For me, learning about history is synonymous with learning about the evolution of humanity and everything we influence, from the smallest to the largest scale. It's really interesting to look at examples of current human activity and to be able to understand how something evolved to where it is today.

I don't usually post here but I studied history in college, because I just absolutely love it. I love going places and researching things that happened there before, standing on ground where something that mattered happened. We drive to Kansas from Washington a lot and always make a point to stop at the battlefield for little big horn. A couple of times it has just been us, and the feeling you get there, knowing what happened makes my heart full of all kinds of different emotions, there is a heaviness in the air there. It is so special to me that we remember and acknowledge the past and its effects on what we do today. Pompeys Pillar is near there too, seeing where Lewis and Clark carved there name into a rock is mind blowing that we can still see it today. In Portsmouth New Hampshire we were in Strawberry Bank near a dock where they unloaded slaves and the hall where they auctioned them off is still there. Portsmouth is kept up historically speaking, and it was very neat to see. I went to high school in England, got to travel a lot over there and see a lot which I think is what tripped me off into loving history. Knowing what happened where you are standing is an incredibly neat, surreal feeling, and I think that it just makes the moment more special when you incorporate the past into your present.

I typed this out on my phone so sorry about any errors.

I can still remember the feeling I had when, during one of my early History of Western Civilization courses, after we had made it to the period of World War II, I was suddenly able to see an arc of history stretching from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, to the Crimean War, to the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, to World War I and thence on to the Second. It was very literally like an arc of causation opening up before me, and I could see clearly how one led to the other until eventually becoming the calamity of World War II that we are all so familiar with.

Before this, periods had mostly been taught to me individually, out of any grand, overarching context. Maybe I was generally cognizant on the various wars involved, but they were presented in relative isolation and the connecting tissues were missing.

And the more I studied, the more periods my knowledge encompassed, the greater that arc became. And when those arcs are broad enough, and stretch far enough, the globalized world we now live within can often make a little more sense. Having this depth of historical insight can really alter your thinking on a current event -- when you can trace, as with your fingers, the fibers of connectivity stretching behind what is happening off into different regions and eras.

I'm less interested in large-scale political history than the sociocultural aspects of it that intersect with questions of memory and identity - things that resonate with communities who still bear the marks of history, I guess.

To the question of how to apply historical knowledge to current situations, I don't generally buy into 'those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it'. But I believe that many people don't have the privilege of forgetting the past, whether it's because of recent nationhood or historical oppression.

I love seeing how past people's lives, what wars did to them as humans. I like stories.

The cyclical nature of humanity is amazing and astounding to me. I use my history degree to teach and I found I'm the only history teacher with a degree in the field I'm teaching in at the school I work at.

For me, being a historian isn't about loving the stories from the past. It's about a different way of thinking and analyzing the world around you. There are things you will notice as a historian about the world that few others can see. It's a bit hard to describe, but the central theme is how your mind works in relation to the world around you.

To take it back to my teaching school, I work in a school that's 85% black and have to constantly explain racism and dead white men in new and exciting ways for my students to remain captivated. It becomes less about the content and more about how they will perceive it.