History - is it just me who hates the subject?

Grandmabatty

I have always loved history. How can we possibly learn how to progress if we don't know where we came from? The lessons of the past are worth learning

Unfortunately nobody seems to have taken the lessons of the past on board.

Humans and progression - a contradiction in terms, in my glass-half-empty philosophy .

I do still love to learn about the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and the Medieval period, though.

The study of history is essential but the focus is important. My school taught social and economic history to the A stream and political history (i.e. kings and queens and wars) as more suited to the B and C streams. Attempts by politicians to direct schools to teach or omit some aspects should be resisted. Remember the Soviets suppressed history they didn't want - for example, the terrible famine of the early 1930s which is described in the film Mr Jones.

I love history. In my case WWII because my grandparents lived through the war as did my parents. As I’m Dutch my family lived through 5 years of occupation and the Dutch hunger winter where up to a 1000 people a day died of starvation. Therefore that period of history is of real interest to me. I used to go to schools and talk about how they lived and had to eat tulip bulbs to survive (if you take out the middle but with the shoot they are apparently edible) I then used to make a soup of things people would have used to try and eat ( left the bulbs and cat out of it as people were that desperate) to bring history alive. I still got thank you letters from teachers and kids. It was so much fun to do but what I was trying to convey was that freedom comes at a terrible price

I love history but I couldn't stand my history school teachers. They just banged on and on about all the killings etc. and in the most brutal way too.

They droned on about all the bad parts but never taught us good and interesting history parts so at the library I educated myself about it!

I love history and also Social history....

The subjects I hated were cooking, sewing etc. Us girls were forced to do it but there were never any boys in those classes. Sexist and chauvinistic. I quit school aged 16 in 1981, my birthday is April and I should have stayed until September but I left as soon as I turned 16 on 29th April. I never ever went back. They just tried to teach us girls we should be subservient little housewives and mothers and we shouldn't have our own brains and jobs.

I still hate cooking, needlework etc., now and won't do it!

I love history, but I do find all the killing and torture (often in the name of religion) very depressing. But have things changed that much today?

Each to their own...I love love history and learning about the past and also love geography. They were my 2 favourite subjects at school. I became PE teacher as I loved and was good at sport but it was a toss up between Geography and PE.....PE won. If you don't like history so what....

If you don't learn from history you just make the same mistakes again. History should increase understanding and enable civilisation to progress - if rather slowly and patchily.

I'm another enthusiast for social history. Often think about how would eg medieval people have coped with this or that...The Time traveller books by Ian Mortimer are rivetting
www.penguin.co.uk/series/IANMORT/ian-mortimers-time-travellers-guides

Callistemon21

Did anyone else have From Ur to Rome as their first text book at Grammar School?

Yes! A small red battered looking book in the first year of secondary school. I'd forgotten all about it until you said.

I never studied history at school. I have recently discovered ancient history through Conn Iggulden’s books (fictional I know, but very closely based on fact).
And I am nearly at the end of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World. What an eye opener. A completely unbiased overview of how the world we know today has developed from prehistory to Putin. I’m blown away that until relatively recently parts of what is now Russia was still ruled by khans descended from Genghis. And just how easily countries/leaders seem to stumble into war on the lightest of excuse. A recommend - if long - read.

I completely agree about Ian Mortimer‘s Time Traveller books, Helenanne.

Luckygirl, I know what you mean about the depressing effect of looking at wars and what they show about human nature. When I took A level history I was startled by the way that nations behaved towards each other, which reminded me of children in a nursery, grabbing things off each other and hitting out.

However, overall I absolutely love history and find it fascinating. I especially like The Rest is History podcast by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. If any history enthusiasts don’t know it, I can highly recommend it.

Studying history does prevent people from being naive about human nature. I used to think that people were naturally good until society got at them. I no longer think that. People have behaved horribly in so many different societies.

My impression is that military history has more male fans and social history more female ones. Like others on this thread, I particularly like social history myself.

As Joseann says, there are some very inspiring people to learn about in history. Elizabeth Fry, William Wilberforce and so many others.

BTW there has rarely been a war between two democracies. Democracy is obviously the way to go! If the number of democracies increases, that is progress.

I absolutely love it but my OH isn’t too keen. Then again he really liked geography and I loathed it almost as much as I located maths.

Much depends on the teachers you have and your general outlook on life. A great teacher can inspire her pupils. A bad one can bore you half to death.

I'm a historian. I'm still fascinated by lots of aspects of history. I think how it is taught is paramount to 'catching' enthusiasm.

However, I offer the idea that the only lesson we learn from history is that we are bound to repeat the same mistakes.

These mistakes are often just to do with land and power grabbing.

I have always maintained that history is really only about the movement of people. Why people have moved around the planet and now want to move into space. Why some people chose to move, were made to move, or just stayed where they were. To me this offers a whole new layer of interest that can be applied to any historical period.

keepingquiet, don’t you think that ideas can also have a strong influence on events? Christianity, Islam, Marxism… all have affected societies and the lives of those within them. Tom Holland’s Dominion sounds very interesting on this (I have it but haven’t read it yet).

I suppose ideas can be one reason that people want to move around the planet, such as to spread an ideology, or, like the Nazis, to gain Lebensraum for their own ’superior’ race.

Ah, History! I was generally good at it in school, but managed to fail my O Level (though I got the usually essential 5 passes, inc English & Maths). I blamed the question-setters. However, the syllabus and standards of teaching varied widely round the country, and I suspect little has changed?! We seemed to cover the Romans, Henry 8th and Wellington/Napoleon almost endlessly, but by subsequent watching of many documentaries, I've filled-in many of the gaps, especially re North America, WW1 & WW2.

For the OP, and others, blaming our bloodthirsty past, well, yes, sadly Mankind is like that. As recently as the 80s, the Rwandan tribal conflict massacred between 1 and 2 million innocent victims, just after WW2 India had to be partitioned due to the massive religious bloodshed there, and even in the 90s in civilised Europe, there was a genocidal conflict with innocent civilians being massacred in the Balkans. Oh, and I nearly forgot the massive loss of life in WW1 and 2, and that driven by Stalin and Mao.

We can only hope that 'civilisation' finds a better way forward, maybe at some point the UN (an org unthinkable in its concept for most of history) will work out how to stop the major powers using their Veto to block resolutions if THEIR interests are affected? And recognising historical mistakes is all part of that, isn't it?

I had no interest in history during my school days because our teacher made it so boring! Documentaries have now opened my eyes to so many things I wish we'd have been taught. The Great Fire of London being just one example. I guess teachers had to stick to a syllabus and now wonder if mine was as disinterested in our lessons as I was!

I find history to be fascinating and enjoy the fact that things can change.

Me too

Skye17

*keepingquiet*, don’t you think that ideas can also have a strong influence on events? Christianity, Islam, Marxism… all have affected societies and the lives of those within them. Tom Holland’s Dominion sounds very interesting on this (I have it but haven’t read it yet).

I suppose ideas can be one reason that people want to move around the planet, such as to spread an ideology, or, like the Nazis, to gain Lebensraum for their own ’superior’ race.

Mmm... the spread of Christianity began with the Roman Empire when there was greater mobility especially around the mediterranean.
Islam was also associated with land grabbing in that area as in the Ottoman Empire.
Marxism as an ideology also led to the formation of the Soviet Union which still has repurcussions today, as in Ukraine, although Marxism haslong ceased to exist in Russia itself.
I hadn't read or even heard of Tom Holland until I just looked him up- maybe I'll give him a go soon!
I believe politics can hi-jack ideology to further its power base, which almost inevitably leads to land grabbing of some sort.
Many ideologies, including religious ones, don't start out that way but inevitably become part of the political exercise of power. It is complicated but I don't believe all ideologies lead to migration, but some migrations occur as a result of humans needing to escape that ideology.
We see this with the Jews throughout history, and these days, people taking great risks to escape north korea for example, which has no imperialist aims- as yet!

I’m with you, I hated it at school and hate it now.

We are the descendants of survivors.
My own dna shows that I have Danish blood in me. Was that from Danish immigrants or the Viking contingent?
For there was no actual race of people called Vikings. The word simply describes the activity or act of going to plunder.
They were Danish when they came as merchants. Vikings when they came to kill. As to the depiction of Viking's wearing horned helmets? Pure fantasy. They were too good at fighting to wear anything which could be grabbed and hinder them killing the natives whose treasures they wanted.
My dna also shows that through the Irish girl who went to America to marry into a long established American family, I’m descended from one of the original settlers who arrived in America on the Mayflower.
History relates to everything we do,
everything each of us, are.
So to stupidly say I Hate History, is just that. Stupid.
We all are the Result of History. Each and every one of us.

I enjoyed history at school and still do. I much prefer social history, though - not keen on the ins and outs of battles. I think if I hadn’t understood and enjoyed history, it would have made me a much poorer musician and teacher as it is so intertwined with music as well as the other arts. As a little girl, I had the Ladybird Book of Clothes and Costume in a Christmas stocking. I still have it and it is almost falling apart. If a child was learning an eighteenth century minuet, for example, l would show them the picture of people wearing eighteenth century clothes. We would talk about it and how it would affect the dance (a minuet, as I am sure most people know, was a very popular dance in 3/4 time). I am sure that being able to picture real people in context makes such a difference. In the last few years, I have been able to show people in eighteenth century costumes dancing a minuet on YouTube. They still like the Ladybird book, though.