Politics is history in the present tense, and the study of history can inspire us to aim high in our own lives.

CNN: What we in 2012 can learn from Teddy Roosevelt in 1912

"You notice I'm speaking in the present tense ... because that's where all your future prayers are going to come in, " she wrote.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

In the present tense, that means that we should do the things that we can control.

WHITEHOUSE: Press Briefing

Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely.

NEWYORKER: Not Reconciled

But she succeeds in evoking a sense of history about a place usually thought of in the present tense.

ECONOMIST: California

She, she sometimes thought, of herself, and always in the present tense.

NEWYORKER: Shauntrelle

This explains the ascent of his reputation in the mid-nineteenth century, when his work showed modernists such as Manet that candid technique could serve the direct registration of things as they really appear, in streaming present tense.

NEWYORKER: Haarlem Shuffle