Why I Teach History and Why You Should Care

Historians are storytellers who, through captivating writing, construct narratives of the past using various sources, methodologies, and statistics. They don’t merely dust off old archives and declare what happened from these. Historians have a dynamic job, for history isn’t static, and its sources are endless. The field is a developing intellectual endeavor that helps people understand their world and place in it. Historians conceptualize the past as an ongoing discussion with the present, in which they tackle new and old questions from new perspectives and provide fresh visions regarding the human condition. Without history, we would be lost. Imagine waking up in a world where everyone had a stroke that wiped out all memory of humanity’s progress: this would be the worst situation imaginable.