Why Study History? - A Study of Time and People

People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, is the study of the past. Why bother with what has been? Why should we care about the past? hIsToRy DoEsN't AfFeCt Me, WhY dO i NeEd To KnOw ThIs? Short answer: because you live in this world.

The events of history are not just facts or dates. Study of history is the study of our ancestors, their struggles and triumphs; it tells the story of how you and I got here, and can help us determine if it has meaning. History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, it is where science, mathematics, language arts, and human interaction converge; it is how we understand the cosmos - the world and universe around us - and how it affects us.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

History offers information (a lot) about how people and societies behave. It helps put how we act in perspective. Major aspects of a society's operation, like domestication of plants and animals, mass elections, or military alliances cannot be set up as precise experiments. History must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory for experiments. This is why the United States of America is commonly referred to as "the American Experiment." Information from the past is our best evidence in the unavoidable quest for meaning. History helps us understand change and how the society we live in came to be, which can help us avoid mistakes made in the past, and make a better future for everyone. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened we have to look for factors that took shape earlier.

History Contributes to Moral Understanding

History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration. "History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.

History Provides Identity

History also helps provide identity, it includes evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and how they have survived over time. For many Americans, studying the history of one's own family is the most obvious usf of history for establishing a family identity. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, such as ethnic groups in the United States, use history for similar identity purposes.

Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship

History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple observer.

What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?

Critical Thinking. The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of information. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.

Determine what's REAL. Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting viewpoints. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.

Recognizing change. Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." How can we make the world better if we don’t understand past efforts to do so?

Still not convinced? Don’t let me tell you, leave it to some of history’s most influential people.

Original text By Peter N. Stearns - (1998)

Yes, but HOW do we know? Sources.

Things that "happen" over time, tend to leave evidence. This evidence can take many forms, such as sources. There are primary sources and secondary sources. Sometimes it is physical; you can tell where battles happened because if you sort through that soil, you'll find weapons, bones, and things of that nature. Sometimes it is informational; writing has been going on for thousands of years. We know about many of the world's earliest civilizations because of what they wrote down, or from artifacts (physical evidence of people).

Most early records of human history are records of trade, or sales between merchants. Even today, some of the most reliable evidence about what happens in the world is bills of sale, complaints, or tax records. Sometimes, the trash of a civilization tells you much about what the people of that civilization ate, drank, and items they used; sometimes you can infer that something terrible happened to a place by the fact that it burned to the ground, or people there were killed by an invading army, or engulfed by an erupting volcano, ravaged by a plague or pandemic, etc. The physical things we find that explain the past are called artifacts. As early artifacts, written records, and sources are compiled as evidence; historians can tell a story about the past that they can prove is true.