Why History is Still Important

Every Sunday when I was little, my family would load into our gray Camry (her name was Myrtle) and visit my grandparents’ house. This was an era when kids younger than twelve didn’t have iPads, so my time was spent gazing out the window and listening to the radio. And while I was bummed that I couldn’t run and play (or read-I would get extremely car-sick and throw up), my imagination ran wild. I dreamt up stories that “could have” happened in the yellow grassy fields: Old battles of Ancient Kingdoms, epic stories of lovers now cold in the earth. I didn’t know much history back then, but I craved its stories. 

Flash-forward to middle school, and while half of my mind is spent preoccupied with how my nose seemed bigger than my face, or how my braces’ rubber bands would snap if I yawned too hard, the other half was concentrated on the tumbling world around me. Somewhere between those car rides, the world had become louder, and there wasn’t a headphone that could tune it out. I spent a lot of time in my own head, trying to make sense of what was going on and where my place was on this Earth. That’s when I turned to history, not as an escape, but rather an understanding. 

I read about the things that scared me, that made me mad, and what I prayed would never happen again. In between those events were stories of people who had overcome them and lived to teach about them. Photographs, paintings, poems, all by people who had once shared the same fears of their time that I did then. Moments like this are easy to overlook when history is reduced to dates and names.   

History gets a bad rep. It’s often underestimated and dismissed as something that’s completed, therefore irrelevant. “It’s in the past,” I’ve heard people say. “Why spend time learning about people who are already dead?” And while yes, a President’s biography may end with an afterword from the author, the whole story is never really over. People forget. They get selfish or act out of fear, and the same mistakes repeat.  

You may find this unsettling, but I find comfort in it. Uncertainty is never new, 

As I write this, I don’t want you to think that I’m telling you to curl up with a history book and tune out the world. That’s impossible today when the news is in everything, and misses the point entirely. Knowing this doesn’t make the present world easier to live in, but it makes it understandable. And when we understand something, we fear it a little less. 

If I had told my middle school self that one day I’d be sharing her greatest insecurities for the sake of making a case for history, she would have been incredibly confused–after screaming at me, of course. But I think she’d understand why I did it. 

• #education
• #history
• college