History's Value: Influence of History Background on Modern Well-being

We People live in the present. We plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Everything that has been done is “history”, meaning that history directly affects us every day, with today’s society shaped by historic periods of industrialization, colonialism and so on. History spans all cultures, eras, seasons and environments and is an immovable factor that can be called upon for knowledge and insight into how the world got to the point it’s at now and how it will continue to develop in future.

In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines. In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior — a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization, a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline. History should be studied – there are many interesting history topics from which you can learn about important periods in the life of an individual, country, and even society. So why is it important to study history? This essay provides the reasons.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace — unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don’t use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society’s operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

“History helps us understand people and societies ”from long time ago, people have got used to learn from our history. Kings tried to make their countries in better way, also they tried not to make same mistake again. In nowadays, presidents are studying history to learn how people deal with various situations. People use history to find out how human and societies behave in specific situations. We need to understand how past societies worked in order for us to run our own lives. We believe that people are different, so social scientists can’t predict all how people will behave.

History Provides Identity

History also helps provide identity, and this is unquestionably one of the reasons all modern nations encourage its teaching in some form. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion. Studying the history of one’s own family is the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts at a slightly more complex level, a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Family identity is established and confirmed. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, use history for similar identity purposes. Merely defining the group in the present pales against the possibility of forming an identity based on a rich past. And of course nations use identity history as well and sometimes abuse it too. Histories that tell the national story, emphasizing distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.

40 Significant Topics in History for Great Research

The Importance of History in Our Own Lives

A vital mode in which history serves a function is derived from the fact that the present can never be understood in isolation from the past. This fact is more easily demonstrable in the case of the individual personality. You can hardly ever imagine a person as severed from the past. At any given moment in an individual’s life, his attitudes, his values and his opinions form a long chain of experiences and influences throughout his life. We are all in the process of “becoming” all the time, and, in this process, each phase in our life has repercussions on the next. Thus, each individual personality has his past, so to speak, “encapsulated” in him. This is also true of groups of people. A community or nation is the product of forces that brought it into being in the first place, and shaped it through its career. To help us understand how the religions, the institutions, and the nations in which we find ourselves came to be what they are is one of the prime functions of history.

History Is Useful in the World of Work

Historical study is unquestionably an asset for a variety of work and professional situations, even though it does not, for most students, lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do some technical fields. But history particularly prepares students for the long haul in their careers, its qualities helping adaptation and advancement beyond entry-level employment. There is no denying that in our society many people who are drawn to historical study worry about relevance. In our changing economy, there is concern about job futures in most fields. Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.

Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. Studying history can help us develop some literally “salable” skills, but its study must not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history — that confined to personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—is essential to function beyond childhood. Some history depends on personal taste, where one finds beauty, the joy of discovery, or intellectual challenge. Between the inescapable minimum and the pleasure of deep commitment comes the history that, through cumulative skill in interpreting the unfolding human record, provides a real grasp of how the world works.

History contributes to moral understanding: Studying history enables one to broaden his or her mind and appreciate the divergence in cultural beliefs and practices. This can be useful in promoting good work ethics whereby one can freely and seamlessly work with different people from different background. History develops a number of important skills of students. Among these are:

• acquiring a broad range of historical knowledge and understanding, including a sense of development over time, and an appreciation of the culture and attitudes of societies other than our own
• evaluating critically the significance and utility of a large body of material, including evidence from contemporary sources and the opinions of more recent historians
• engaging directly with questions and presenting independent opinions about them in arguments that are well-written, clearly expressed, coherently organized and effectively supported by relevant evidence;
• gaining the confidence to undertake self-directed learning, making the most effective use of time and resources, and increasingly defining one’s own questions and goals.

Why is history important? This essay helps with an answer. Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the promotion of that elusive creature, the well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual information about the background of our political institutions and about the values and problems that affect our social well-being. It also contributes to our capacity to use evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze change and continuities. No one can ever quite deal with the present as the historian deals with the past we lack the perspective for this feat, but we can move in this direction by applying historical habits of mind, and we will function as better citizens in the process.

Works Cited

1. Carr, E. H. (1961). What is history? Random House.
2. Gaddis, J. L. (2002). The landscape of history: How historians map the past. Oxford University Press.
3. Hobsbawm, E. J. (2012). On history. New Press.
4. Jenkins, K. (2011). Re-thinking history. Routledge.
5. Marwick, A. (2006). The nature of history. Palgrave Macmillan.
6. Nash, G. B. (2015). American odyssey: The United States in the twentieth century. Oxford University Press.
7. Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical inquiry, 17(4), 773-797.
8. Tosh, J. (2017). The pursuit of history: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of history. Routledge.
9. White, H. (2014). The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. JHU Press.
10. Wineburg, S. S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past. Temple University Press.