Dear Graduates!
Today, you receive your diplomas – an official confirmation of your professionalism, passion for history, curiosity, and aspiration for learning new things about people and events you have mostly never met and will not see with your own eyes.
Still, you have selected the History Faculty of the VU that enables amazing trips to the past where you can reveal the actions and intentions not only of famous leaders of medieval Lithuania (like King Mindaugas, princes) or modern Lithuanian state (like presidents), but also of ordinary people of various ethnic origin with their everyday life, their beliefs and identities. Or you can explore life stories during calamities – for instance, the fears and hopes of Lithuanians who were torn off their land, homes, and families and were deported to the Russian concentration camps by the Soviet regime, daring thus to face the stories about incredible courage or fatigue of struggle for life in exile.
History research is about the ability to go against the stream, persistence, dignity, and responsibility. A historian must pose questions that are often not in the mainstream of the public discourse. Then, he has to look for answers from historical sources and literature, construct and represent new knowledge, and argue his position. Historians must persist in finding the appropriate sources that support or equally refute their hypothesis.
Dignity and responsibility are extremely important nowadays. Unlike generations of predecessors who had restrictions on learning history, you are free to choose the topic and the interpretations, guided by the history research principles and not by ideology. You live in a democratic society that is being threatened by the autocracies and mental wars they launch, trying to disorient the societies, using history in particular as a tool to manipulate the consciousness of the people. On the contrary, a historian bears the responsibility to reconstruct the past and represent this knowledge to society and the professional community. So, your mission, among other things, is to protect democracy from the threats mentioned.
Historians help to create moral guidelines for the communities in their research about the past, representing the motivations and actions of people who lived 10 or 1000 years ago. It is a historian who introduces new names to the pantheon of history actors and enriches the existing ones with the new details of their biographies, horizontal ties, and actions, enabling more space and senses to comprehend the past.
Historians must be active in the discussion inside a society, initiating and leading the talks on various aspects of Lithuanian history, ongoing life, and problems, because history is foremost about human beings, communities, societies, and relations among them. And historians are trained to see the relations among various actors of societal life, not only in the past but also nowadays.
Historians thus play a pivotal role in how society will identify itself, comprehend itself, and what vision it will have in the circle of other communities and ethnicities.
The debate on whether history is a teacher is ongoing. Despite the answer, historians set markers and guidelines for the future on the grounds of the past. Historical memory is a vivid manifestation of this past. Who, what, and how are commemorated construct the senses, ideas, and national identity.
Memory politics defines the vector of the future state development: a retrospective move with no modernisation, non-inclusiveness, stuck in past traumas and negative experiences, or perspective advance, directed at the future, aimed at a flourishing society.
School history textbooks help to form the values and outlook and introduce the concepts that contribute to the picture of the world of a future citizen, be it a Lithuanian or another one, helping to answer the question "Who am I?".
Historians must be objective and empathic because we are people writing about people and for people. Today, during ongoing calamities, this feature is essential. Your striving for objectivity and your ability to work with information will help you remain a top professional in history, humanities, education, or other fields.
Not in vain, the Lithuanian anthem suggests: "Iš praeities Tavo sūnūs Te stiprybę semia". Keep Alma Mater in your hearts and in your minds, ir sėkmės!
Tetiana Boriak
2025
