Why Study History Essay

Why study history?

When trying to apprehend why you should study history it is good to have the understanding on what history is and what it contains. In the essay written by Peter N. Stearns, he gives a multitude of examples and reasons why history is a subject that should be studied. Throughout my life people have always used the allusion: learn from your history, I agree with this and it’s meaning. Even though historians don’t affect anything in the present or in their immediate timeline, what they do affects the people in the future.

The only way we are able to learn is through our past and historians help us do that.

Why We Study History

History helps us understand people and societies

In this section, the author talks about how history “offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave.” I believe that this is true because scientists in order to study human behaviors and the societies they lived in they had to rely on historians accounts of that time.

Since these people were not able to witness the happenings first hand they had to use whatever the historians have written up from the past.

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

When the author begins talking about change, I completely agree on the fact that history is needed to move forward and change. But when the author is talking about how history is used in the study and understanding of things like alcoholism, I don’t think that he is right.

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Alcohol in plays lots of roles in history but learning from it scientifically is not one, more often I believe that the scientist would be the one performing experiments and people will be getting the information from there.

What skills does a student of history develop?

This is another section that I thought was really important and that I agreed on. Stearn talks about different things that a student will ascertain when they study history such as the ability to assess conflicting i…