The What and Why of History
I’m going to start off by telling you what History personally means to me. History has always been a really good escape for me, whether I’m stressed out or simply bored picking up a book and reading about those who came before us is beyond interesting to me. I was very fortunate to have amazing social studies and history teachers that knew about my passion and challenged me throughout middle and high school. If there is one thing I’ve taken from those experiences It’s that history is an extremely political subject and despite your personal beliefs it is detrimental to understand every angle of a particular event in history. Learning about only one side of an event will make you even more ignorant than you were beforehand in my opinion due to the massive gap in your understanding by not learning of the opposing and neutral ideas.
Majority of the people I have met in my life hated history with a passion. They find no use for it and believe it is unimportant to learn about, and with no disrespect it shows in how they view the world. For example, America has been a fairly hostile nation in the past year with the Black Lives Matter protests or riots and more recently the storming of the capitol, and many people tend to say violence and destruction isn’t the answer yet tend to forget how we as Americans gained independence from England about 250 years ago in the Revolutionary War. In the opposition to that statement, many who strive for violence and destruction also tend to forget the civil rights era and Martin Luther King Jr’s peaceful protests. I believe looking at that modern issue in America is a great example for why history is important as we can see how change has been made in our nation in the past and model our current agendas after two different examples of massive changes being made to this land.
Looking at the past in great detail can show us the parallels between now and then, which allows each generation to model the world in the ways they see fit, and while history may not necessarily repeat itself as stated by the essay by Valdosta State University, we can see that many issues may resurface or be realized to have been unresolved. Knowing these things is the only way we can make good changes to modern and future society.
