History is an essential aspect in our lives. We can learn from mistakes done by past leaders, improve the creations that were made by inventors, become inspired by ancient philosophers, and much more. It’s such a vast subject that’s full of so much content, and there’s so much knowledge that one can obtain just by reading one excerpt of a history textbook. Lots of people see history as boring, but it’s miles from that–you can find history in quite literally anything; it’s not restricted to a bubble full of political leaders and past wars.

Without history, we wouldn’t have or know a lot of things. If it weren’t for Andreas Vesalius robbing graves and stealing dead bodies form gibbets to dissect during the Renaissance era, we wouldn’t have as much knowledge on biology or physiology. If it weren’t for Alan Turing’s cracking of the German Enigma code, we wouldn’t have modern computers or artificial intelligence. 

With the invention of Google, you can easily look up the history behind your favorite foods, and you can discover that a majority of them were most likely created by accident, not just by scientists, but by normal people who got creative (or clumsy) in their kitchen one day. 

A lot of people avoid history because they feel like they’ve learned the sum of it all already, which is understandable since U.S. history is taught to us since elementary school. We dabble a little bit in world history–mostly centered around European history, and even more so if you’re in AP Euro–so we think that should be the end of it. 

Like the complicated formulas and methods that come with algebra classes, we consider history to be something that we won’t need when we get older, when we will. We use it literally every day and see it pretty much everywhere–money has the faces of our past leaders and had gone through several transformations in design and worth over the years, we refer to past historical events in jokes and debates, we see monuments and statues dedicated to influential historical figures; history is honestly inescapable. America may not have the rich history in architecture and art like Italy and France, but that doesn’t mean we lack it completely. 

History is important. We don’t have to become history majors in order to appreciate it to its fullest, but we should at least give it a chance and realize that it isn’t useless to us. Not many of us realize the impact it has on our daily lives.