What is more interesting than people? Most posts seem to reflect how the subject was presented whether well or ill. I was self taught having never taken a history class from the time I was 17 until I started teaching US History at the ripe old age of 45. Over those 28 years I read about interesting times and followed the ebb and flow of history to satisfy my own curiosity. Imagine though if those 28 years had to be condensed into 2 or 3. The first thing you do when you condense something is take all the juice out.
You really can’t blame teachers, though. We become history teachers for the love of the subject but we are evaluated and judged based on whether our students can identify 35 sometimes arcane facts on the annual standardized test. The real purpose of teaching history in high school is to “hook” students with a taste of the good stuff and then leave them craving more.
Tonedef: Have you read Barbara Tuchman?
You do have to have a chronological sense of history to understand how one thing leads to another, sometimes because of the great surprises but more often predictably because people don’t realize that humanity has dealt with everything and we can avoid the pitfalls if we just pay attention.
For those who don’t like American history, find your connection. You may not feel a connection with the Civil War but when you learned about how your direct ancestor left Tennessee in the 1850’s only to find himself fighting on the opposite side from his family 10 years later. Or that grandad’s family had gone from immigrant carpenter to the State Architect of Illinois in 50 years and then develop a thriving practice among the booming capitalists in 1928 then lose it all in the great depression and becoming a maintenance man for his father-in-law’s apt building, it makes history come alive.