The subject of history has never been my forte and my classmates would wonder why economics was my choice over history as my fourth subject (it was this system where out of four subjects, you could assign one as your fourth, or an elective: if you passed it, well you get credit, and if you flunked, it made no difference to the final result). History with its many places and dates and not to mention who is who, and of where and how many of who (the same name in a roll call list) you have was not my favourite place to be running around.
My late professor of world history however had his own way of telling us why learning history is significant. He would do so by asking the class a question, "Why was Napoleon defeated when he tried to invade Russia?" As we pondered what the answer might be, he would reply "because he did not study his geography." Simply put, the mighty army of Napoleon (in a wrong calculation of time) is said to have been defeated by the harsh weather conditions of Russia as the Russian army continued to retreat further into the country and winter set in. As we did our "oohs" and "aahs" at this answer, it was followed up with the second question, "Why was Hitler defeated when he tried to invade Russia?" And once more he would provide the answer, "Because he did not study his history lessons; because if he studied history Hitler would have known what happened to Napoleon." My professor would then go on to explain how in almost a similar fashion, the German soldiers of World War 2 sent to invade Russia met a similar fate as the French army because of the onset of winter. We can definitely challenge the truthfulness of the proposition, but my professor by brilliantly bringing these two pieces of history made a good point: history has lessons to offer us if we will but read through its pages and learn. George Santayana, an Italian thinker and writer said "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain in a 1948 speech, rephrased it as "those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." Very succint, very true.
The study of history is often associated with memorizing persons, dates and events. That is one way to start but that is not the only way. When the task of history is reduced to just memorizing persons, dates and events it becomes tedious and rather dull. Perhaps a better way to approach history is to learn from both the mistakes of the past and the successes of the past. And yet, we do not seem to be a race of people that learns quickly from history. For instance, the world is facing a pandemic right not and you may have heard the phrase, "we are living in unprecedented times" (unprecedented means never done or known before). But is that really the case? Yes, a pandemic of such global proportion as this, is probably unprecedented, but human history has been wrecked by epidemics. We have enough lessons on what can be expected and how must we behave, but are we listening-either to lessons from history or to present instructions?
We are all rooted in a history and through that history is formed our identity-our distinct story. As we read of the Old Testament people, their prayers were often tagged with the proclamation "the God of our fathers Abraham, Issac and Jacob." Why was that so? We could say that there was history involved in those persons through whom they traced their lineage and above all gave their allegiance to the God that these ancestors served. Reading through the genealogies in the Bible is quite tedious. Reading the formula "son of so, son of so, son of so" is by no mean inspiring or motivating and yet that is preservation of history. So history gives us a sense of heritage, a legacy and an identity to hold on to.
I recently finished teaching a module on history and in the first class I was given the same comment that I made in the beginning. However, as we explored the different ages and made efforts to draw lessons to learn for today, witnessed their errors and their celebrated their achievements, history came alive. In it we found the lure of various directions that humanity was being pulled towards, some noble, some ignoble. And this we learned afresh, while we cannot undo the past, the future can be won in the present with lessons from the past. Go read a biography, read up on an event, read on a movement, there are lessons to be learned. And may you meet a professor like mine to spark that history buff in you!
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