HistoricalHorrors

1. Class is basically story time. Do you want to hear riveting tales of cross-dressing slaves that escaped in a daring journey across the U.S. or how about an apocalyptic bad Byzantine battle where half the army switch sides and the other half ran away?  or what about that time a women became king of Nigeria? Yeah I get to go to class everyday and be endless entertained by these awesome stories and even better? Its all true. 

2. It makes you a more empathetic person. Its really easy to look at people in the past and make a snap judgement about them, that they are so stupid, bad, sexist, uncultured. ect ect… But as historians we have to walk a mile in their shoes and not judge them by the standards we have today. For instance important idea that we take today like umm. universal individual rights  or personally property or not having to work everyday for our physical survival hadn’t even been invented till pretty recently. History forces you to understand why people make certain decision and why they held certain views without judging them, a skill I am happy to carry into my day to day life. 

3. It is the best study of people. There are a lot of majors that study people: physiology, sociology, gender studies but those all focus on theory. History studies what real people do when faced with real situations. And it is indeed history that sparks social scientist to do their work. The reason behind the famous Milgram Experiment was trying to figure out why good people followed Hitler during WW2. History is the ultimate social experiment and gives us the best data on why people are the way they are and do what they do 

4. You get to touch the old things. You stand around in museum. See some boring rocks and some ugly paintings but when you are a history major, all the sudden its “HOLY S#&%* THESE WEIRD LITTLE BONES CHUNKS WAS TOUCHED MOTHERF@#$*$@# SHANG DYNASTY EMPEROR!!!” All the sudden the world is a magically place where everything even mundane, ugly, old things become special and amazing because there is history there! 

Caricature showing the Count of Provence as a cat, 18th century.

1. Class is basically story time. Do you want to hear riveting tales of cross-dressing slaves that escaped in a daring journey across the U.S. or how about an apocalyptic bad Byzantine battle where half the army switch sides and the other half ran away?  or what about that time a women became king of Nigeria? Yeah I get to go to class everyday and be endless entertained by these awesome stories and even better? Its all true. 

2. It makes you a more empathetic person. Its really easy to look at people in the past and make a snap judgement about them, that they are so stupid, bad, sexist, uncultured. ect ect… But as historians we have to walk a mile in their shoes and not judge them by the standards we have today. For instance important idea that we take today like umm. universal individual rights  or personally property or not having to work everyday for our physical survival hadn’t even been invented till pretty recently. History forces you to understand why people make certain decision and why they held certain views without judging them, a skill I am happy to carry into my day to day life. 

3. It is the best study of people. There are a lot of majors that study people: physiology, sociology, gender studies but those all focus on theory. History studies what real people do when faced with real situations. And it is indeed history that sparks social scientist to do their work. The reason behind the famous Milgram Experiment was trying to figure out why good people followed Hitler during WW2. History is the ultimate social experiment and gives us the best data on why people are the way they are and do what they do 

4. You get to touch the old things. You stand around in museum. See some boring rocks and some ugly paintings but when you are a history major, all the sudden its “HOLY S#&%* THESE WEIRD LITTLE BONES CHUNKS WAS TOUCHED MOTHERF@#$*$@# SHANG DYNASTY EMPEROR!!!” All the sudden the world is a magically place where everything even mundane, ugly, old things become special and amazing because there is history there!