As someone who is deeply interested in British constitutional law, it’s extremely important to have a firm grasp of history. It’s terribly easy to get things confused otherwise and assuming what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Also helpful to understand how and why Parliament came about, and why Britain never had a revolution. It’s frustratingly easy for people to characterise all monarchs and aristocrats as being the very worst of the Franco-Russian mould.
Wouldn’t the civil war technically constitute a revolution? Sure it didn’t have the lasting effect of the French of Russian ones, but it did overthrow the political establishment (even if it was only temporarily).
/Hijack
…ehhhhh, kind of. It was a very top-down revolution, if that, and didn’t change much of how society was governed. The King and House of Lords were abolished but after a brief, three-year Commonwealth run by the Rump Cromwell effectively restored much of the old, monarchical constitution with himself as king in all but name. He even restored the House of Lords (under a different name). The suffrage and constituencies of the House of Commons were altered and engineered to favour his supporters. When this failed to work as he wished he installed direct military rule until just before his death.
What was revolutionary were the ideas behind it - that a King could be removed and that Parliament was supreme as the representative of the people. But even these were not entirely new, weren’t fully appreciated at the time, and were suppressed after the Restoration, to play a far fuller part in the Glorious Revolution of 1689.
It’s a fascinating period, I’m sure you’ll agree 
I don’t disagree with that statement. But surely you know that many of those sources may themselves be fiction. There is so much more we don’t know than we do. And unlike a hard science like evolution, there is no conclusive means of increasing the accuracy and testing the surmises.
This is IMHO, and I’ve stated my opinions, and why I don’t think a thorough knowledge of history is important. I do not dismiss the value of studying history as a discipline, but I don’t think the details are very important. And there is no doubt that the record becomes more accurate as time advances and we record more information. But history is very long, and the further back we go, the less we know, and the less we can be sure of. I’m personally satisified with history as a collection of facts and figures, and the knowlege that many of those come from unconfirmable sources. The rest of it I can do without. If your opinion is different, that’s fine with me. I’m glad that you find it useful.
The Second Stone’s corollary is: “Those who do learn from history are doomed to make mistakes too.”
As to the OP’s question, some people have no interest in history and no need for it. But people who want to learn from the past should know history. If you want to learn from mistakes of the past, you have to know what those mistakes were. Same with successes. It doesn’t matter if it is political history, or engineering history or art history, the benefit of experience is learned through the study of history.
As a huge fan of history, I must admit that its usefulness for the majority of people is pretty minimal. Lots of smart people don’t know much history and frankly don’t need to.
I think a knowledge of history makes for a more interesting person who can benefit from the wisdom of previous generations, but, for instance, my doctor doesn’t need to know the evolution of the scalpel to be a good surgeon.
History major here. While I don’t agree with TriPolar that history isn’t important, and will say more about that below, I feel that he’s being piled on a bit here. It’s just not true that modern history books are all absolutely objective. Of course many works adhere to the standards you describe, but historians are just as capable of making specious, biased arguments as their colleagues in any other discipline. Just because you footnote a claim doesn’t mean your reading of the primary document is accurate, fair, or 100% based on the available evidence. For example:
In other words, past historical accounts of Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech were inaccurate (I agree that “fiction” is a stretch). So why assume that no currently accepted historical narratives are equally inaccurate?
Also, I would guess that TriPolar’s first thought was about the version of American history that’s taught to schoolchildren, which is less fiction than creation myth (e.g. George Washington and the cherry tree). I do agree that it’s fascinating and instructive to consider the why and how of the development of that narrative.
Anyway, on the usefulness of history, I think it’s more than having information to draw upon when you’re making a decision that may have similar consequences to a past decision. I studied urban history and I was always more concerned with understanding how things got to be the way they are now. For example, at the broadest level, why did people start living in cities? I don’t think you can truly successfully navigate the modern world without understanding how our insanely complex economic, social, and political systems ended up being what they are now.
Well, if you ignore the guns, germs, and steel parts, Jared Diamond’s introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel highlights a textbook case – the capture of the Incan emperor Atahuallpa at the Battle of Cajamarca. The odds at Cajamarca defy the imagination: 168 men with 12 inaccurate, slow-firing matchlock guns overcame 80,000 warriors whose morale was high from a recent victory.
The whole thing is worth a read, for context:
But of specific interest to this thread is the advantage written history gave to the Spaniards.
Atahuallpa was captured, and ultimately killed, and his civilization was destroyed, and everyone he ever knew was killed or enslaved because he didn’t read history.
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Degree in History. Job in Fast Foods. Next question.
Stop it.
Is that a fact or your opinion? You don’t seem to have a positive regard for qualification in history but do you have any evidence to back up your implication that it’s useless?
I don’t even know what you mean by this. Stop what? Stop posting? Stop posting in this thread? I only made one post. Stop talking about history? Diamond? Incas? Conquistadors? Matchlocks? Conflict?
I think handsomeharry was conceding the power, persuasiveness and unanswerability of your argument.
This author might disagree with you. Blanket statements are usually incorrect statements.
Part of the problem is the manner in which history is taught. Students are taught to regurgitate dates and locations of famous battles and learn the names of presidents and kings. This ignores the actual narrative of what happened. History isn’t a set of dusty old facts and statistics. It is the story of Humanity, for goodness sake! Everything we do becomes part of History. So, it should be a foundation subject taught early on if only with good historical fiction to begin with. Or simple but completely accurate stories about the early settlement of North America by the English. Perhaps a story about the founding of Charleston, including the slaves and how we interacted with the native population. That kind of thing can make a difference in how young people feel about ‘History’. You might even have some of them look forward to the class.
Took the words right out of me mouth!
Or there’s William Faulkner (I think), who said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it sometimes rhymes.”
This thread is descending into quip central riding the famous quote train. Anyone got any actual insights of their own to add?
Here’s an example from my own life.
I was educated in England during the 1980s. At that time the IRA was setting off bombs in England, particularly in London (I missed one myself by a few minutes).
At school we were taught nothing whatsoever about England’s history in Ireland. And none of the news reports couched the atrocities in anything like historical context. Even at the time of the hunger strikes.
The contemporary portrayal of the IRA in England at the time was as a bunch of psychopaths motivated purely by spilling the blood of innocents. While this is understandable given the atmosphere of the time, it was absolutely counterproductive in working towards a political solution, or in allowing the British voters to vote for those who would work towards peace.
One of the prevailing opinions amongst many Britons at the time was that the Republic of Ireland was part of the UK, and the bombings were viewed with bemusement, reinforcing the ‘psychopaths’ view. This view is still in occurrence: just the other day I met a 50-something Englishwoman who did not know the Republic of Ireland has been independent for more than half a century.
While not denying that there were bloodthirsty psychopaths in the IRA, if you think that a political organisation’s sole motivation is death and destruction, you are not going to vote for anything other than a confrontational ‘solution’ to the problem.
I suggest that a general historical understanding of the roots of IRA and INLA terrorism (and I say IRA specifically, because Loyalist violence was confined to NI and largely glossed over ‘down the pub’ by British people) among the British, and particularly English, population would have led to greater political pressure to come to a resolution, and would have saved a lot of lives.