by Ben Hughes

Created on: February 20, 2009

History isn't just the past it's the present and the future too. Isn't just about facts and important dates it's about learning and progressing.

Let's start at the beginning. The very beginning. History tells us where we've come from. In terms of our ancestry, whether it's the creation story or the big bang and evolution, it gives us an idea of our context and can even point to a purpose of life. And how more motivating and how much more interest do we take in something when it has meaning; and you don't get something more valuable than the meaning of life.

History, as a chronological timeline, is also littered with conflicts. It tells us how things happened, explains why they happened and gives reasons for why things are as they are now. Think of the two world wars, the arms race in the early twentieth century and the fiasco of The League of Nations. Unless lessons from these decades had been learnt, we wouldn't know how we arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century and we would view current events completely differently. Nuclear weapons and international disputes would be approached in potentially destructive ways and the United Nations and NATO may never have formed.

With this in mind, history puts things into context with hindsight and hindsight is a wonderful tool to help to learn. Sometimes lessons aren't understood until years after events have taken place and it's only by studying history that we can fully appreciate the past as whole rather than a series of individual events.

But more than this, history is interesting. It's full of personal stories, family anecdotes and individual and social identities. History tells us how we interact with each other, how we've learnt, progressed and made mistakes; and why sometimes it seems that we still haven't progressed as much as we like to think.

Individual personal identity is a like a glass waiting to be filled with water. Our experiences are like the water being poured into our life between birth and death, so understanding our history gives us an understanding of personal identity. It can also give us a history of ourselves to take with us throughout our life and to pass on from one generation to the next, like a history of mental health problems, a criminal history or an academic history.

We can study family history and discover why our family is in poverty when it was so rich a few generations ago; or maybe find that elusive link to royalty or a Hollywood star. History is something personal as well as something social. How and when did our cities form? Why did empires disappear while religions spread across the globe? And why is there tension between some community groups when modern life demands such partnership and cohesion? History can give us some clues.

By studying and understanding history, we can also help to predict the future. We know from what happened during the Great Depression of the 1930s that the current credit crunch could last longer and be deeper; and we know from numerous events in history what economic measures and social interventions work and what doesn't work. Predictions can sometimes be dangerous but the best way of predicting and dealing with future events is to study past events.

So studying history is useful and beneficial to us. Ignoring history means we are unconscious of what's gone before us, unaware of where are now and, as a civilisation, are likely to repeat the same mistakes in the future. Doing something wrong once is bad enough, but to do it again and again is just foolish.

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