I’ve always been a huge history nerd.
I still remember the first history class I took in 1st grade when I was in school in Pakistan. I was completely fascinated. We learned about ancient civilizations, empires, rulers, wars, and artifacts from thousands of years ago. It felt like every lesson was a story, and every story made the world feel bigger. That was honestly when I decided that I wanted to be an archaeologist someday. If archaeology actually paid well, I probably would have chosen that career without hesitation.
I love ancient history, museums, old artifacts, random historical facts—anything that connects us to people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. To me, history never felt boring. It felt like time travel.
Which is why it was so strange that, over time, I slowly started to fall out of love with history class.
The problem wasn’t history itself. The problem was the way history was taught.
Starting in middle school and continuing through high school, history class slowly became less about world history and more about the same section of U.S. history over and over again. First it was Civics, then World History largely centered around the US, then Honors U.S. History, then AP U.S. History. The workload got harder, the readings got longer, and the essays got more complicated—but the content barely changed.
Every year felt like a slightly more detailed version of the year before. The same events, the same timelines, the same historical figures, just repeated with more depth. Instead of learning new parts of the world or new time periods, it felt like we were circling the same material for four years straight.
And honestly, it made history start to feel boring—even though I knew I loved history.
I remember talking to my friends about it, and a lot of them felt the same way. It wasn’t that history was boring; it was that we were barely seeing how big history actually is. There are thousands of years of human history across every continent, and yet we spent years focused mostly on a few hundred years in one country.
It actually wasn’t until college that I realized how much history I didn’t know. When I started using social media more—especially TikTok—I somehow ended up on the “history side” of TikTok, and it genuinely shocked me. I kept seeing videos about historical events, countries, conflicts, empires, and figures that I had never even heard of before, or had only heard mentioned briefly once in school.
It made me realize that there were huge parts of world history that I was basically ignorant about—not because I didn’t care, but because we were never really taught them. When I talked to my friends about it, a lot of them said the same thing. We all felt like there were so many important historical events and regions that we just never learned about in school.
There are so many stories we never really got to learn about.
We could have learned about King Leopold II and the Congo. The Mughal Empire and the partition of India. The fall of Constantinople. The Rwandan genocide. The Ottoman Empire. African empires like Mali and Songhai. The Islamic Golden Age. The Cold War outsude of the US perspective. Colonialism in Africa and Asia. The Yugolsav Wars. Cleopatra and Ptolemaic Egypt. Ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. Civil Rights movements across countries. And I also wish we learned more about the history of Palestine and its people, which is something I only really started learning about on my own much later. There is so much history that is dramatic, tragic, fascinating, and important, and most of it barely gets covered.
It just feels like history classes could be so much more interesting if they were more global and less repetitive.
One of the few times I actually felt excited about history again in high school was when I took a Holocaust elective during my sophomore year. That class felt different. It was emotional, complex, and meaningful. We didn’t just memorize dates—we talked about people, decisions, ethics, and how history still affects the world today. That class reminded me why I loved history in the first place.
It made me realize that I never actually fell out of love with history. I just fell out of love with history class.
What made this realization even more frustrating was seeing how much is going on in the world today and realizing I don’t fully understand the history behind so many of these issues. So many current conflicts, political tensions, and global issues didn’t just start recently—they have decades, sometimes centuries, of history behind them. And yet I often feel like I don’t know enough about that history to fully understand what’s happening. It made me realize how ignorant and unaware I was, not because I didn’t care, but because I was never really taught the background to many major world events. I understand that it’s impossible to cover everything in high school history classes, but I do think it’s important to at least cover major current world issues and teach the historical context behind them. Without that context, everything happening in the world just feels like random events instead of part of a much larger story.
Outside of school, I still watch history documentaries, look up ancient artifacts, read random historical facts, and wander around museums for hours. I still get excited when I learn about ancient cities, lost civilizations, or archaeological discoveries. That curiosity never went away.
I just wish history classes had felt more like exploration and less like repetition. History shouldn’t feel small. It shouldn’t feel like the same timeline on repeat. History is messy, global, dramatic, and full of stories that most of us never get to hear in school. It also helps us understand the world we live in today, because so many current events are rooted in history. And I honestly think if we were exposed to more of that, a lot more people would realize that history isn’t boring at all.
It’s actually one of the most interesting subjects out there.