When I was a kid, documentaries were the singular most boring thing on TV. If anyone tried to watch anything remotely resembling a documentary—anything explaining something for the sake of learning—I was out. The History Channel bored me to tears, and I begged the remote control controller to turn to something more entertaining.
I think a lot of people are in the same boat when it comes to history. I haven't watched the show "Cunk on Earth," but from the clips I've seen, the general "history is boring and dumb my god this is pointless how do we make this interesting" vibe seems to be the uniting stance.
I'm not sure quite when I began to enjoy documentaries and history information, or learning for the sake of learning, but I do know why I think it's important.
When I was in college, I had to take a required basic history course. The adjunct professor was Indigenous, and the way she taught history was so different than the way any of my white high school teachers had taught. She didn't make us memorize dates. She told us stories, situating objective facts in context and meaning, and I was surprised how engaged I was, and how much I remembered without trying.
History taught as a stack of dates and occurrences with no other context is pretty pointless. No wonder it's a common disinterest—what are you going to do with that information? Win the occasional trivia game?
When these dates and occurrences find their place in the context of culture, place, and time, it becomes more accessible, more like reading a story than a list. And stories are where we can find and make meaning.
As an English major, I took a lot of literature and writing classes in college. I once attended a writing course where my professor was helping us to write personal experiences, and it was from her that I learned how history is a matter of subjectivity and objectivity.
"When you write about a fight that you had with your sibling," she told us, "there are many ways to write it. Your account of the fight will be different than your sibling's account, even if you both have all of the same details, because you each experienced it through your own lens." Of course, there's a good chance that you and your sibling would include different details, because that's often how memory works.
This was a light bulb moment for me. How is history told? How do I know what I know, and is it objective or subjective? I figured history was told by historians, people who study things of the past, like journal entries and bank statements and other accounts. If those journal entries are subjective accounts, what is the core of objectivity?
A war, for instance, is an objective occurrence—it's very observable from photos, multiple accounts, archaeological findings, etc. that somewhere for some time a group of people fought. Events that took place are objective happenings.
It's the meaning we draw from these events that is subjective to multiple interpretations. For instance, the North won the Civil War, but there were multiple ways people interpreted that outcome: some were thrilled, some were upset. And for different reasons. And those meanings got passed down and threaded into policy and religion and society.
Context is also helpful for comparing history horizontally. It's easy to trace a singular country's history vertically throughout time, but it's useful to know what was happening across the globe, across cultures, at a specific point in time. My brain exploded when I learned that George Washington and Marie Antoinette existed at the same time. They both seemed vaguely ancient to me, but realizing that they were making history at the same time really locked in me an understanding of what the Western world looked like for a moment.
Learning history also makes ancient happenings seem less ancient. As a kid, the Civil Rights movement and Jane Austen seemed nearly as ancient to me as Julius Caesar or the Renaissance. All I knew was that the Renaissance was ancient ancient and the Civil Rights movement was a while ago. As an adult with a better understanding of time and history, I can see clearly that the Civil Rights movement is hardly history—people that lived those tumultuous times are alive today, which leads one to assume the aftermath of the movement is alive today as well.
Knowing where we came from is the only way to know where we are going, and the only way to make real change and undergo true healing. As the old proverb goes—those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. When we can learn history in context of how the past brought us to the present, things click into place a bit better, and the History Channel doesn't seem quite so boring after all.
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