Hello!

I think I've posted here once before and I was hoping you wonderfully talented folks could point me in the right direction.

I'm trying to learn more history. However, I've found that for myself the most efficient way to learn something involved its application and answering questions. That said, are there question driven texts that I could use to learn history? I've started learning about the Middle East and I'm reading Bernard Lewis' The Middle East and while I enjoy the narrative, as long as I'm passively reading things I'm going to forget. I've read before that in learning history I should focus less on facts and more themes/motifs/over-arching concepts and I try to do that, but there is still sooooo much to learn that being successful feels incredibly daunting. I feel like question sets, because they focus on asking things that are presumably important, serve as a guide and so I'd hope to find something like that.

I've gone online and found previous exams though AP College Board for World History and European History and stuff, and I'm going to use these as guides for things to learn.

It might also be a memory problem. There's so much to learn, so many facts, and while the advice isn't to memorize anything, I see experts that have so much knowledge that they can just recite that I wonder how they do it. Active learning helps this process and I'm just trying to be efficient.

Does my question make sense? I'm hoping it does. Anyway, hope you folks can help.