I grew up in a low socioeconomic area, and was told that, despite being clever, I'd never afford uni. I couldn't stomach that - I knew I'd never be happy without intellectual challenges and constant learning. I've always loved history, but signed up for an education degree because I knew I could get a job out of it. I hated it. The classes were forward thinking, but the practical training and most of the people I worked and studied with were quite conservative and complacent, and I hated the child-care feel to it.

My lecturers suggested I do a degree I love, and come back to education, and I chose history. A year in, I found I loved Australian history (few Australians that aren't ultra conservatives do). What inspired this love was initially reading about the Dutch explorers in my area, and especially the Batavia Massacre, which is a tale as stirring as the sinking of the Titanic, but with equally unique flavour to it. Following the Dutch, I looked into the founding of my city by the British, and was deeply fascinated by the urban planning, the progression of settlement, the characters and the dramas; the fact that so much of my city had been landscaped and transformed shocked me, especially the fact that much of the central business district was once a multitude of lakes that flooded the town every winter. When reading about the lakes, I discovered a whole new can of worms.

In modern Australia, Indigenous Australians are treated like they are not welcome - they are 'tolerated'. The media hates them, the government hates them, most people hate them. I grew up in an area with plenty of Indigenous residents, but I only ever had negative experiences with them on the streets, which seemed to confirm stereotypes I pushed myself not to believe. I never had the chance to study with, work with or engage with an Indigenous person until I took Indigenous Studies classes at university. In school, we learn nothing about them, and at uni my history course mentioned the barely at all, and oh so timidly - much easier to explore the Holocaust or other atrocities elsewhere.

The same is true for Australian historiography. Australia tried to wipe them out, and then claimed it was peacefully settled and that Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction. Upon becoming its own nation, Australia legislated their annihilation through incredibly harsh assimilationary policies, like stealing children, intended to breed them out. Attitudes changed somewhat in the 1970s, and Aboriginals were given nominally equal rights, but now live in poverty and are treated as aliens. They are also heavily politicised - Indigenous history is always seen to have a modern political agenda, such as native land rights or changing colonial celebrations. In Australian history books, Indigenous Australia is always the prologue - a single chapter for 60,000 years of history to be followed by another ten accounting for 'new/real Australia' - or in their own separate books, written by white Australians. In urban histories they are almost entirely forgotten - most believe that urban Aboriginals are 'inauthentic' or corrupted in some way, so are not written about.

When I began researching the lost lakes, I looked through popular books about my city that spoke about 'lost history' - they were all about colonial architecture lost in the 50s and 60s. None mentioned rivers being extended or dammed, lakes being filled in, islands reclaimed - if they did, it was as a brief line about progress, the little colony conquering the wild, never that they had just destroyed homes, economies, heritage.

It wasn't until I found old books from the 1960s that are now out of print and incredibly rare that I found information about the destruction of the local tribe of Aboriginal people in my city. In these books, I found the names of numerous sacred places with deep heritage all over the city, places I had been to hundreds of times and never seen any sign of their significance. I found heroes and tragedy on both sides of the colonial divide. There is no commemoration of anything Indigenous in my city - not just prehistory, or precolonial, but also extending on into the 60s and 70s, within living memory. The local tribe lived like refugees on the outskirts of the new city they weren't welcome in, a 'nuisance', which is totally forgotten now and is a clear precursor to the poverty and social ills that continue on today.

This shook me. I realised that this was something that needed to be done, people needed to know. Having started with my city, my goal is to travel to and research the urban Indigenous histories of every Australian city, and hopefully inspire love for Indigenous Australians through helping the rest of Australia realise that their history is our history, and it enriches us all.

Sorry for the huge wall of text.

All the untold stories of people who aren’t “important” enough to make the historical record.

I'm an Orthodox Jew, and that's something that already comes with a lot of heritage and echoes of the past in basically every way. Everything you learn in day school or yeshiva is tied to something that someone said fifty years ago or a hundred years ago or five hundred years ago or fifteen hundred years ago- or possibly all of those in the space of a short lesson. The chain of mesorah, or tradition, is heavily emphasized, connecting all that we do today to what was done in the past, and classes on Jewish history are as well.

That said- I soon realized that a lot of the history I was learning in school often a) lacked context and b) could be skewed. This was for a bunch of reasons that it's complicated to go into at the moment, but briefly, some of it has to do with either general revisionism, a myopic focus on very specific elements of the Jewish experience, or a mindset which looks at Jewish history as a field less as a way to objectively discuss the past and more as a way to derive moral instruction. This led me to start looking at the more academic side of Jewish history, and now I'm finishing my master's in modern Jewish history. I had always been interested specifically in the modern experience because there is just so much there- an incredibly diverse array of experiences to be discovered that so many may never have known about (I personally am fascinated by Latin American Jewish history and if I go for a PhD then I will probably do so in that field, and yet so few people know much about it.)

The thing was, when I got to grad school and had done a lot of reading on Jewish history, I realized that I was circling back to my original thing- I was reading a lot of academics discussing Jewish history but Orthodox Jews/religious Jews were discussed either minimally or condescendingly. To this day, in the field, Orthodox Jewish historians of Jewish history are often seen as biased and less sophisticated, which is extremely problematic. Especially when they're studying Orthodox Jewish history, they're seen as continuing in the more skewed and hagiographic tendencies of the more religion-oriented layman-written Jewish history stuff in the Orthodox community that I mentioned above, and that's not really a fair assessment. Nobody is criticizing secular Jewish historians when they write about secular Jews...

Especially in modern European Jewish history, there's often a conception that Orthodox Jews were the old-fashioned, backward folk who were just waiting to secularize and run away from the shtetl. To a certain extent there's truth to that, but it ignores both the rich cultural life of the shtetl and the role of religion in general, which did persist even once people started moving to the cities, and which remained a large force even in the interwar years in which there is this perception of overwhelming secularism- of the Jewish private school systems in Poland between WWI and WWII, for example, included three Orthodox school systems (Chorev, Bais Yaakov, and Mizrachi) where more than half of the Jewish private school student body were enrolled, and that doesn't include the Orthodox students who went to Polish public school.

One of my favorite things about what I do is that, if I choose, I can study the very things I learned about as a kid in day school, in the context of the academy, and walk the line between both sides- use historical thinking and context to understand what was going on while also learning more about the heritage with which I am constantly in contact and, in a sense, working to restore its reputation.

Another angle is the family history angle. In particular, I am interested in Latin American Jewish history because my grandmother was from Argentina, and rarely talked about her childhood. The first I really heard about it was in twelfth grade when I was doing a genealogy project for school, and then I decided to delve a bit deeper, which opened me up to a really fascinating world that I'm now very invested in. These kinds of personal connections really make a difference to me. To a lesser extent, I've had the same experience when learning about the Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan (two of my grandparents grew up there) and the Holocaust (another grandparent was a survivor).

I am a art history major. First I was intrigued by the aesthetics. But I stuck to it, because it allows you to gain very fundamental and diverse knowledge about humankind.

Currently, I work at a museum and my boss told me one thing the other day that stuck with me: "History of art is really a mosaic of different fields. It has a lot to do with theology, psychology, economics, sociology, and general history. The smallest part is the artwork itself." But it is all condensed in its material. That's what I find fascinating.

I always had a fascinating with Medieval and classical cultures, and when I first started taking history I found I really loved most other aspects of it as well. Seven years later I have a degree in it.

From my experience, its borderline impossible to convince someone of why history is appealing. Like chocolate vs vanilla ice cream, you can argue as much as you'd like for or against, but ultimately, it is really up to personal preference as to why we like what we like. I think a large part of why history appeals to me is because i managed to find one niche or one part of history that i like, being modern European history. It is fascinating to see how the world comes together and things shape one another, how one bullet in some poor archduke's head can topple a few dominoes and cause one of the most devastating events in human history. I personally love historiography as well and the philosophy behind what is history and what makes history. Again, i dont expect everyone to enjoy what i enjoy nor am i trying to convince you to take history, but if you do find something (or somethings) you enjoy about history, pursue it and see where that takes you. Thats what i did.

I'm an amateur military historian. I grew up in the military, I was baptized on my father's first ship he served on when he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy, basically all my life I was raised in the military way of life.

I came to appreciate everything the military was, and what it did. When I was a kid I never really understood "why" my dad was going away for months on end, and as I got older I knew and respected his service.

I'd play army men, make up my own countries, and peace talks would break down and my army men would fight for their lives and it would be an epic battle of plastic on plastic. My army men turned into books and I'd read about anything I could.

War always fascinated me, it never mattered if it was modern war or ancient war. It was the tactics used that made me even more interested, and seeing how war started off as men in suits of armor, and swords and shields, trebuchets, siege towers, Greek fire, and the evolution into army tanks, airplanes.

I had always wanted to get into teaching history but theres not much need for war history teachers/professors. I became involved with a local WWII living history group and for several years I portrayed a soldier of the West Nova Scotia Regiment who served in Italy during the second world war.

I've amassed a collection of roughly 300 books focusing on military matters, from history to naval battles, and to this day, as I no longer do the WWII living history thing, I still am fascinated with the military history of our ancestors and the wars they fought.

I also have a huge addiction to anything related to the Knights Templar, and have read a lot about them, and a war I've enjoyed reading most was the Battle of Hattin, which turned out to be the collapse of the crusader armies for an array of reasons.

When I was in Grade 9, for my final English report, I cant recall how long the essay was, but my topic of choice was "The beauty and ugliness of war" I got a lot of laughs and had always been viewed as "a nerd" but I love my interests and I'm always happy when I find places like Reddit where I can find others with shared interests which can enhance my knowledge. I never went to school to study history so I always feel outmatched, but love the ability to learn when I can.

I've always been "good" at it. Plus, there's numerous different things to study, even in just one area. Take the Civil War. You can study the economics, troop movements, culture (my area), diplomacy, gender, etc etc.

But yeah, I regret my chosen field immensely.

Couple reasons I guess. The study came natural to me and I excelled at it far and above my classmates without really trying. I got lucky with that and I really enjoyed it as it was basically a story time class. I'm also a highly functioning musician during times of depression, sadness, pain, etc... The study of history gave me that. I took a lot of the things I learned, of the suffering and the stupidity of the human race, to heart. I could feel it. The sadness. The weight of it all. From the wars, murders, injustices, sacrifices, beatings, robbings of people, nations, lives, minds; I loved to wallow in the sadness of it all. It made me feel more human and it made me never want to turn away from the lie. It gave me a more cynical outlook on life for sure, but I've convinced myself that it's realistic. I miss not being able to sleep. It was all real and it still is.

My motives have changed greatly since the beginning, but what drew me in first were the grand and epic stories of great conquerors, brilliant commanders, the decisive battles of history.... That's why I started getting into history, I suppose, I just wanted to know more about all of those epic moments in history.

As I started to read more books my mentality started expanding a lot and I started to realize just how much more there was to history than the "epic" moments, I began to take an interest in diferent cultures and the societies they birthed, the ways of life throughout history, etc. As I grew up I became very invested in politics and developed some clear ideologies, and as I started my history grade I finally realized just how much these two interests had in common.

I started to view historiography as a way of studying and understanding the present through the past, the outcome through the process. I read this one book by Paul Freedman that studied the rights and freedoms of rural inhabitants of a particular region of Spain (Plana de Vic, Catalonia, Spain) during the XI, XII and XIII centuries and claimed they suffered a drastical downgrade through the centuries until they developed into the state of serfdom we usually atribute to feudalism; the book then went on to analyze the processes that cause this change. That was it for me, I was set on what I wanted to study from that moment on.