I'm no history buff by any means, there are plenty of people know American history better than I do, but I LOVED AP American History in high school, I'd argue it was probably my favorite class ever (except maybe Evidence in Law School where we just watched Perry Mason clips to see where the lawyers should have argued for hearsay) and the teacher wasn't even that great, it was just the substance: whenever I got home from school and started doing my homework, I would always start with the history reading because I had actually been looking forward to that, it wasn't work to me. Chemistry and physics and writing papers were always a drag to me and where I learned there was just something topics I wasn't interested in, but HISTORY.....that's where it was at. The stories of people, of battles, of real people who did real things whether right or wrong, that's where I got hooked, similar to learning about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Chinese history, I was really into it. If only historians got paid more, I definitely would have studied history in college and pursued a career in it, whatever career there would be. The problem is there's no money in history, most industries actually don't WANT you to remember stuff, they want you to spend money NOW and in the future. History is full of old technology and old products that no one wants anymore, what's coming up is always the here and now and what companies want consumers to focus on, whether it be the new iPhone, the newest car models, or even, the newest campaigns for president. I was just reading about the 2012 election today.... just 12 years ago and 3 elections ago! Anyone remember who Michelle Bachman was? or Rick Santorum? Those were going to be major players in teh Republican nominees for President to take on President Obama, until Mitt Romney won the day and the year. Now they're afterthoughts. Definitely part of it as everything post-Trump is different than it was pre-Trump, but also for the Democrats I just recenty saw a picture of one of MJ's friends with Julian Castro, the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Obama and contender for 2016 Presidential nominee, and he's been kind of buried too.
Kind of just goes to show or country sacrifices learning from the past in order to focus on what's next, what's new, what's trending on TikTok, not pausing to think that a lot of stuff that's new and hip now is just going to fade away really soon. Chappelle Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, flavor of the months for now, who knows how long they'll be relevant.
Got off topic! Yes I love history and any book in the library or bookstore with a "timeline of events" on a certain topic is going to get me hooked, especially if it divides the history up year by year, like what happened in 1973 or something like that. I once embarked on a project to read every Time magazine from every year.....I didn't get very far, but it's eye-opening what gets reported and what's newsworthy back then. I did not know, for example, in 1991 the Persian Gulf War was happening, and the actual military phase of it just lasted.....43 days, from January to February of 2021. Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Saddam Hussein had been in the public spotlight since all the way back in 1990 until 2003 after he'd been blamed for having WMDs and found and killed in a spiderhole. Every generation has its crisis and things that pervade the generation. It changes so dramatically, what everyone is worried about in a particular time period and then ten years later it's almost completely different, like everyone's memory got wiped, we reset the game, and we're starting over as new characters in a different level of the game. Donald Trump was at the center of another attempted assassination tonight in Florida on a golf course, and it just feels like we're living through history. It's fascinating that all of this stuff will one day be history, and I'm living through it. History is such a wonderful study of how we all lived through a particular time of Earth's history. I'm just suprised more people don't want to examine it further.
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