The era I study has been heavily romanticized over centuries with novels and movies, Liu Bei and his sworn brothers fighting to restore the beloved Han and defying the power, the valiant warriors of flawed nobility, sage minds who commanded the heavens.

In truth, it was a brutal civil war that lasted nearly 100 years, there were massacres, murders (and murderers being rewarded with high positions due to being useful), famines, cannibalism, bigotry, families separated, wrongful executions, kidnapping, ladies paying dearly for the loss of husband's affections (or being forced into bigamy), bigotry. Even unification would not bring peace for long.

Yet in the era there was an advancement in medicine, inventions, history, philosophy, literature, there was major economic development of the south which went from place of exile to a powerful part of China thanks to the Wu dynasty. There was suffering and that should never be neglected or waved away, but there many who strived to better things via such ideas or via bringing in agricultural colonies to end the famines, to take on the problems of their generation and they had seen in the past.

The bad side is also not the only thing there. There was humour and jokes, friendship, love, mourning deeply because they hurt, people striving to make a difference, kindness, silliness. Sure I could focus on all the cruelties but I always remember the lighter side, the human side. The moment Liu Bei's old friend Jian Yong (who was not one for obeying etiquette) got a law changed by ridiculing it in a carriage ride, Cao Cao's words about the youngest of his inner circle Guo Jia for whom he hoped to entrust his future but who died young and sharing his grief with his friends. Sun Quan arguing with his old adviser Zhang Zhao and swords being drawn but then weeping into his old mentor's arms.

There are many such moments, where the human side, it's pettiness and it's sweetness comes to the fore in sweet and amusing moments. Where tragedy also sees love and pain because it hurt, because we are humans and we grieve.

Or the mighty warrior Lu Bu, a man famed for his disloyalty to allies, killer of two masters, arrogant, sometimes a bully, a man accused of sleeping with the wives of his officers. Yet the moment I often remember of him is, as his last stronghold was flooded and the city fell as officers defected, he climbed up a gate tower and saw it was over. He turned to his servants and told them to kill him, to get the reward that would come with his head, none would do so. He was a flawed man in so many ways yet at the moment when his career, and soon life, was over, he was capable of something like that.

Yes, I see the brutality and the ugliness that humanity can bring but I also see the kindness, the warmth, the pain because life hurts, the little human moments between friends and rivals, the humour of people relaxed, the "I regret what I said last night". The moments where people showed the best sides of themselves in a moment of understanding for another. Moments that, in different ways, we all share in some way or another and I see people striving to make their world a better place as best they knew how. That brings a smile to my face and hope as I myself hope to bring a little bit of kindness and make the world, even if just a little, a better place.

I'll throw in my two cents. I study and write on what is perhaps (one of?) the worst movements to ever arise in human history. For the answers I write here, I have to dig through aggregate data involving the loss of millions of people and on essentially every page of National Socialist history there is at least one war crime.

Yes, this is true.

But I also have the benefit of hindsight and a generational perspective. I have the hope for justice that is the Nuremburg Trials; I have the assurance that the Soviets and the Allies will very soon come crashing down upon the Reich's insidious machine.

History tends to take a large scale, statistical perspective but I always try to maintain that there are real people involved in all of this. I look for the human stories: the diaries, the children growing up in the midst of war, the kindness of humanity helping to hide Jews and political prisoners. For every terrible man like Goebbels or Heydrich, I find several stories of hope. Kindness and humanity does not make for juicy news and reporting, whether that's today or generations (or centuries) back. Historians want to remember and write what is interesting, and that is most often the atrocities. I'm also more than a little morbid and find things like a bush-whacking guerilla army of anti-fascist & anti-Nazi partisans to be genuinely pleasing to the soul.

So all in all, it's the surety of justice and the morbid pleasure of seeing war criminals shot by the people they persecute that motivates me.

My own tuppence on this most interesting question. My area of expertise encompasses two of the most brutal, bloody, and terrifying conflicts in the history of our race. In the course of my research I've seen photos of combatants with all innocence gone from their eyes, the atrocities committed by both sides in the pursuit of victory, and the destruction wrought on our planet's own face. In short, I find truth in the words of Arthur Koestler:

"The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums."

But as the other comments have highlighted for their own contexts, for every dark event there is always a brighter one to be found. In the case of the world wars, I'm also reassured by the benefit of hindsight and generations of progress. I know now that for each Nazi victory in the early stages, there will be a more decisive Allied one to come. I know that the Treaty of Versailles, as flawed as it was, was written by the just victors of the Great War. I know that despite the horrors of mass genocide and death, there will be an end to the killing and justice shall find its mark.

I also however, gain motivation by asking the simple Socratic question: why? Humans were not bred (as far as I am concerned) to spark destruction and take the lives of their own kind, so war as a whole is a uniquely human phenomenon that has unfortunately plagued the record of civilisations. How did our societies come to blows over the most varied (and at times trivial) of causes? There is always more to be found out about the past in my view, and that is the singular maxim which drives me in my research and writings.

Now on the more preachy side of things, the old cliche of "those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it" is not something I stand by. Drawing parallels between events happening now and a century ago is dangerously single-minded in my opinion. The optimism gained in knowing more about the past and keeping that record as an evolving narrative is instead, I believe a better reason for my continued positive outlook on the world.

So all this being said, at the end of the day, I find more truth in Aristotle's quote than Koestlers:

We make war that we may live in peace.

I study Hebrew print, and I can not avoid anti-Semitic printing and the Holocaust/shoah. (I’m not Jewish for context) and it’s tough, there is one book printed during the Nazi Period that used cadavers from victims of the Holocaust and it makes me cry even thinking about it, when I was studying this particular book intensely I would set times to go outside, get fresh air, drink water and phone my mum; it’s tough. This has lead from the study of censorship of books and book burning which can be anything from contemporary attempts to ban Lord of the Rings in the Bible Belt of the USA to the Nazi book burning to the burning of the library at Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.

I take the philosophical view that everything is worth study and by studying and analysing these books, are a way of trying to acknowledge it happened.

Why do I study it? If I know the history of these books I can care for them better thus honouring the lives these books contributed in destroying or lost as a result of. As to the study of censorship and book burning, It is attributed to Sir Frances Bacon “power is knowledge” and how does one gain knowledge historically through books. If these atrocities are not studied I worry they will be forgotten and allowed to continue, which is still happening.

How do I find happiness? Some of the early printed torahs are the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen, how the type is designed to how the page is laid out, one takes the good with the bad. This is why I chose to study Hebrew and it’s print history, to me the text is beautiful and it brings me such joy to see it and see these books survive being banned, censored and hidden to being treasured books now that are vital to history. On a side note I am usually described and very positive and sunny. I study these things due to no other reason that a love books, it’s that simple.