Although Ian MacPherson's 1999 book on the development of the global credit union movement partially
bridges the gap, one of the most gaping holes in contemporary credit
union historiography has been the lack of a synthetic treatment of
the American movement's recent history. While Moody & Fite's The Credit Union Movement remains an
absolutely vital resource, an enormous amount has happened since the
last edition was released in 1984 that has the potential to shine new
interpretive light on the whole sweep of the movement's development.
One
of the benefits of a synthetic work of history is that it organizes
the jumble of changes that characterize its subject's development
into a coherent, meaningful narrative structure. While people often
enter into ferocious debates about the exact parameters of that
structure, having some sort of understanding of the mechanisms by
which the world came to exist in its current form is a powerful aid
to decision-making. Without such a framework, it is impossible to
learn from the past beyond the scope of simple personal experience.
As George Santayana put it more than a century ago, "when
experience is not retained ... infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
