How I Learned to Love History
Better learning through ownership, curiosity, and the search for insights
Growing up, I hated history.
I valued knowing historical facts, as I value all knowledge. But it took me too much effort to memorize dates and events. Even then, I could retain the information only long enough to pass an exam. Such investment came at the expense of other learning. By contrast, learning math and physics was easy for me. I only needed to understand basic relationships (such as the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration), then from those I could deduce anything I further needed.
Learning history as a straight timeline was not best for me–and might not be best for most people.
Recently I researched history for a series of articles starting with Silent Narrators in a Wallet: What Shared Currencies Confide About Historical Socio-Economic Dynamics1. Nobody asked me to; I was simply intrigued by the idea of a currency used by multiple countries (or territories)2.
This kind of history study felt surprisingly enjoyable.
Throughout my research, I had transformed into a sociologist embedded in an economist trapped in the body of a historian — piecing together the facts behind each shared currency. I repeatedly assessed historical conflict to determine if my hypothesis (that shared currencies spring from armed conflict) was correct.
Actually, there had been one year (only one in my primary and secondary education) when I did enjoy history.
Twelfth grade.
That senior year in high school, my history teacher taught history thematically.
The period we covered was from the end of the middle ages to present times. Our teacher must have been something of a rebel, because he broke with the Ministry of Education which prescribed a chronological curriculum.
Rather than take the period sequentially, decade after decade throughout the entire school year, he spent the first three weeks covering all war from the entire period. He followed with a few weeks on economy from the entire period, linking the evolution of economies to what we already knew about wars. Then, government and power, again for the entire period, linking that new information to wars and economies. Later on, how art was affected by all that evolution of wars, economies, government and power, etc.
Every new theme (wars, economy, government and power, art etc.) gave us an opportunity to see the big picture again, to see it with fresh eyes, and to link our thinking, which strengthened the older knowledge while acquiring new knowledge. There was less intentional memorization but more exploration, deduction, and understanding.
Diana A. Laufenberg, executive director at Inquiry Schools, described a crucial characteristic of thematic teaching as layering a “theme over the previous themes and discuss connections and patterns and flow and trends that exist when we look at multiple themes at once. Then we move forward with another theme. By the end of the year [students] have seven shelves3 onto which to load their learning.”
This thematic approach to history teaching was exactly what was missing before my senior year in high-school, but it came rather too late.
My research on shared currencies felt closer to thematic teaching of history, but there was more to it. Here are three elements I identified.
First, ownership. I owned the curriculum. The whole topic was something I found myself interested in. I persisted down a research thread so long as I owned interest. The effort was not imposed on me; it sprung from within.
Second, curiosity drove me. I had an overarching research question to guide my exploration. I judged incoming information on how well it addressed my research question. I allowed exploration of nuances when my intuition told me there was something there for me. For every curiosity that was worth pursuing, I methodically studied a variety of resources. This transformed the task into discovery, rather than memorization (of someone else’s discovery).
Third, my success metric was insights. I looked for patterns, themes across multiple currencies . You can own the scope of your studies, and curiosity may drive you, but you may still only learn what you could have learned through someone else’s research. I was instead aiming for fresh insights. For all I knew, nobody had previously created a taxonomy of shared currencies. Deriving my own unique insights helped fuel my enthusiasm.
Studying history chronologically is like examining a Persian rug by dismantling it thread by thread, inspecting each thread under a magnifying glass, and then discarding it. We would know every detail about the threads, but we would lose sight of the big picture, missing the intricate beauty and depth of the rug's patterns.
Also—we’d destroy an expensive rug.
When you own the scope, and you explore, and you seek themes and insights, you will discover and understand. And when you understand something you don’t need to memorize it.
This is how history should be taught.
Thank you to
, , and MAK for providing feedback on early versions of this article.Are you a lifelong learner? Of history? How do you learn effectively, and how do you maintain enthusiasm throughout the process? Leave a comment below.
I have since come to notice it’s much more common than I thought. In fact, I have been using such a currency for over a decade: every time I visit the EU.
Laufenberg says that teaching history chronologically is like giving students papers (that is, facts), but without real understanding how to connect and make meaning with those papers. Thematic teaching provides the shelves that allow students to shelve information appropriately, which then facilitates understanding and recall.
https://laufenberg.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/teaching-history-thematically/
(accessed 2023-09-20)
This is another valuable new lens through which to view a subject synoptically, as was your piece on currencies. I, too, have often been frustrated by the attempt to understand global history (for example) by following the historical threads of individual countries one by one.
History most certainly does not happen like that. People, cultures, and ideas mix and swirl like ocean currents. Isolating their pathways for observation ignores their influence on one another — the effects of which then swirl back to influence themselves. It's a tangled loop that indeed cannot be unwoven for the sake of understanding any more effectively than your example of a rug. Teasing out the parts automatically sacrifices the big picture.
With hopes for a more comprehensive understanding, I bought an 8-foot-long wall chart many years ago that stacks the historical trajectories of the world’s major civilizations across a 5000 year timeline. Shazam! The interplay among those cultures — or lack thereof — snapped into bright focus. (The Iron Age came two _thousand_ years before the Incas? Who knew?)
All it took was the effort to assemble the information into a matrix — a stack of layers — instead of a train of unrelated lines. Your 12th grade history teacher was onto something.
...lifelong learner here but always struggled with history and economics...i guess that helps explain how i keep miring in debt again and again...i love this idea of picking a theme...my favorite histories have always been oral...anything by Studs Terkel, but also books on comedy, punk rock and movies because those things interest me...now if someone could finally just release the oral history of punk rock comedians in the french revolution for me...