The subject and discipline of history is an important element of human knowledge. Now most people are familiar to some degree about history through public education and some through higher education. Some find it interesting, others find it not so interesting. Some remember their lessons in it well, while others didn’t. Some learned only as much as circumstances called them to while others took the initiative to learn further of it. As a history major and young historian, I have looked further into knowledge of history, and in reflection I have gained increased awareness and an increased realization of the importance history has to our awareness. The condition of people’s knowledge and sense of history affects the way in which they can understand and conceive of the world.
The subject of history is relevant to our lives. Contrary to what some have claimed, history isn’t just irrelevant stories of the past. History as a subject is the facts of humanity’s past, in all its conditions, mechanisms, meaning and value. History as an intellectual discipline is the effort to seek knowledge and understanding of historical matters. History is not something irrelevant to us, but rather it is something that can be rather intimately connected with us. I wouldn’t be living in my home town of Angelica if the founder, Phillip Church, hadn’t made the expedition. And that wouldn’t have happened if the United States hadn’t won the revolutionary war, if the Iroquois hadn’t signed the Treaty of Big Tree and if Robert Morris didn’t sign over land in the area to pay back his debts to the Church family. If people like John Irish, Kenyon Allen and Jonathan Allen hadn’t worked to create and advance Alfred University, then all of us at Alfred University and Alfred State would be somewhere else in life. There are countless instances in which what happened in past has affected people’s lives. From the school you attended, to the sports people enjoy, to the video games that people play, to the circumstances in which one came to even be born, there are stories of how they came to be. As the character of John Quincy Adams said in the movie Amistad, “who we are is who we were." The content of history is a part of our lives and thus awareness of it affects our lives.
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The study and discipline of history affects people’s awareness and understanding of the world in which they live. The knowledge and understanding which people gain of the world comes from the ability to effectively conceive of it. The quality and amount of the knowledge and understanding is based on how much people are able to use their intellect and data to establish an accurate mental picture. The history of the things is part of what in informs our understanding in the world.
Take for instance the example of the Middle East. Some people have the mistaken belief that the Middle East has always been a violent, poor, chaotic place, full of religious extremists (which is a stereotype even when talking about its current condition). But an awareness of the history of the region can see that the current condition of it is something that was created much more recently and that the condition was much more different. The ancient Middle East was home to some the key early civilizations in history. The medieval Middle East produced many advances in mathematics, science, technology, philosophy and medicine. The Ottoman Empire (which controlled much of the Middle East from the 15th century to the end of World War I) had, through much of its history, a greater degree of religious tolerance than Europe at the time. In the 1960s, nationalism, Arab Socialism and secularism were dominating trends in countries like Egypt. The region has had changes numerous times in its history. Likewise, the elements of history can point to how the region attained some of the conditions which it is seen to hold. Things such as some the ideological currents of the past few centuries, Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of Wahhabism and the Soviet-Afghan war help to explain why Al-Qaeda came to be. Historical knowledge has the capacity to help give better awareness to things and is a power to help replace poorer notions of something with more accurate ones.
In the same vain, the condition of historical understanding which people have the dynamics what notions of history are taught and expressed, have an effect on the way in which people effectively conceive of things in the world. While these topics are worth looking in depth on their own and I hope to write future articles on them later, they help show why these historical matters impact understanding. In the U.S. a significant aspect of enculturating people into an idea of what America is and what it means to be American is based on educating people on a selection of aspects of American History. Examples are using the Revolutionary war to convey a sense of freedom and democracy, using the Civil War to convey a notion of human equality and national unity, using the Civil Rights movement to portray a spirit of progress and using World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. People use narratives with claims of historical information to make the case for numerous things, from LGBT historians recounting past notions of sexuality to challenge views they consider bigoted, to scholars debating the merits of a policy, to average people using stories of past events to make predictions. The power of historical conceptions on people has also motivated people to create and perpetuate historical mythology to influence opinion. For instance, the anti-prohibition movement and its wealthy backers created a mythology of prohibition being a massive failure and variety of inaccurate and false claims about it, in order to discourage people from ever attempting it again. These conceptions, narratives, and mythologies of the past can dangerously go wrong; such as when the Nazis propagate a mythical ancient Arian society in order to help convince people of to support their imperialist and genocidal ambitions. These thoughts and ideas on history matter because the effect how people think of things in the present and how they guide themselves as they act and move toward the future.
It is due to these reasons that I make the case of the importance of history to awareness. History is relevant to our lives and knowledge of it helps to enrich our understanding of the world around us. The ideas and notions of historical matters help influence how people view the world, and consequently how they will direct themselves in it. As Richard Weaver had wrote, History is like the memory of society, and as memory effects the character of individuals, history effects the character of a society. I would add that history affects the character of people and the condition of their lives. For which it seems rightful that we should the benefice of knowledge of it, and that we should have an understanding of historical matters which is aligned with historical truth.
Notes: For information and further reading look at: The Modern Middle East and North Africa; A History in Documents, by Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles Smith; The movie Amistad, by Stephan Spielberg; Actually Prohibition Was A Success, by Mark H. Moore, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually...;Temperance Facts, By W.G. Calderwood, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.3901507...; Visions of Order, by Richard M. Weaver.
