History Lesson

Plot summary

The first part of the story is told from the perspective of a tribe of nomadic humans in a future where Earth has entered a final ice age. The tribe is travelling toward the equator ahead of glaciers that are descending from the North Pole, but discovers, when they arrive in the last hospitable region of the planet, that glaciers from the South Pole have already almost reached them. The tribe carries with it a few relics from the mid-21st century which it considers sacred, although the functions of the various objects have been forgotten. Before the ultimate extinction of the human species, the relics are safely relocated to a mountain that stands between the two advancing bodies of ice.

The second part of the story is told from the perspective of a race of Venusian reptiles who have evolved into intelligent beings capable of space travel in the 5,000 years since the cooling of the Sun. The Venusians travel to Earth and recover the relics of the last tribe of humans, now the only remnants of civilization not buried under ice. The title of the story comes from the attempts of the Venusian scientist, to reconstruct the life and times of erect bipeds that once walked on the Third Planet through the analysis of one of the last relics of humankind — a film reel that apparently contains a Disney animated cartoon short, which ends with a section of text, which no amount of effort and speculation can decipher : "A Walt Disney Production". .

Similarities with other works by Clarke

Publication

History Lesson was included in Clarke's anthology Expedition to Earth, published in 1953. In the British Edition (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954) the title was "Expedition to Earth", while the story otherwise also known under that title appeared there as Encounter in the Dawn.