For me it was expanding on topics I liked. I've always liked World War II. Since I was a kid there were video games on it, the history channel was all over it, and there were a lot of movies based on it.

I slowly started reading books on the war from different perspectives. It allowed me to understand the causes for the war and explain situations I had seen in video games and movies.

Eventually it was early 20th century history that pulled me into, well, history. This was also why I decided to major in history.

After talking with a few others, that's how they got into it as well. Try liked a historical subject and expanded their knowledge by reading books or watching documentaries on other happenings during that time period.

I think there must be something about that specific time period or topic that resonates with the person, something to do with their inner life. For me a big draw of the past is distance; I'm interested in time periods that lack a lot of the modernization of today. My love of history basically stops when the Industrial Revolution ramps up and steam power becomes common. In my daily life I don't dislike technology at all. I'm a fan of electricity and plumbing and cars and television. I was an early adopter of computing, coding and browsing the net. I'm as dependent on technology as your average Millenial in the western world, but that's why I'm drawn to time periods so different from what I know now.

I've always been in to Swedish military history, mostly because I've had family members with officer rank is every Swedish war dating back to King Magnus Eriksson (1316-1374). Reading about my family and looking in to what life must have been in those days, When under the kings protection they moved to the Arctic circle area to make sure there wasn't any trade between Saami and the Novgorodians.

Reading about the Birkarls did to the saamis who got caught trading with novgorodians sometimes makes me feel ashamed. I'm also proud of what they accomplished on the battlefield as officers in the hakkapeliitta regiments, in Breitenfeldt, and the march across the belt.

I can trace the exact moment when I became interested in history. Being a typical 10 year old, tanks and army men fascinated me and I had a huge collection of plastic army men. My primary school's library had a book on military vehicles which I would borrow constantly. That book had a section on Hobart's Funnies, the specialty tanks developed for the Normandy invasion during World War Two. That got me interested in D-Day, then in the Second World War, then I thought that if there was a Second World War then there had to be a First World War. This led me to discover the horrific conditions of the Western Front and my own nation's large part in the conflict.

My particular interest in the First World War stems from a desire to understand how such a tragedy unfolded and the experiences of the men and women involved. In particular, the First World War holds a particularly prominent place in Australian history, more then 300,000 Australian men enlisted from a population of about 5,000,000. Why these men chose, and they did choose, Australia's army was entirely comprised of volunteers, to enlist is something I want to understand and passing on their experiences to future generations is something I feel is of great importance.

I became particularly interested in 18-19th century British criminal law, with a specific focus on capital punishment and minority struggles, but I'm not sure why that time period, exactly. It came only after I became interested in the history of capital punishment in Western Europe.

Perhaps because the 18th and 19th centuries was a time of great change, in attitudes and practice towards capital punishment across Western Europe. It saw the development of new philosophies, abolition campaigns beginning, a growing distaste for public execution. Prison reform was the big thing, from separatism and silence programs in places like Pentonville to rehabilitation and reform. With a growing awareness of poverty, with the number of charitable organisations increasing massively, changing attitudes within asylums and large migrations such as the Jewish immigrants to the UK of the 1880s or the Irish migrants, to name just a few, it is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting times to study changing attitudes towards death, punishment and reform, in British history. I was interested in British history because I grew up in the UK, I guess, and I was particularly interested in my family and local history, which made me interested in minority British history, so Jewish history within the UK, Irish Travellers and so on.

I became interested in capital punishment partly because my mum was involved in the court system, and I remember hearing a ton of interesting stories about her clients. The majority of them were criminals, petty ones, shoplifters and the like, and it gave me an interesting look, because some of them were friendly, the majority were messed up, a lot of them had their own problems. It was probably only when I started secondary school and saw different attitudes to criminals than I'd seen in my home, that I began to understand dehumanisation. I was interested in history, social history, because it was just fascinating, these living, breathing people who ate different foods and had different views on genders and lived in homes with different furniture, just little things.

At one point, I wanted to be a lawyer, a defence solicitor specifically. I couldn't get into amendments and Acts and bills. But I was reading court papers from the Old Bailey in the early 19th century, and was hooked. I can still remember that moment. They were relatively short and talked about foreigners being able to have juries of foreigners, described petty crimes like the stealing of linen. Half the time, the defendant blamed them being found with stolen clothing on having bought them off a Jew. Most of it was just horribly small, to me, at least, and sentences were harsh, from hard labour and imprisonment to death. There was one case where a little boy had been beaten to death and the grandmother who cared for the boy during the day spoke about the son going off with the father, who had killed him. It humanised them. This little boy who didn't like going out with his father and was cheeky and loved by his grandparents, killed senselessly. The man was executed.

It made me realise that everything I'd ever read about sentencing and prisons and law involved real people. I mean, I'd understood that , of course, before, but reading all of these small details and statements and character witnesses made me realise that, truly, for every historic execution, a person had died. A person who'd done something, who'd talked to people in the street, who had children or parents, who was raised in the context of their time, who might have been an alcoholic, an apprentice, a maid. That was what got me interested in it. What allowed people to distance themselves from the deaths? What reasons and justifications did people have for capital punishment? Why and how could people execute someone? That then led me down the wormhole into changing attitudes, into discrimination within the legal system, into abolition and reformatory programs and so on.

I think it depends on the period and the person. I love reading about colonialism and imperialism because it makes the world of today make so much more sense. You get to place modern conflicts in their historical context and see how events from a hundred or even a thousand years ago can have repercussions up to today.

I think a lot of people see history as something divorced from the present, but it's not. If you take a modern conflict, say Israel-Palestine, you can trace that all the way through WWII, British/French imperialism and WWI, down through the Crusades and the rise of Islam all the way back to the Roman Empire. You can study how the history of far-flung places like Russia and Germany affected the formation of Israel. It shows how everything connects, how one event in one place can have a vast impact elsewhere.

So that's why I'm fascinated by imperialism, and read a lot of books about it. But I think everybody has their own story and their own reasons.

I am interested in very specific portions of history, which just makes me rather weird I think. Nonetheless, they each had something that drew me in.

My first love was ancient Egypt, because of the pyramids. A little boring, I know, but that was what caught my attention. I loved the mythology of Nut and Seth and the whole casts of animal gods, and I wanted to know more. And since I loved reading, I just delved into whatever archaeological books I could find.

Still, I think that was just a superficial liking, which led me to choosing history as my specialist humanities subject in Secondary school. In Singapore, we study both International history and South-East Asian history. The latter was kind of boring, since we had that pretty much drilled into us since Primary school (via Social Studies), but International was intriguing to say the least. After the introduction the subject, the theme for our study was revolutions. And when we reached the French revolution, I became fascinated with French history under the House of Bourbon, especially under the figure of the Sun King. I spent days at the library (also how I got into becoming a librarian) and would pour over any information I could get my hands on. It was this passion which carried my through the days of studying the industrial revolution and the cultural revolution (both which I found awfully boring).

Finally, when I went to Junior College, I took up Knowledge and Inquiry. Philosophy was a passion that I developed alongside history and KI enabled me to delve deeper. However, rather than the Western philosophies which first drew me in, I became more interested in the Chinese philosophers like Confucius and Han Fei. I had never been particularly good in my Chinese exams, but I could still read the language fluently, so I took to reading the original texts. And then I got into the endless deep hole that is ancient Chinese history...

So while I still have a liking for mummies and Versailles, my real love would be for Chinese history from the Zhou dynasty up to the end of the three kingdoms.

BTW: Should the heading have [META] added?

I've always been bored by American history and World War history. The exact same things were covered every damn year throughout school. By boring teachers with only slight deviation from the previous year. I don't know how many times I 'learned' about the damn gold rush (I live in California) from Elementary through High school. Because of this, I've always hated History as a school subject. Rote learning just for the sake of it has always been my biggest problem with school. Math homework after I learned a topic was so painful I had to take Algebra 3 times. Finally getting a Uni Professor taught class during summer school, I got like 120% in the class because he didn't care about homework.

Thanks to video games books, movies, etc, I've always been interested in the Fantasy genre, Rome and anything related. And it was a complete shock to even find out that Byzantine history and the Eastern Empire was even a thing. Throughout school, it is/was completely ignored. So thoroughly that I didn't even equate Constantinople to this time frame. Outside of being able to name the city, and the They Might be Giants song, I didn't know anything about it.

It also helps that I found an amazing podcast at a time when I was listening to 8-16 hours of audiobooks a day at work. The boring and long job of sitting on a jet and sanding it with inefficient and inadequate tools made it easy to focus on the books.

After 'discovering' this new side of history on my own without the taint of school assignments and reports and repetition it really feels like it's mine. I didn't learn it because I was forced to. I discovered it on my own. Like it's my thing. Somehow that lead to some amount of feeling ownership over that knowledge. And I think that is the key. That feeling of ownership. Nowadays, I don't devote much time to expanding that knowledge, but I actually get a little excited and a small feeling of anticipation seeing anything relating to 'my' subject here or elsewhere.

For me, I really like Early Modern Europe, and especially the 16th century. It's just such a fascinating, albeit tragic, time with the Reformation, the reign of Henry VIII, the infiltration of the New World (especially the conquest of the Aztecs and the early voyages of Cartier), the spread of the Renaissance to France and England, the Wars of Religion in France, Mary Tudor, Philip, Elizabeth, Spanish armada, Shakespeare (17th c), Thomas More, I could go on forever! Also, the 1500s were still 'medieval' enough despite rapid change to grab my attention, yet the time was not as modern or complex as the 17th and 18th centuries.

I think a lot of us start out trying to answer some basic question in our minds about a specific historical event, and that thread draws us in deeper, we plunge further and further into the details of something, and before we know it we have intimate knowledge of how Gerson von Bleichröder's railroad plans helped unify Germany.

I've always found the study of history to be a bit like bottomless quicksand; the deeper you get, the more you realize there is to learn.

For me personally, it starts when I visit, or intend to visit a place. I had an oppurtunity to visit Israel/Palestine last year for 3 weeks. So I rented a car and drove all around. I went to town on Wikipedia, I read and learned as much about the histories, the cultures and stories about it, from Jerusalem, Masada, Hebron you name it. There's something magical about knowing the history and walking through the places. I love it, I did the same when I visited Vatican, Machu Pichu, Angkor Wat, Forbidden City, Petra. I try to imagine what life was like for the people of these ancient places. What was Rome like, at the height of the empire?

I think people's historical interests stem from the same causes that people's general interests come from. For example, someone who feels as if their life is stressful because it's hard to handle or lacks internal structure may prefer a tidy home, disciplinary reactions, and military history. And conversely, someone who lives a very structured life (or had a strict childhood) may react by having no interest in structure, and may be attracted to asymmetry, revolutions, and times of anarchy.