I've Been Studying History and Now I'm Depressed

I’m taking the stupid Jeopardy test in a few weeks and I know I won’t pass – it was just an odd fluke that I passed the online screening test, because my history and geography knowledge is really poor. You have to take another test in person.

But I thought, since I was lucky enough to be invited to a regional tryout, I should work to improve my scores. And I probably ought to know more about the world anyway.

So I got some geography books (for kids, thought I’d start small) from the library and I’ve been gathering information in index cards, trying to put together a mental picture of where places are and who lives there.

Now I’m so fucking depressed.

It looks to me like whenever the world “gets smaller” because of increased exploration and travel, people just fight. Somebody takes someone over. People grab after resources. They don’t care about anything, just themselves — there’s talk about principles, sure, but whether it’s “spreading Christianity” or “fighting terrorism”, it’s really about getting yours. Ours.

The slogans are meaningless, and cruelty is staggering. Slavery and genocide. One book had a little blurb from a former slave (somehow he was freed in his 20s) who’d been kidnapped from West Africa as an 11-yr-old, describing his experience. My heart is broken over that one.

I don’t think human beings really WANT to live all THAT closely together, but it’s happening anyway. I see the same hatred and intolerance in our local newspaper’s forum, where the rednecks complain about Mexicans. They have no idea of the power of their fear and hatred.

Interesting, too, that 5000 years ago the Sahara was a grassland. I don’t know if human activity contributed to that change - but if AGW turns the midwestern U.S. into a desert, it’s going to get real ugly real quick.

Scary shit, history.

Yes, there are plenty of incidence of incredible human cruelty scattered throughout history. But there are also lots of inspiring stories of heroism, compassion, and perservence against grave injustice. Keep learning, and for every instance of horrible atrocity you’ll discover, you’ll be amazed to learn about some uplifting success (okay, maybe it’s not a 1 to 1 ratio, but there’s lots of good in with the bad).

My suggestion: Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which is replete with stories of “regular” people shaping the American experience

More for third-world nations than for us. Just the Northeast US alone could almost feed us if we utilized all available farmland, and that’s assuming that the same factors that made the Great American Desert more desert-y would not at the same time make the Northeast warmer. To say nothing of the northern Canadian plains.

But we certainly wouldn’t have any food left over to ship to the tropics!

I used to have an aversion to history. I trace it back to high school history classes where all it seemed to be was some king fighting some other king for some reason, being victorious only to be beaten down by yet another king 20 years later.

That’s all it was, wars and more wars, as if that’s all history was about.

Now, I really like history. I read books about historical accomplishments in science.

Like the book “Thunderstruck”, about Marconi, or “Endurance”, about Arctic exploration. “The Ghost Map”, about how a doctor discovered the cause of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1800’s.

I just finished “Einstein”. I also like more personal histories, like “The Glass Castle”.

History is now my favorite subject.

One way to look at things is to realize that happiness, good times, and uninterrupted peace don’t make for much recording. People concentrate on the notable things that happen. aside from births, marriages, changes in regime, and peaceful deaths, which flow on monotonously. So history is mainly a repetition of the awful things that happen – wars, invasions, pestilence, natural disasters. People record the two wars that took place in one location in a 50 year period, and ignore the longer periods of peace and prosperity in their recordings.

So, naturally, the historical record is going to look pretty damned depressing. If people aren’t doing awful things to each other, they’re catching it from Mother Nature.
Just keep in mind that the historical record is skewed to the outrageous and unusual, and you can keep a sense of perspective.

Thank you for your replies. :slight_smile: :cool:

I had a similar experience through studying art history.

In college, I took an art history survey course as an elective, because I wanted to learn more about art. What I discovered is that it was also a good way to learn more about history. It was a window into what people throughout the ages felt was important aesthetically and socially.

So I ended up taking more courses in the subject and ended up feeling like I had a more balanced view of the past, instead of just going from king to king, and war to war.

History is full of a bunch of odd shit that we did. That’s what makes it so disconcerting to me, because that’s me. That’s my family, those are my ancestors, and that’s us…you know, humans, as a whole. We’re always doing something, and sometimes it’s just not very good at all. Then again, you get great works of art or amazing buildings or some things that would take you a million lifetimes to do, and some lucky fuck gets it (and others like it) done in one lifetime.

AGW? I have no idea what that is.

Anthropomorphic Global Warming. The theory that human activity is contributing to or causing and increase in average world temperature, melting ice caps, rising ocean levels, dogs and cats sleeping together…

Other scientists are theorizing that the sun is getting hotter, and all the planets are having ‘Global Warming’.

Anthropogenic Global Warming actually, anthropomorphic would be like a big oily cloud of gas laughing menacingly. :stuck_out_tongue:

“Bwhahahahahahaha! Feel waaaaarmer, silly people! Goodbye ice cubes, hello liquids and steam!!!”

They came — and now, you come! I boiled them, and now I boil you! Sand dunes! Snakes! Brown stone! And minerals from the desert!

I’m a little turned on, but that’s as far as it goes.

I’d second what Zambini57 said. History truly comes alive when you read the details about lives.Warfare, though indisputibly a shaping force, is only ONE shaping force out of many. Studying individuals and teams of people who accomplished remarkable things puts that into perspective, and you learn from the context of those stories how life in those times was lived, how warfare at the time did or didn’t impact them, what government was like, etc. It can be cool and uplifting stuff.

Well said. I love history, particularly British and American history. Military history is, I’ve found, an amazing mix of strategy and error, brutality and kindness, heroism and cowardice, nation-breaking and nation-forming. Reading about the courage and self-sacrifice of people like George Washington, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, John Lewis, etc., both humbles and inspires me.

I’m sticking with Anthropomorphic. I mean, the surfing cartoon penguins go first, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

Interesting replies! I’ll have to look for those books, Atomicktom and Zambini57; thank you for your recommendations.

Yesterday I learned about ancient Iraq - man, that’s some amazing stuff! What a rich history. Is that what sustains them, now? It makes Americans and our presumptions seems pretty small. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t realize that Iraq isn’t a “backwards” country in the least.

Your point about studying art history is a good one, KayElCee; that’s pretty much ALL that I remember of my history education as a child.

I definitely agree, Elendil’s Heir that specific lives are a fascinating point of study, I was a big fan of Harriet Tubman as a kid.

But for a while now I’ve wondered about the wisdom of studying history via the Greatest People Ever. Is it realistic? Is it encouraging to have an inspiring role model, or do people give up when they realize they’re never going to make history’s All-Star list? I see a lot of people toss it in when it comes to studying art; their willingness to learn basic skills seems to be predicated on their eventually being recognized as “great” (which ain’t gonna happen).

I’ve done that “pick a passenger and see how you fared” exercise at various Titanic exhibits… I always die in steerage. :smiley:

Studying “average” people is harder - particularly going back a few hundred years when fewer and fewer people were literate. But it is more realistic if your definition of History is more anthropological or sociological rather than politcal. Economic history is interesting as well. Reading diaries of people who lived during the Civil War or letters from WWI can give you a very different idea of what it was like.

I love reading history. I know there’s a lot of depressing stuff too, but there’s so much that’s inspiring and wonderful. And one thing I get out of it is a sense that people have always been very clever at figuring things out. We have it so easy, but women used to create meals and clothing and comfort out of nothing. Someone had to invent all these clever little things, like fish traps made from sticks and string, and weaving patterns, and artesian wells–all sorts of things.

Here are a few of my favorite books–some of them deal with ordinary people and how they lived.

Women’s work: the first 20,000 years
America’s women: 400 years of dolls, drudges, helpmates, and heroines
The history of the ancient world (Susan Wise Bauer)
For kids, but plenty to learn for adults too: The story of the world, 4 vols.
The age of homespun (too long and detailed for most people, but still good for a skim)

Well, it did inspire one leader to attempt to recreate the grandeur of Babylon.