Unfortunately, there are many people whose contributions were lost to history for the average person. Hell, there are many famous people in history that one SHOULD know, but most people don’t.
Anthony is the face of the suffrage movement today, but there were dozens of prominent leaders, and thousands of foot soldiers. Unfortunately the average person just doesn’t know about many of the other leaders of the time. So if they play tribute, they do so to who they know, not the unsung heroes.
It is funny how some figures make it into popular conscious through art. Paul Revere gained a lot of his fame from Longfellow’s poem. I know who Ira Hayes was thanks to Johnny Cash.
I don’t understand why people don’t like history. It is basically story time in class. I gladly took elective courses because they were fun and easy.
I have learned to never underestimate what people don’t know. Maybe they never studied history… or much of anything else. Maybe the subject never interested them, or their education was so subpar they never even got a chance to see if it interested them or not.
It’s mainly just because Woodhull figured into a friend of mine’s dissertation, actually!
Honestly, I don’t think being “highly educated” really means much. I know a bunch of stuff about history… so could anyone else, frankly. I don’t think that makes me any better or smarter… just means I have some historical knowledge floating around in muh brain meats.[quote=“Mister44, post:21, topic:88965”]
I don’t understand why people don’t like history. It is basically story time in class. I gladly took elective courses because they were fun and easy.
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They aren’t taught it in a way that captures their attention and they don’t see how history impacts their daily life in any substantive way. And good for you!
Agreed. It’s why we need a good history circulum from K all the way through to college. History matters.
Personally, because history class was “memorize the following names, and dates, and countries.” It wasn’t told as stories, it was told as, “This is a list of things that happened.” Whereas the stories I was reading had not just plot but characters: people I could follow around and get into the heads of.
If, instead of being told, “reparations from the First World War caused an economic depression, so Germany tried to get rid of the debt by printing the money to pay off their debts, which caused hyperinflation, which caused…,” I had been given a first-person account of a hungry young man on the streets of Berlin, who only knew that he couldn’t afford bread, and that there was a rally where this charismatic Austrian would tell him who was to blame and how Germany could become great again… That I would have enjoyed. That is a story.
Instead, I get names and dates and places that I have no emotional connection to, and which therefore go in one ear and out the other.
Educated doesn’t mean smart. The smartest person in the world would know nothing with out education. If no one taught Einstein mathematics and advanced mathematics and physics (or he didn’t read about them on his own), he wouldn’t have had the basic knowledge he needed to come up with his theories.
Same way how for all his smarts, I bet he couldn’t build say a nice oak desk because no one taught him how to or he didn’t get a book and learn it himself.
The nice thing about history, is people with even modest intelligence can learn about it. It does require some memorization (and I personally am horrible at remembering specific dates), but if you can remember what happened through, say, the Marvel cinematic universe, you can learn what came before you in history.
I think that is it. They view it as boring and uninteresting. I feel that way about shows like the Kardashians or Big Brother, or what ever.
I like all the names and dates and places stuff. Telling the stories of Joe Public I find desperately dull.
History (or Humanities, that I had to do instead of History and Geography) that I was taught, was all about the stories of normal people, bored me rigid. I wanted to study military history, not the Home Front or Victorian Workhouses.
LOL - that wasn’t directed at you. I am saying unlike say high end math, most people can grasp, understand, and remember history. You don’t need to be super smart to be good at it, one of the reasons I don’t know why more people don’t have more interest in it.
It’s always interesting to learn what is and isn’t pre-loaded into auto-correct…you can’t know to add it manually until the first time you type something and realize “hey, wow, apparently Douglass isn’t as well recognized a historical figure as I thought”!!
Remember, we live in a country where the number one customer for school textbooks – and therefore the driver on what can and cannot be included for the majority of other school districts – chose to delete Thomas Jefferson (as an example) from U.S. history textbooks because he wasn’t the ‘right sort’ of Founding Father.
The educational continuum in the U.S. is becoming more and more about extremes, rather than having an “average” anywhere near the middle of the spectrum.
Too much of anything is bad. Like bridges with “love-locks” where the padlocks were adding many tonnes to the weight of the bridges, requiring removal.
