Originally posted by C Elegans
History is awful. I can never remember anything and I constantly have the feeling I ought to learn more but I still don't remember anything. If I live to retirement, I'm going to take evening classes for adults in history.
Many people dislike history for the wrong reasons.
[soapbox mode on]I don't know how history is taught in the rest of the world, but in the United States, it is a forgotten discipline. When Sputnik scared the bejezus out of Americans, there was a tremendous push to increase the populus's general understanding of math, science and reading. The social sciences were virtually forgotten.
History is often taught as the simple memorisation of a bunch of names and dates. Its "learning" is often through rote and as soon as a test is over, most students flush history lessons right out of their brains. It doesn't help that many people's history teachers's first name is "Coach".
When people think of history, they often think of all of the useless facts and scattered passages of old documents they had to commit to memory. However, this is one of the least important parts of history. History is about understanding the past and its causal relationship to other events leading up to the present.
Anyone can look up in a book that the Confederacy had 51 general officers at the battle of Gettysburg, and anyone can look up in a book that 17 of those officers were killed or wounded in the three days of the Civil War's bloodiest battle (or soon after). History isn't about knowing minor facts which may earn you $800 on
Jeopardy!; history is understanding that those 51 officers were leading an ill-fated invasion of the Union states that, when combined with the surrender of the Confederate fortress of Vicksburg on 4 July, doomed the secession states's rebellion and ended the practise of slavery for good in the US.
History is also about re-interpreting traditional conceptions about the past based on new evidence and bringing us a greater understanding of the events and people who have shaped the world we live in today. It's understanding that Richard Nixon, while no saint, certainly was a better president than Kennedy, who in turn wasn't the angel everyone thought he was.
If you don't like history, chances are that you had a bad history teacher somewhere along the way.[/soapbox mode off]
@C Elegans:
Fisherman's Wharf certainly isn't all about shopping; it's also about eating. If you ever get to San Francisco ("The City by the Bay"), you absolutely
must visit one of the many hole-in-the-wall restaurants that line the wharves. They have some of the freshest seafood you'll ever eat and the dungeness crab and sourdough bread are worth killing someone (preferably a complete stranger) over; in many of the places you can actually pick out your dinner and watch them cook it right out of the holding tanks.
