What History Means to Me

We have to wirte an essay about what history means to us. I need a few more details in my paragraphs, and i reallyy dont know what to put!

To me, I think history is very important. It is a way to make sure we don't make the same mistakes twice, it also helps people and things to develop, and it shows us were our ancestor have come from.

If we do not learn our history - we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. We could learn from the mistakes of others and make better choices for ourselves. A prime example would be the Holocaust, which is often listed as the most horrific event in that it was the first industrialized mass murder. We now have laws to ensure that something like the Holocaust does not happen again. Something like slavery and segregation we now know is terrible could happen all over again if we didn't know the effects from the first time it happened. With history we know what works and what doesn't. On the other side, history can show us what not to do, and how to not make the same mistakes over again.

History can also help so we can use that knowledge of the past events to study things that aren't currently happening. In the past, people died from things like then common cold. People now have things like vaccinations to help us live longer. By studying history, we can learn to develop more and more.

One of the coolest things about history, to me, is the fact that I can trace back my family name. You can track your ancestors to almost the beginning; you can even see when they came to America. History also can show us how America began and why people started to come here.

History can mean different things to different people, and to me, it means a lot. I feel as though we need to know where we have been to know where we are going.

Who's "we"? Who is asking you to write this essay? Why?

I see that you have a consistent theme here: History means learning from the past, and especially from past mistakes. Some of your examples are apt, but your common cold/vaccinations example makes no sense to me. What do we learn by knowing that people used to die from the common cold (for which there is still no vaccination)?

Avoid slang terms like "coolest" when writing class assignments.

thanks for the coolest thing, i didnt even realize. and my hitory teacher assigned this essay to my class.

Really? What laws exist now that didn't exist before? Have there really been no genocides since? Or does your description of it as "the first" incidence of industrial mass murder indicate that in fact there have been others since?


Yes, because America is now blessedly free of segregation, and no longer has schools and neighborhoods that are essentially all black or all white . . . oh, wait, never mind.


Exactly. Genocide, for instance, clearly works. Compare how much more stable contemporary American society is as a result of the European settlers' genocidal treatment of the Natives to how unstable Israel's situation is because they insist on containing, rather than exterminating the Palestinians. Clearly the lesson is that it is better to eliminate a people you are going to displace . ..

Okay, I'm being deliberately provocative, but my point is that your essay lacks any real depth. Your examples are generally trite and overused, and you seem to have no awareness that history is largely a tapestry of fictions put together by those who hope to influence the future by the way they describe the past. Worse, you completely miss all of the wonderful tensions and ambiguities that arise as people try to make sense of history by reviewing varying accounts of it, and that make the subject so fascinating.

Actually, the international genocide conventions that are now part of international law were inspired by the Holocaust and do, in fact, represent new laws against genocide. However, these certainly have not prevented genocide since, although it has tended to be non-industrialized, as in Rwanda in the 1990s.

That's okay. The questions weren't rhetorical. Although, I have to question if laws against genocide are really meaningful. Most countries already have laws against murder, and genocide is murder on a massive scale. As such, the laws you reference seem more to be a way for the countries that made them to engage in a form of catharsis of their own guilt for the genocides they carried out in the past, than a way of ensuring that genocides no longer happen.