day writings, there is a great uproar in regards to history and its role in a child's education. Headmaster Lewis Scott plans to phase out the history department leaving Tom Crick with no job. His reasoning is that history is a "rag bag of pointless information."

In Crick's generation, history class meant political history, the study of governments and relations, wars and treaties. Lives of ordinary people were not deemed worthy enough to study. Women still did not matter that...