Before we answer the question we have to know what word history means. History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Who writes these history documents? Well the historians do that by analyzing and interpreting evidences. One of the most important piece of evidence for historians is the primary source. The primary source is the actual records that have survived from the past. The primary source could be a person, animal and human remain, to language, literature, material products, etc. Secondary source is interpretation of primary sources by historians having an open-ended conversation with their work.
Every one of us is a living history of our race, form the technologies we use to the language we speak are a part of us which make us history. We in a society with complex culture, tradition, and religion that didn’t happened in an instant but took us eons to build. So understanding who we were in the past and who we are now is a basic good for understanding the condition of being a human. For example, millennia ago we lived in cave and under cliffs/rocks, today we live luxuries life in skyscrapers, hotel and houses. In this case, understanding history allows us to build and if necessary change.
Learning history doesn’t just help us understand where we came from or what we did in the past, but it shows us how to appreciate how we came to be where we on present day and what we did to accomplish what we have. It also provides us with rich knowledge of what we can built and useful ideas that help us further improves our civilization. For example, the pyramids of Giza were a huge mathematical engineering achievement which also help our modern day mathematicians or the Greek democracy. Dates and facts in history helps you understand what happened back then and could happened in the future, it’s important to know our history because we’re the only species that can record it and understand it.
Where we came from is a huge question I ask myself, evidence suggest that my people came to settle at the islands around 3,000 years ago, successive waves of Southeast Asia migrants spread across the Western Pacific populating its many small islands. The Marshall Islands were settled by Micronesians in the second millennium BC. Our old religion suggest that we came from the heavens onto earth. That’s is another interesting fact history showed me. History didn’t just teach me where my ancestors came from but it also showed me what my generation is missing.
History matters because no matter how many times we “change our history”, it’s the same thing all over again. History repeats itself not because the human race can’t “modify” itself, it because the human race never learns. History is one huge collective of knowledge that we have and all it takes to change is to simply take advantage of it.
