No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.
After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
It is quite likely. . . that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure, but if you could travel. . . back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.
In Bolivia, we want to overcome our historical problems with Chile. The sea has divided us and the sea must bring us back together again.
I believe it has been said that one copy of The Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.
Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.