Why do people study history? I suppose there are a variety of reasons. Critics would say that it all happened a long time ago so why rake up the past? Would it not be better to look to the future? Others just say - who cares what happened in the past? I am too busy living my own life.

If you take a moment to think about it, however, there are some good reasons why history is important.

• We can always hope that we can learn from past mistakes, though cynics have said that the only lesson of history is that no-one learns from history.
• We can understand ourselves better if we understand the past.
• We may appreciate our own circumstances as a nation or people by understanding the past.
• We can improve our core skills in communicating, problem solving, evaluating and analysing.

Studying history is not, as some people might think, a matter of being given a vast amount of information, followed by feverish memorising of dates, places and people. In order to pass a course in the study of history you obviously need to know what happened in a given period. However, anyone wanting to study history rather than simply "read history books" must also consider why certain events happened. In addition, you should be able to evaluate the effect certain events had on people's lives. If you are new to the study of history you may well be surprised to discover that historians and history books often disagree about the answers to the above issues! Sometimes the history books cannot even agree on the same dates so you may wonder what chance poor history students have got.

Another important part of studying history is being able to read and understand "sources". These are divided into

# primary sources i.e. documents from the past such as letters, newspaper reports, speeches from parliament

and

# secondary sources i.e. various history books written by people who were not involved in the original events.

These days, these sources can be accessed not only through libraries but also through cd rom and the internet.

Finally, studying history should be an enjoyable and thought-provoking experience leading to have a life long interest in the subject.

More articles

, Return to home page