The Historian - Yawn......Sorry, but history was never one of my favorite subjects, and I tended to find myself falling asleep during many classes. It may not have been the topic itself, it may have been the teacher. He was a big oaf with a deep voice, and when he spoke, the world stopped spinning and everything went dark.
Seriously though, I have always been extremely interested in history. I went through a phase a few years back where I ate up every book I could find on World War II. I have always been a firm believer that if we study our past, we have the opportunity to make fewer mistakes in the future. Notice I used the word 'opportunity'. Just because humans have the capacity to learn from their mistakes, does not mean they actually will.
Historians are a little like private investigators or archeologists digging for clues about a subject, and then arranging them in some sense of order. Hopefully if they accomplish this, they can also make their works interesting reading. Actually, when you get right down to it, I love a task where I can work alone and spend hours investigating a mystery.
I can't believe it. I started this article with the premise that historians were boring people and even more boring writers, and I finished with them being some kind of detectives. Go figure.
Next week's rant - Who knows?
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