My hopes for History 200 are mostly formed based on what I have heard about it from people who have taken it before. I hope to improve my writing skills, particularly in my own field – history. I know that I struggle with tenses when writing history papers. When I talk about historical events I tend to use the present tense (like “So then the people get even more angry at Marie Antoinette because they think she is mocking them.”). In high school I had a teacher who got so tired of me forgetting to stay in the past tense when writing papers that he just told me to just write everything in the present tense. I hope I’ve improved that bad habit a little in college, but I think it will be beneficial to get some instruction about how it should really be done. That’s just an example of something I know I need to work on, and I hope that History 200 will help me improve.
Why do I like the study of history? I think the best answer goes back to the extremely cliché phase, “those who don’t learn their history are doomed to repeat it.” The most fascinating thing about history for me is when I learn about events in the past and I realize that something about the world today can be explained by what happened in the past. That is one of the reasons I like Middle Eastern history so much. The fact that we are sending soldiers to a place in 2011 can often be traced to events ranging in time from ten to a thousand years ago.
You are so right about the issues of our contemporary world having roots in the past. Hard to understand the news without some sense of history.
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