History : A Journal

Even though I have taken this subject (Social Studies) for two times, still, this topic attract my mind. For me, history is forever important to us as history taught us on how to improve day by day, and how to be a better person. They say, the best teacher is experience. Experience is of course, from the past. No one summons experience from the future.

I have wrote journals about history and civilization last two semester, but I think that was still insufficient for me to obtain required marks to pass. Here I am, repeating everything for once ever, again. We have learnt about history from high school, even done a project for that, in form three. But to be honest, when I step up to the university, my perspective towards history deviated bit by bit, like our Earth that is forever moving even we didn’t realize about it. If before, History is all about Parameswara, Malacca, 1400-1511, how Penang was separated from Kedah and so on. But now, in the university, in this Social Studies subject, suddenly I was introduced to certain characters, that they claimed as father of History such as Asa briggs and Edward Hallet Carr. These characters shared their own respective definition about History. Weird is, school syllabus never expose these names. I learnt about Stamford raffles, JWW birch and James brooke but Asa briggs, who is him or her?

In university, I also discovered the difference between history in school and history in university. History in school taught us about events, highlights us about figures, whether good figure or bad figure is decided by the learner themselves. Some of us might assume that Dato Maharaja Lela is good but others may took him as an goddamn devilish killer. Same case to Hang tuah and Hang Jebat. There are groups that take Hang tuah as the protagonist as he protected the sultan, but there are also people that think Hang tuah is a foolish dumbass for abandoning the truth only to protect the corrupted leader.

While in university history has left those events behind, and taught us on how history occur and how things are to be verified as history. In this topic of history I learnt about the scope of history, perspective from Quran and western, the sources, primary and secunder. How history are claimed as history, by the evidences, such as oral, written, visual and archaeological. That is the difference between history in school and history in university that I managed to unearth. For the topic civilization, I couldn’t say much because I never learn about it before even though I know what is the raw meaning of civilization itself. But I can comment that the relationship is so near that they compile the topics together. Because with history, follows the civilization. But civilization can’t work without history. I still remember what my lecturer said about the stages of civilization. The first stage, the development stage. The second stage, the climax stage, where the civilization become so modernized to its maximum, and the third stage, the downfall, the decline of a civilization. And then the cycle turns around and around until the doomsday.

As familiar, what goes around, come around.