The Importance of History

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History is really important because it helps us to understand why we live the way we are living and why we are where we are as a species and country.   Studying history allows learning from the mistakes of our ancestors so we do not do the same things they did and work towards reaching a better place.  

 Historians are often asked, what is the use or relevance of studying History?  Why on earth does it matter what happened such a long time ago?  The answer is that History is inescapable.  It studies the past and the legacies of the past in the present.  Far from being a 'dead' subject, it connects things through time and encourages its students to take a long view of such connections.

All people and peoples are living histories.  To take a few obvious examples, communities speak languages that are inherited from the past.  They live in societies with complex cultures, traditions and religions that have not been created on the spur of the moment. People use technologies that they have not themselves invented.  And each individual is born with a personal variant of an inherited genetic template, known as the genome, which has evolved during the entire lifespan of the human species.

So understanding the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human.  That, in a nutshell, that is why History matters.  It is not just 'useful', it is essential.  


 The study of the past is essential for 'rooting' people in time.  Yet, why should that matter? The answer is that people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process.  Indeed, at the most extreme end of the out-of-history spectrum, those individuals with the distressing experience of complete memory loss cannot manage to negotiate on their own at all.  In fact, all people have a full historical context, to come to terms or comprehend.  But some, generally for reasons that are no fault of their own, grow up with a weak or troubled sense of roots or continuity and belonging.  Such as knowing who they are or where they come from and going.  For others, by contrast, the inherited legacy may even be too powerful and outright oppressive.   
In all cases, understanding History is integral to a good understanding of the condition of being human.  That allows people to build, and, as may well be necessary, also to change, upon a secure foundation.  Neither of these options can be undertaken well without understanding the context and starting points.  All living people live in the here-and-now but it took a long unfolding history to get everything to NOW.  And that history is located in time-space, which holds this cosmos together, and which frames both the past and the present.

Why did Hitler call American Negros the Real Jews


That Time Hitler Gave a Speech on Blacks in Germany

Jews Not Descendants of Abraham

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