The Importance of Historical Knowledge Learning about our past is vitally important to the present and future of our civilization. We must learn to grow from our past successes and mistakes. It is human nature to make mistakes, but the less we make, the stronger and smarter we become. The drawback is to go through the process of learning. It is impossible to grow and learn from if we don't know or analyze our failures and mistakes.
I feel the most important thing we can do with our history, is to take advice from it. When terrible things occur in history, it is recorded in textbook and encyclopedias as a bad thing. As intelligent being, it's our job to read this, comprehend what is being said, and try to prevent future occurrences. History advises us that certain events are failures because millions were killed, or property was severely damaged, and our fragile eco-system was damaged.
Portrait of Henry Ford (ca. 1919)
One-cylinder gasoline engine (ca. 1910)
PistonIf we can't learn from these past mistakes, we won't have to worry making future one because we won't have a future to screw up. The human race would probably not survive another world war, so we must prevent one from ever occurring again.
Another great advantage of knowing our history is being able to improve our quality of life, as well as helping wild life prevail. By learning about old technology we can improve upon inventions making them faster, stronger, smaller, bigger, lighter, more accurate, and/or more reliable. If Henry Ford had not learned from his first attempts on the internal combustion engine, we may have a very different lifestyle today. If nobody came along after Henry Ford to improve upon his engine, we wouldn't have nearly as powerful, reliable, and luxurious cars as we have now. We could still be driving model A's. There is also the ability to take past inventer's failures and turning them into a success. Inventers can apply new ideas of their own that have never been tried before to past failed inventions to get them to fulfill its purpose.
Religion is important in most people's daily life. By studding world history we can dig deeper into the origins of our religions, as well as learn to understand and tolerate other religions. As America is becoming more and more divers, we are commonly coming in contact with new, and sometimes odd customs. I feel that it is important to understand others differences so not to become prejudice against others. If you can understand others difference, they don't seem so odd and it is easier to relate and communicate with others. If people understood each other better and wouldn't judge others just on their beliefs or race, we would have much less world conflict, since most wars are started over religion and differences in beliefs.
History plays a huge roll in the existence or our race and the world we live in. With out the historians who archeologists that research and record it, we would be lost. Besides, history is cool anyway.
The Radiator to Cool Internal Combustion Engine
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