History is boring.
There are about 6,030,000 results for āHistory is boringā if you Google it. Yeah. I Google things like this.
Head over to Twitter and you are guaranteed a steady stream of heavy sighs and eye rolls tweeted round the world about the subject.
The collective groans about history haunt me like the melodies of Who choirs that plague the Grinch. I guarantee you that I too find myself in the comfort of my lair like the hairy green What, plotting a devious scheme to thwart their common unity.
There is quite literally so much about the past that weāve yet to discover. After 5-6 generations of Egyptian archeological digs, weāre STILL digging up new shit. Even Star Fleet devotees predict weāll still be exploring, peace keeping, and researching in 2399 and thatās really not all that far away from now.
So, why the insufferable whining about studying history? Rhetorical question. We all know the way itās written, presented, and taught is boring.
Iām inclined to believe that we think āhistory is boringā because itās so beyond what we can grasp of our own existence that we canāt connect to the narratives. Itās not relevant. So, it doesnāt resonate.
Itās as if the events and figures we read and learn feel more like the made up characters of billion-dollar media franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, or Star Trek.
ā¦and yetā¦
Star Wars was influenced by the Vietnam War.
Marvelās X-Men was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement.
And Star Trek has drawn directly from the moral and social problems of Earth.
Though, we do revere participants of the Second World War much like we do Luke, Steve, Tony Kirk, and PicardāāThe Greatest Generation.ā
According to [Tom] Brokaw, "[a]t every stage of their lives they were part of historic challenges and achievements of a magnitude the world had never before witnessed." - Clint Pumphrey, HowStuffWorks
While this may be true to an extent, have we ever felt the experience of their personal struggles, shortcomings, love, loss, and victory the way we did for beloved franchise superheroes?
We forget that many of them were barely 18, some as young as 12 on the frontlines; that there was discord among themselves and on the home front; that some fought to be recognized as valuable contributors; that they fell in love, were insecure, and frightful of death and dying in combat.
I, myself, might not have known any of this had my family not read my grandfatherās letters he wrote during the war shortly after he passed. Amid a prophetic amount of āI love youās, we learned he had KP a lot, caused mischief with the MPs, and REALLY enjoyed military night life. *cough*lush*cough*
In fact, Iāve since become enamored with how historians build their research from speeches, letters, comics/cartoons, songs, legislation, court decisions, journals/diaries, interviews/transcripts, artifacts, autobiographies, statistics, experiments, and photographs. Newspaper and magazine articles. ETC.
Just think, one day historians will read our emails and messages threads to reconstruct the history weāre living this very moment. Better make sure yāall add a āTech Clean-upā clause to your wills now.
Weāve yet to find the letters my grandmother wrote to her soldier. Sadly, thereās so many unanswered questions between them that we might never solve. But to know them that much better now makes me yearn to know more about others like them who, as Dame Judy Dench puts it, have āsailed through the universe of time.ā And it makes it ever pressing for me to leave a treasure trove of research for a future historian and to encourage others to do the same. Itās one reason Iāve started to exchange written letters with my sister. Plus, you never knowā¦maybe the Christopher Nolan of tomorrow will one day want to share my history.
TTFN ~ Angelica
Random thing I walked into Dorianās office to say
If our biological systems are moving when weāre static, but we also have potential energy since we could physically move, does that mean we have both kinetic and potential energy? But then, we also travel through timeā¦in the same plane that people from 100 years ago didā¦so it is basically parallel universes separated by time? š³š„“š¤Æ
TikToks Iāve watched more than 5 times this week
Pluto had me crying.
Cat view while Iām writing
You need to readā¦
Furious Hours by Casey Cep - Itās the perfect book that showcases the importance of personal notes, letters, diaries, etc. to piece together Harper Leeās story (she only published the one book) in a really unique way unlike any other biographies. So much gets left untold, locked up in vaults. A surprising and fun straight through read. (An unbelievable feat since I read like 7 books at a given time).