While for some, history is not much more than a bunch of names and dates, others could spend countless hours studying how certain events developed and how they changed the world we live in now.
“The decisions of people who came before us definitely impacted the world we live in today; just as our decisions will impact the people who come later,” associate professor of history at Southern Utah University, Dave Lunt, told Bored Panda, adding that history is more than just “the things that happened”.
“It’s more of the understanding and interpretation of what happened,” he explained. “Most of the time we can all agree on the basic facts, dates, and events. But history occurs in figuring out the bigger trends or effects of the events in the past. And the most interesting interpretations are usually complicated, nuanced, and firmly situated in ‘the gray areas’.”
Assoc. Prof. Lunt suggested that practicing the skills of investigation and interpretation can help make sense of our world as the years go by. “Oftentimes, very small things end up having momentous consequences in our lives. The first time we meet ‘that special someone’, we rarely understand how momentous that meeting is. The same is true of history. Only later can we appreciate the true value and importance of certain events.”
Dave Lunt shared that the idea of cause and effect is what fascinates him the most about history. “I think, in some ways, that history is similar to science in that historians develop theories and then test them against the evidence,” he said.
“But history isn’t science. Sometimes things happen that defy easy explanation. Some things don’t have a rational cause and effect; underdogs can win the big battle, or a freak weather event can alter plans, or an unexpected eclipse of the sun in August, 413 BCE can convince the Athenians to delay an attack on their enemies, allowing the enemies to regroup and defeat them. It is a desire to know more about these human factors in the events of the past that draws me to history.”
Unsurprisingly, the general public’s view of history is not exactly the same as those of the professionals in the field. A national survey in the US, conducted back in 2020, found that the majority of respondents—roughly two-thirds of them—consider it to be “an assemblage of names, dates, and events”. (While for practicing historians it’s more of a field that provides explanations for certain events in the past.)
The survey found that the vast majority of people (as many as nine out of ten of them) say that one can learn history everywhere, not just in school. Nearly three quarters believe that it’s easier to learn history when it’s presented like entertainment, which might be one of the reasons why the most popular sources of information for the general public are all in video format.
The 2020 survey found that the main sources of historical information for the general public are documentary and fictional movies and television, followed by various online and print sources, and museums, with history lessons and college courses lining up at the end of the list.
Despite being the most popular, though, movies and TV were not considered to be the most reliable sources for historical information. That might be because without certain embellishments or adjustments, some historical events would be too “dry” or too complicated to follow, which, according to Lunt, is one of the likely ways myths are born.
“I'm sure there are many factors in play, such as the unreliability of memory, differing eyewitness accounts, and the need to simplify complicated events into easy-to-follow narratives,” Assoc. Prof. Lunt told Bored Panda, discussing how false historical information becomes accepted as historical fact.
“But the one I think about the most is similar to how I approach myths—something about the non-factual version resonated with people, and that's why it stuck. In a way, it says more about the people who adopted and maintained that belief than it does about the historical (non-)event itself.”
Lunt expanded that the way historians approach myths is not whether they are “true” (as in factual) or not, but what they reveal about the people who told them and believed them. “So, with something like the Trojan War as told by Homer, it's clearly a myth but the values of its characters reveal the values of the ancient Greeks during the time it was composed,” he provided an example.