We can look back, and pretty much see where we have been, though, the further back you go, the more distorted history becomes. (history is written by the victors, after all) But, even with absolute clarity of vision into history, we still don't have a clue where we are going. As a whole, humanity has proven time and again, that we simply do NOT learn the lessons of history. We keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, each time, expecting a different result than we have seen with each previous iteration. The very definition of insanity.

We will be our own undoing, and then we will act surprised when it happens.

Learning the mistakes of the pass can prevent the same mistakes in the future---that is if people are willing to listen and learn from it.

So far as I have been able to determine, most folks aren't.....

What are we doing now that we've done in the past (which proved to be destructive)?

take a look at the actions of the US government over the last couple decades. Economic measures that have proven to be ineffective, yet still implemented again and again, to no good end. Wars in various countries where we overthrew directly, or helped others to so, legitimate, if distasteful, governments, in and effort to bring 'freedom and democracy', and all we succeeded at doing was throwing yet another country into chaos and violence. One would think that we would figure out that we totally svck at 'nation building', yet, we continue to attempt it, using the same methods, that we already know don't work.....

I think the folks of those countries would agree that they would be better off, had the US NOT stuck their noses into their business.

I know the american people are getting seriously tired of the crappy economy that we have, with no end in site.

That's just one nation though.

The US doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity....... we are just more obvious about it.

It makes one wonder how much has been misinterpreted and how much information is incorrect in the history books. It makes me think of the word of mouth thing where 1 person whispers something to another and a few people later the original information has already changed...how much of our history was oral and thus changed over time this way?

I'm not sure, but I think you just called my great grandfather a liar.

History is important because as a society we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Once we learn to pay attention to history, then we can move forward as a whole.

Since history is written by the winners, most people don't have the opportunity to get the entire picture.

Pretty much every war, the winners are painted as the good guys.

Well, the question is, what history? There is more than one historical tradition for just about any given event. Most of what is "commonly known" is either wrong, or so badly slanted that you cannot really call it right. However, even though history may be written by the victors, it is rare that the losers leave behind no accounts from their perspective. Finding them and seeing how they line up with other accounts is the key to understanding.

Even in ancient times people wrote down a lot of stuff. It is a bit surprising really, and would be very interesting if the stuff they wrote down was not dreadfully dull. But people come up with surprising ways to support or refute historical traditions.

I thought this was going to be about a website called Think History.

Are you a physicist? Would you mind explaining what I'm about to get wrong?

I've heard of the concept of information being physical transmitted from the past as visualized by a Velocity vs Time Elapsed graph, and that something can only ever approach the present from the past if it's in an intense gravitational field, such as a Black Hole (helps explain why perception of time stops at an event horizon - in addition to lack of light transmission). I wasn't under the impression you could explain a biological/physiological phenomenon such as selective memory by 'interference' as we move away from the past.

You know what, I'm going to take the unpopular side here and say that history isn't important and here's why I think so.

We already have the argument brought up that history is written by the victors, which in lots of cases has been used to cover up atrocities committed by the victors to achieve said victory. On top of that, as Haggar pointed out, history can become distorted over time very easily. Just look at the telephone game in elementary school, with 30 kids whispering in each others' ears a specific message from one side of the circle to the other side, in a matter of 30 seconds to a minute across 30 kids that message almost always comes out completely different than what it started as.

Now take the same principal and put that on a scale of decades to hundreds of years and across millions or even billions of people and then add in the variable of ruling parties purposefully changing history to meet their narrative or to keep control or what have you. Despite what some people like to think, governments can and will lie to you if they can get away with it (as they are run by humans, and us as humans are fallible and can change).

A most recent example is in North Korea, Kim Jong Un is releasing videos of the North Korean soccer (or football) team winning the World Cup and people are partying in the streets from this great news. Or even last year, they released clips of Call Of Duty to their civilians telling them it was North Korea attacking the United States in order to get more proud North Koreans.

Now a good thing about history is that you can learn from mistakes. Now that's all fine and dandy, but countries aren't learning from their mistakes so what's the point? All the great ruling civilizations in history have toppled, and almost all of them for the same reasons.

The lack of hardships usually begins the fall of great nations, getting too much luxury and being too comfortable, but that isn't the exact cause of the fall of these countries - it just brings about the cause.

The cause, governments pandering to those luxuries and forgetting their job as a government. With nothing left to fight outside, the country then looks inwards. In order to make life better and better for their civilians (or at least that's the intent), they start to change things to make life more comfortable. Eventually they start interfering with things like commerce with the intention of keeping things fair, or interfering with people's personal lives with their new laws and regulations (lots of times these laws are brought in to protect the civilian from themselves) - in short, they start stepping on the toes of the people who got them there, which then pisses those people off (and may lead to civil wars).

The governments keep going for more and more control, as they now have the luxury (or misfortune) of having nothing better to do - since they arent at war or worrying about keeping water running and roads going so people's lives keep can keep going. These grabs for control can come in the iteration of many things such as more taxes, new bylaws, new building codes, redistribution of wealth, curfews, prohibition (such as guns or drugs), and many more. These are things that usually stem from luxury, most of these arent present when the country is worrying about keeping themselves afloat or staying alive.

A country doesn't worry about redistributing wealth from the rich people to the poor people, or worry about banning guns or weapons when they are in an economic boom coming from a destitute state. No, that comes AFTER the economic boom and contributes to the stagnation. Instead they worry about the basic things, the necessities. People are smart, they can look after themselves, we have proven that time and time again.

Rome, Great Britian, Russia, and now the United States, these are good examples off the top of my head of countries that have fallen in these same circumstances when they were in their height.

Rome started off as a bunch of farmers and became a great nation that conquered almost all of the known world and lasted for awhile. Of course in that time, they got too cushy and went from the base conservative values to excessive liberal values. By the end, Rome was a cesspool of useless people, prosttutes, nobles having 100 person orgies, laying around all day not working and banging each other and a complete loss of morales, then not long later their empire crumbled beneath itself.

Great Britain ruled almost all of the known land, with power all across the world on almost every continent and still with the aftermath of their influence seen to this day in many of these countries. Eventually they became soft, pandering to the weak, pulling down the strong (what was left of them) and loosening their grip on their lands. Now, they have lost all of their land in all but name and are a tiny little country on the map that is getting overrun with outside sources who are coercing them to change their laws through bully tactics (islamic terrorist organizations, sorry I had to say it, but it's true) to pander to them. Just look, the UK is going to let in sharia law into their country, which is a very gruesome set of laws for anyone who isn't muslim - especially women, even if they are muslim.

Now you have the United States, the most recent powerful country in the world that is now steady into its decline. They are over a trillion dollars in debt, yet they are still borrowing more money to pay for their unsustainable economy and giving out welfare and benefits to more people than who are paying into the coffers and pumping cash into go nowhere things like carbon storage (which is not only dangerous, but incredibly stupid and pointless) and carbon bucks (just giving money to some guru of the environment to atone for your environmentally unfriendly sins - much like the church used to do back in the days).

The City of Detroit has declared bankruptcy. A city. Declared bankruptcy. Not just A city, but Detroit, a very well known world class city. The place looks like a friggen wasteland in lots of parts. Over half of it is abandoned and crumbling apart, cops cant cover everywhere so communities are hiring vigilantes to defend their neighbourhood. This is all coming from having way more civil employees then there are tax paying citizens, who are all in unions getting benefits and raises every couple years, while meanwhile the city population keeps dropping and these people still demand their 2 weeks paid vacation and of course they are ENTITLED to cushy retirement, and god forbid you lower their wages for any reason what so ever in the meantime, even if that reason is that there is no money to pay them with, as they are getting paid with public tax payer dollars that is coming from too little tax payers (you cant count government employees as tax payers in this scenario, because their money comes from taxes).

Not only that, but they are steadily losing their 'power' in the world. Countries like Russia and North Korea and Iran have no fear of America like they used to. They are full of empty threats, warning russia not to do anything but doing nothing about it when they do it anyway. Telling Israel to stop bombing the terrorists who are attacking them and now currently forcing over half of Israel's population into hiding into bomb shelters and at the same time they are using their civilians (Hamas and the Palestinians) as shields against the bombs purposefully (last time i checked, wasnt the States supposed to be on the side of Israel?).

The United States has shown a lot of weakness in the eyes of the world stage the last few years, and the enemies of the western world are taking advantage of that. We all have the misfortune of living in the next iteration of the decline of the world's most powerful nation.

Not that Canada is any better. Canada has a population that is about the same as the population of the State of California, yet the single province of Ontario is in debt of around 300 billion themselves (and Canada as a nation is at about 500 billion). Per capita, Ontario as an entity is worse off then the entire country of the United States, but of course their latest premier has been caught in a few billion dollar scandals, is forcing people to pay taxes on unwanted and useless green energy (literally, it's useless. On any given day the wind turbines in Ontario are running at about 3% efficiency, it was a bust.)

All of this. These are all examples of how the most powerful countries in the world aren't learning ANYTHING from history. The United States, The UK, Canada, we're all following the same path as all the last great countries that have ruled the world (not saying western civilization 'rules' the world per say, but they definitely do rule the economy, and last I checked english is still the main language of commerce in the world).

So that's why I say history is useless. UK and US both have lots of smart people come from their country, but despite how smart these people are, the countries are falling for the same stupid mistakes as the last batch did. Those are also the last two countries, respectively, who basically 'ruled' the world.

Of course, small things in history, like knowing not to use nukes on your own soil as tests is a good thing to know. Of course, if you're using the term of history that broadly, well then me knowing whether or not I took a [censored] this morning is 'history' and it's important I know the last time I took a [censored] in case I had a tapeworm or something sort of health issue that was diagnosed through my bowel movements. Or you could say that hard science is history, which in a way it is because there is lots of trial and error in science to get to where we are today, of course I personally wont consider that history and just say it's hard science, because it either is or it isnt (despite whether or not you had to fail a bunch of times to come to that conclusion).

But yeah, as far as political history, I think it's kind of pointless because no one learns anything anyway, and there's a debate as to whether it's even true or not. All that matters is YOUR history, what scenarios you have witnessed and how they pertain to your current situation and the knowledge you gathered from them.

Anyway, rant off. It may or may not make sense, I'm tired after a long day of work and had a few beers. I just felt like i should bring another side of the argument to the table.

History is very important so you can tell where things will go in the future. History repeats itself often enough because people don't pay attention or don't care about the past.

It is pretty much the main reason why there's so many people out there trying to get people to forget history by not teaching it or worse changing it. Revisionist history. The latest thing is to teach history by removing the historical context. Just throw out a quote but you don't tell the student who said it, when they said it and why and let the student come up with a reason.

Without history, we'd repeat ourselves and live in an infinite loop until we learned true love, or something. idk

History is useless since it is just stories hence the word His Story which became History.

I'd say it's pretty important to understand patterns, and what has been tried to see what works and doesn't.

That said, my history professor for western civ from 1500 to present makes me hate this entire time period, because she svcks all the fun and interest on the subject.

That frightens me, revisionist history.

You make a good argument, though I'm going to try and be idealistic and say there are those who look at history, see its mistakes, and are trying to prevent them from happening.

My problem with history is it's always written by the victor's or those in power. So it is always biased.

In studying history you have to remember you are only getting one side of the story most of the time.