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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 3 page paper analyzes Peter Stearns's article about why we need to study history. Bibliography lists 1 source.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVStearn.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
times its difficult to see why history is important; people who oppose the large chunk that it takes up in most curricula are quite right when they say that historians
are not curing cancer or building safer highways. However, history is vital, for two basic reasons: it "helps us understand people and societies" and it "helps us understand change
and how the society we live in came to be" (Stearns, 1998). These two reasons are the foundation for studying history and everything else about the discipline comes from them.
The first reason for studying history is that it tells us how people and societies work. These are difficult studies, and they cannot be accomplished if we look only at
current data. How, he asks, can we evaluate the behavior of the nation at war when its at peace? The only way is to look at historical records. Likewise, how
can we consider the impact of some new technology on society unless we look at the comparable impact in the past? In addition, significant aspects of a societys functioning, such
as military alliances, or "missionary activities" cannot be "set up as precise experiments" (Stearns, 1998). The only source we have for the study of such things is history, and "data
from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings" (Stearns, 1998).
This is the fundamental reason why we need to study history: it is the only place we can go to get evidence of how societies function, and we must have
this information to run our own lives. The second reason for studying history is so that we can understand change, and how our society was created in the first place.
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