My grade 10 history teacher Ellard Perry. He made the subject come to life. After graduating college I went back to my high school to be the school nurse and by that time he had moved on and was the principal. I congratulated him on his promotion of course but I told him I thought it was a great loss for the students because he was an amazing teacher.

Never likes history before, but everything changed when Barbarians attacked.. literally, in Rome total war. Strategy games,my friend , that's what got me into history. especially games like total war, AoE and pretty much every paradox interactive game

When i would play as some nation or person in game, I was interested and wanted to learn more, I would open up internet or couple of my school books and search up. I was so dedicated to some games, that I would pretty much go to library and read biographies of some generals and rulers :p

Curiosity? This sub tends to give me answers I didn't even consider asking. For example, arrows - where did it come from? It's not like ye olde armies can buy them at the store.

Also, manga. I read historical manga, then wonder, "just how much of this is fictional?", then get interested from there. And while I'm shilling, I'd like to recommend Kingdom (about how Qin managed to unify China), Sangokushi (Three Kingdoms period) and Ad Astra - Hannibal to Scipio (I don't have to tell you what it's about).

My love for solving puzzles and mysteries. I fell in love with Ancient History in college, at the Ohio State University. This is where I really started seeing how little we know and how much room there was for creativity, ingenuity and problem solving. In the end the pursuit of history is one of the only truly human endeavors.

Nuclear weapons and the Cold War. My library had tons of books from the late 70's and early 80's about mutually assured destruction, nuclear holocaust, etc.

... The irony being that I was NOT a frequent watcher of the news, and nobody ever saw me reading those books and bothered to explain to me that the whole thing was over. So, as the last Russian troops were pulling out of Germany, I was lying awake hoping the Communists didn't decide to end the world that particular night.

In any case, I've been fascinated with history ever since.

Not no much the big events and great men in history but rather the small, insignificant things did it for me. Seeing the Pompeii graffiti, reading how much of a womenizer Julius Caesar was (e. g. by reading about the incident with Cato in the Senate) and reading Newton's notebook when he was a 1st year student at Trinity college painted a completely different picture of the people in the past. They felt more familiar and not so much different than the people today and me. Made really see how history in a continuum and i'm a (small) part of it. Have been obsessed with history ever since.

My dad always liked history, and since I'm a daddy's girl, I usually was around when he watched a few stuff.

When I was in the car with him, we usually listened to a podcast on history. I still listen to it from time to time. In high school, I got a subscription for an history mag for 2 years, made me discover a lot of eras I really liked. After high school I got into HEMA and historical reconstitution (end of the 14 century).

For years I hated it. But once I hit the high school level, all the classes got way more in-depth and complete, and for me, that made it way more interesting. Over the few years after that, I got more and more interested in it and decided to major in it. That interest was then increased exponentially by my first college history professor; he made it really entertaining and clear.

Reading popular history novels (Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Bernard Cornwell) and playing video games (the original Shogun and Medieval: Total war games).