Living the nerd life: What would I do without history?

Soooo often my students ask me, "Why do I need to know about history? When am I ever going to use

this in my life?" My usual response is "because someday you'll be history" which usually does well to stop them in their tracks but it still feels a little weak. I think about this everyday. Do we actually need to know history is it even really important? Should we even still teach it in school?

I will give my academic response first. YES, ABSOLUTELY! In other classes students don't actually think about deep social concepts that have wracked the human mind for centuries. The more I teach and the more I try to help my students understand history and people in history the way I do, or the way real studies of history do, the more I see that understanding history is actually really complex. The reason why, well because people are complex, and if you didn't know it history is filled with people. This kind of thinking is excellent to develop, because it can be applied in so many subjects and aspects of life. If you have some good analytical weapons on your belt than you are much better equipped human being than many others. Also people have a difficult time understanding that history is not actually just about history, but about how humans have lived on this earth and how we left our mark on it. I believe John Green says it well. BTW John Green is awesome, even though the first book I read by him was throughly shocking and even offensive, still I think John Green is pretty cool.

An Arrested British Suffragist,
"Mrs. Pankhurst has been clapped in
irons again!"

History can also whisper the secrets of life to us! There have been billions of people on this earth and we think that they haven't experienced the same things we do. How era-centric are we? "Well the Bible doesn't apply to me" oh that's right because people don't question their faith anymore, Or ponder what their purpose on earth is. Or the Revolution doesn't have any relevance to my experience in America? Oh that's right because we don't try and create a society based on equality and liberty any more! The Magna Carta, we can just forget about it because I'm all for despotism. Humans did not just wake up one morning and think "Hey how about we free slaves, and while we're at it let's let women actually vote for things in our country." We are the way we are today, because of History! Every single part of our life is touched by history and to understand it in a deeper way that applies to humans, learn about history.

My social reasons: History really has never been about dates, names, and places. Even the early historians like Herodotus, did not write the history down so that he could torture people with

Nuclear bomb testing dummies

memorizing dates, and names, and what people did. He and others wrote it so that, us in the future could understand those people, so that we could answer the why's of history, and that our collective memory isn't lost. One thing that is so sad about studying history is that we forget that these people we read about were actually real people. They aren't just characters written about in a book, instead they breathed the same air we do, they walked on the same earth, they felt pain, they thought, they were the ones in control of their lives. I think it is often difficult to actually put our selves in the past and see that these people really were just like us, they were people who lived, and then became history. I believe that I didn't quite come to that empathetic revelation until my capstone course in college, when I was writing my senior thesis about Northern school teachers going to the Reconstruction Era south and teaching freed slaves. It may have been the whole school teacher thing, but I started to feel these people from the past speak to me, tell me their story, and pass on their memory to me. Being as religious as I am, I believe that these women actually knew that I was reading their story, and diaries, I could almost feel them as I researched. Their stories are not forgotten, they should not be forgotten, otherwise we will be forgotten and the human race will sink into the ground faster than our time.

Me at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay

Need I say more...