I am even more of a nerd than previously suspected
When I was in elementary, middle and high school, I hated history class. I did well enough to take the advanced classes, but I still hated it. I sucked at remembering dates, and I despised hearing about wars fought and lost from ancient times up through Desert Storm (not truly a war, but we still had to learn about that crap in high school some). War bored me, and to a certain extent it still does. I mean, aren’t we advanced enough to solve our differences without blowing each other to smitherines? Ok, that’s a different topic. Anyhoo…
The only thing that ever kept me going in history class was the social aspects. I loved the little vignettes in the books about how the people interacted, how they traded and bartered, what they wore, how they raised their children, etc. I was especially interested in medieval times; I think the sense of magic, mixed with the violence and nobility, drew me to it. In college I only had to take a couple general history courses, but I wish I would have had more money to spend on some medieval times courses. After I finished those two classes, I said good riddance to studying dates and boring wars for good.
But over the last year or so, I’ve found myself yearning to go back and re-study different periods in time. And I know exactly what triggered it–a book called The Social History of Western Civilization Ian found when we were going through our old textbooks, deciding which ones to sell and which to keep. We threw that book in the “sell” category (and I think it’s still on Half.com/Amazon, which I need to fix), but I grabbed it one day when I was looking for a book to read.
Well, I kept reading it off and on for the past year, and now that I’m about done with it I find myself wanting to read more. I discovered there was a volume two by the same author, and have found it listed on Amazon for about $10 including shipping.
But I wonder: Why didn’t I have a history class like Ian? He wasn’t a history major, so he must have just lucked out and had a teacher who chose to focus on the social history vs. warswarswarswarswars and other boring crap like mine did. I wonder if I had more teachers like his in grade school and high school, teachers who would have taken the time to figure out that hey, some students learn better when they have anectotes about the past to interest and stimulate them, would I have been a better student of history?
Because right now, as embarrassing as it is, I can not tell you the exact dates of WWI, WWII, when the battle of whateverthehellyouaretalkingabout was fought or who occupied certain countries at certain points in time. (I can tell you a little about Spanish and Mexican history because I had some awesome Spanish teachers, though.) But history that I’ve been supposedly learning, over and over, since birth? I haven’t retained much.
But I can tell you about swaddling, civil disorder, why people eschewed water and what they did with their insane in medieval Europe. And that makes for a whole hell of a lot better reading. To me, at least.
