50 Old Pics Showing The World That We Will Never See In Real Life

Penelope J. Corfield is professor emeritus of history at Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom. According to her, people working in the field are often asked: What is the use or relevance of studying history? Why on earth does it matter so much what happened long ago?

"The answer is that History is inescapable," Corfield writes, highlighting that the capital letter signals the academic field of study.

"It studies the past and the legacies of the past in the present. ... It connects things through time and encourages its students to take a long view of such connections."

To Corfield, all people and peoples are living histories.

"Communities speak languages that are inherited from the past. They live in societies with complex cultures, traditions and religions that have not been created on the spur of the moment," she explains.

"People use technologies that they have not themselves invented. And each individual is born with a personal variant of an inherited genetic template, known as the genome, which has evolved during the entire life-span of the human species."

There's a good reason why you ended up on this list — the linkages between past and present hold the key to understanding the condition of being human.

It might sound like I'm peppering it up, but according to Corfield, that is precisely why History matters. "It is not just 'useful'; it is essential," she says. Being familiar with the flow of time allows us to ground ourselves within it, to find our place.

"The study of the past is essential for 'rooting' people in time. And why should that matter? The answer is that people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process," the professor explains.

Much more can be said on history's importance, but you probably get the idea.

And what's cool about the subject is that it's so broad, everyone is bound to find something that speaks to them. "Among professional historians, the prime focus is upon the past/present of the human species, although there are some who are studying the history of climate and/or the environmental history of the globe," Corfield adds.

Indeed, the boundaries between disciplines are never rigid.

Some scoff at history because of all the facts and dates you supposedly need to painstakingly memorize in order to … But the professor says such details provide only a portion of the basic building blocks of History as a field of study. On their own, they have limited meaning.

"Take a specific case. It would be impossible to comprehend 20th-century world history if given nothing but a list of key dates, supplemented by information about (say) population growth rates, economic resources and church attendance," Corfield says. "And even if further evidence were provided, relating to (say) the size of armies, the cost of oil, and comparative literacy levels, this cornucopia of data would still not furnish nearly enough clues to reconstruct a century's worth of world experience."

So if having abundant information doesn't automatically mean that people can make sense of the data, what keeps us from getting lost in history?

Mental frameworks. We people need to develop adaptable and critical minds.

"Returning to the case of someone first trying to understand 20th-century world history, the notional list of key dates and facts would need to be framed by reading (say) Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century or, better still, by contrasting this study with (say) Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century or Bernard Wasserstein's Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time on 20th-century Europe, and/or Alexander Woodside's Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History or Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy."

In other words, you have to critically examine different views, find new arguments when discussing them, and keep re-evaluating what we know.

And, of course, a picture or two.