Quote:
Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
What made me fall in love with history was the realization that these were real people, doing real things and living real lives. My biggest regret is that this didn't happen for me until I was almost 40.
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Glad to hear you at least realized it yourself. There are plenty of people who won't and to them, it seems to me, history is not about what human beings have done or quite as often failed to do. It's a series of events, series of names, series of numbers, series of anything you can imagine. Neat, separate blocks that they then start categorizing: us and them, good and evil, black and white. It's a scary way to approach the past.
Us historians are not above the blame for this. Things are changing here, it's seen everywhere on the field (pedagogy, research, museums, you name it), but it won't happen in a day. More like in a generation or two and where it goes from there, nobody knows yet.