Nobody can tell me that society doesn’t appreciate history, but history as a field of study is relegated as a bookish, boring field of study. Nontheless, society glorifies it, many turn history into blockbuster Hollywood films that ignite patriotism but that doesn’t appreciate the lessons and stories offered by our ancestors. We live in such a short blip of time compared to the collective human experience; One of my favourite things to see is attempting to put this in perspective in that Cleopatra, lover and wielder of Marc Antony and Julius Ceaser, lived closer in time to us than she lived to the building of the Pyramids. Highly structured and capable human society has existed so long and we’ve lost nearly all of it to the wither of time. Regardless of this long lost story of humanity, we understand so little of the builders of the pyramids, and still have a fairly vague understanding of the roman empire. It might interest some to consider that our current concrete buildings are based largely off roman concretes and I often hear that it is still largely not understood how to make roman concrete which has structures which stand to this day around the whole mediterranian. Yet we’ve lost that connection to the past. To be fair, between then and now a lot has transpired, but weaved throughout this is the constant disregard for history. At the turn of to the 20th century (That’s refering to the 1900s, but the first century is the years between 0-999 because we can’t have a “Zeroth” century), academics saw the reduction of History programmes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My hypothesis would be that the succeeding fields in humanities and social sciences is often considered to overlap and overtake what many might assume history might offer. Studies in anthropology or other such fields offers an adequate study of the past. Perhaps what people might not understand is what history studies. The layman answer might be simply “The Past,” but that doesn’t accurately describe history. Anthropology, Political Science, English, Indigenous Studies\/Native Studies, and endless others all study the past in one way or another. History is the study of documents. The almighty primary documents is the fundamental purpose of a historian, studying and applying documents to the understanding of events. The crux of the issue is that a historian’s job is never done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is resolutely impossible to ever give a clear picture of the past. The biggest barrier is the lack of documentation. Some things people just didn’t care to record, especially things regarding the illicit economy or regarding to deeply personal. Look no further than the Diary of Anne Frank in which her father edited her diary to omit things regarding sexuality and puberty. Not that I believe it wasn’t done with good intentions, it obfuscate the depiction of the past. Historians have analyzed the original Diary to identify this descepency, but it makes me wonder how much this has been done through the past or more commonly, how few have not recorded their experience and how this can shape our construction of society. Most often we get the stories of literate people, meaning relatively educated with access to certain services. The story of the majority of the population is left to speculation based on art, relations to others or other such descriptions. Rarely do we get the viseral experience of the drudgery of everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Currently studying America’s late 19th century history, so many things I cannot even begin to study or understand, and I had a great grandmother who lived over 100 years and while likely did not have memories of the exact things I wonder, it just goes to show how short our memory is. In the matter of two generations, memory falls off the pages of texts and it is left for the interpretation and representations of future generations to make sense of the past, and yet we are so focused on the here and now we forget to ponder the story of an issue. While not to suggest History has all the answer to society’s woes, but one might better understand a situation if we were to take a moment to study the history. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nobody can tell me that society doesn’t appreciate history, but history as a field of study is relegated as a bookish, boring field of study. Nontheless, society glorifies it, many turn history into blockbuster Hollywood films that ignite patriotism but that doesn’t appreciate the lessons and stories offered by our ancestors. We live in such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[39],"tags":[17,40,5,42,41],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}