Some teachers appear to be larger than life, influencing successive generations of students with displays of erudition, inspiration, and a dash of drama. Professor Donald Kagan of Yale University is one of those teachers, and he delivered a lecture to the entire nation on May 12 as he presented the 2005 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jefferson Lectures are the nation's top prize in the humanities, and the list of previous lecturers makes this point clear. At the same time, like virtually everything said or done in Washington, the lectures carry a political dimension as well. Professor Kagan's lecture, "In Defense of History," was indeed a bold defense of history, delivered in the face of postmodern critics, deconstructionists, and cultural relativists.

Born in Lithuania in 1932, Kagan has taught at Yale since 1969. President George W. Bush presented him with a National Humanities Medal in 2002--a signal achievement for a man who was the first in his family to attend college.

Kagan is best known for his work on the Peloponnesian War and the history of classical civilizations. In his view, history is more than an interesting story or a battleground for competing ideologies--it is the ground from which we understand the present by understanding the past.

"Without history, we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born," Kagan has said. The study of history allows living persons to learn from those long dead and, by extension, to emulate their successes and avoid their failures.

This view of history is under assault in today's academy--and particularly among the academic elites. For most of the last two decades, history departments have been hiring faculty members who, by and large, believe that no objective account of history exists, and thus that history is nothing more than a realm of competing ideologies and inconclusive debates.

In his Jefferson lecture, Kagan presented a bold defense of history--and the humanities--against the claims of the postmodernists.

"I come as a defender of the faith, of the humanities as they were understood ever since the invention of the concept many centuries ago," Kagan announced. Without embarrassment, he cited the Renaissance humanist Pietro Paolo Vergerio, who argued that the humanities--the traditional liberal arts--represent "that education which calls forth, trains and develops those highest gifts of body and mind which ennoble men and which are rightly judged to rank next in dignity to virtue only, for to a vulgar temper, gain and pleasure are the one existence, to a lofty nature, moral worth and fame."

That quotation from Vergerio announced that Kagan is determined to defend a hierarchy of values as learned from the ancients and understood by the study of history. The liberal arts were intended to train the intellect, in order "to produce an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction" that would also benefit the larger community. This education is intensely moral, Kagan understands, intended to train the educated individual to be eloquent and wise and "to know what is good and to practice virtue, both in private and public life."