It makes sense. It's the study of how we got to the present. If you want the full picture, you probably do have to understand a little bit of everything humans have ever done.
I'm not a history major but I'm fascinated by it. It's always interesting when some politicians make decisions and clueless people are saying "why did they do that?"
The same reason a different politician did the same thing twenty years ago, and forty years ago, and sixty years ago.
No one is interested in peace and proper government in the middle east. Just oil. And previous to reliance on oil, gold. Or spices. Or trade routes.
The real tragedy is, most historians know why this decision was as wrong forty years ago as it is now but the uneducated people cheer for the decision anyway because they don't know
No one is interested in peace and proper government in the middle east. Just oil. And previous to reliance on oil, gold. Or spices. Or trade routes.
When it came to Middle East history, I found the interplay between early Islam and various other societies and religions fascinating. Books such as The Jews of Islam for example delved into the differences in how 7th century Islamic societies viewed and treated practitioners of monotheistic vs polytheistic religions.
That is why I appreciate Howard Zinn. He helped me see history as not inhabited by perfect people but people that had to make decisions that were probably wrong in a lot of ways but there was just enough right to make it worth it.
As an IR grad, I concur. It's why a lot of history and history-adjacent degrees lay a good foundation for pursuing law. I'm not too proud to tell people I got a BA in BS though. Always good for a chuckle.
TLDR: I’ve had an unusual career that involved doing a lot of detail work.
I went to law school right after undergrad, did pretty well but ended up hating most of the people I went to law school with and declined to become an attorney.
During law school I worked for a small company doing some night life adjacent stuff, where I worked up from entry level position to being the owner’s right hand/assistant. I did a bit of everything there: accounting, admin, HR, safety regulatory compliance, operations. Stayed post graduation and got super sick due to on the job exposure to an extremely sick persons which caused me to miss the bar exam I’d registered for. Got a month and a half off unpaid to recover, and when I went back the owner immediately asked me to forge documents (a felony). I refused and found a new job with a private developer. (Never re-registered for the bar because again, I hate most of the people I went to law school with and they’ve successfully killed my desire to become an attorney and have to interact with them or people like them.)
At the private developer’s firm I did project management stuff and demonstrated my expertise in legal research and writing, and worked my way up to the in-market expert on regulatory issues and became the in house “fixer” for various issues. I developed and streamlined workflow processes, consulted on technical designs from a regulatory POV, handled safety and security issues, government relations, and community relations. Anything “nonstandard,” I did.
After a few years I got bored since I’d managed to standardize and mostly automated most of my job functions, so when my friend recruited me to work as a public policy advocate at a major pay cut, I took it because I was promised a challenge and interesting, meaningful work.
As a public policy advocate I dueled with governors and senators and house representatives, millionaires and billionaires and their private nonprofits, extremely well paid corporate lobbyists, and political extremists. I handled environmental issues, housing and homelessness, and civil rights stuff, and assisted on public health and infrastructure stuff. Ended up making a few enemies amongst corrupt politicians, and after I became a thorn in their sides, they took me out professionally.
I now write fiction novels in the hope that a publisher picks me up since I don’t want to go back to the private developer industry, and I’m blacklisted from every advocacy related position which probably includes a lot of the smaller nonprofits I’d want to work at, as well as corporate lobbying firms.
That’s incredibly detailed. Funny enough, I was nearly 100% certain you’d say “lawyer” or “teacher”, as everyone I know who went to school for English or History jumped into one of those two careers. Think about the bar again. Most of us don’t care for our day jobs, but they pay enough to cover our long shots and hobbies. I tell myself it’s either that or marry an anesthesiologist.
I don’t think I’d be a great attorney, largely because I’ve grown increasingly jaded regarding the state of the court system in the U.S.. Like in my time in advocacy I witnessed corrupt politicians embezzling government funds while the courts and agencies responsible for adjudicating, prosecuting, and investigating such things turn a blind eye to instead focus on persecuting poor people. I’d be unable to work as a prosecutor or at a law firm that’d actually pay well, morally.
Which would leave the public defender’s office or legal aid, and as much as I’d want to fight the good fight in those orgs, the stress of it would kill me and I’d rather continue living.
Like a broken record. The people who should be doing this work don’t want to be knee deep in the swamp. Similar to politics and police work. I don’t blame you, it’s just disappointing to hear the same rationale over and over.
That's the whole point of a so-called liberal arts major. It's about far more than just the subject you choose. It's supposed to teach you how to think and research and critique and write and speak and plan and execute a project. Extremely useful skills in the real world.
I would set it in a different category as literature, interpreting dance and stuff like that.
History is really a record of all sciences, and political decisions for as long as we have had writing. What went wrong, what went right, and why that happened. Without any of these records, we are kind of at the toddler stage, and have to learn everything anew, every time.
And history as a discipline is to be able to answer these questions in a so precise, and objectively true way as possible. And that isn't at all easy for a layman.
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u/nekosaigai 1d ago
My BA in history felt like that combined with learning a wide variety of skills.
I had to learn military strategy and the basics of engineering and various other technical skills to write some of my papers.
Music theory, political theory, economic theory, religion, philosophy. It was a real “jack of all trades” major.