Don’t have to tell me that. My own field is quantum computation, about as narrow as it comes.
In cases like this reductive survey, yes. In general, I believe it’s a really good idea for every member of a society to have a solid grounding in history, both that of the world and that of the land they call home. The problem is that such history is useless without a narrative, because history is simply too vast and complex for any individual to grok every thread. But narratives are partially subjective, so they really don’t lend themselves to rudimentary factual surveys like the idiocy that gave rise to this BB post. As you allude, history isn’t trivia, it’s an vast interleaving of cascading events. Even so, to (loosely) paraphrase Michael Crichton, if you don’t have some grasp on the arc of history, you’re just a leaf ignorant of the tree.
