If you know history well, it is a lot easier to predict the future. For example, Hurricane Katrina was probably caused by human activity. If people would have been more careful about polluting the enviroment, it may not have happened, or it may not have been as big as it was. Hundreads of people had died and thousands of them lost their homes. Most of New Orleans is under water, so the chance of getting ill is very big. There were scientists who actually predicted there will be a big storm in the Gulf of Mexico around the time it really did happen. Even though their job is dealing with nature, not History, those Scientists had to find examples in the past, like this one, to know more about what was going to happen.
Another example is the Industrial Revolution. All these people started making new inventions, like electronic devices and cars.
Get the boot from Industrial Revolution!
Great Depression Food Line
View of the eyewall of Hurricane Katrina taken on ...There were great job offerings, wages were high and everybody wanted to buy these new items. Everything was going fine as more and more inventions were being made. Machines like robots started taking people's jobs because robots were faster and cheaper. Slowly it led to a revolution and for the stock market to collapse. This over-producing industry came so sudden, that everybody bought what they needed, ran out of money, and less and less jobs were being offered. This led to the Great Depression. Now people can be more careful for this not to happen again.
History really effects our lives. You can have intelligent conversations about cross-cultural events and how people deal with different situations, for example wedding rituals, sports, sport history (Olympic games), fashions, cuisins, technology, music and art. We still treasure some of those Christian art work that was done hundreads of years ago.