The point of history is to collect and maintain knowledge of what happened in the past in order to observe trends and learn from mistakes and events. The point of learning and keeping history is to create memories and not forget the journey humanity has made to get where it is today. History is both interesting and important. I think it’s interesting because there are so many stories to be told and poring over items and books and photographs are just so cool because of how you can so directly connect it to culture. It’s important to not forget because all stories are equally important, even if as archivists and historians there sometimes needs to be a decision made about who’s story is worth telling. This makes history really important because it highlights all of that– the losses, the victories, progress, mistakes, etc. As a historian, I would want to preserve history that is culturally important to me and bring it into the western consciousness. I also want to be the type of historian that emphasizes a more niche topic as opposed to the more popular, ‘exciting’ ones. As such, I recognise that history is used all the time by everyone everywhere. Especially by politicians, who seek to shape a national identity and redefine core events to center a feeling of nostalgia, victimhood, or even leadership and victoriousness.
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As a historian of a niche topic, I am very glad to hear that’s what your interested in too! One of the things I love about history is the breadth of analysis that is possible–that even as I study one city during a specific time period, another historian is working at a different city, a different scale, a different aspect of society, and that our work can build on each other in the way that human experience often builds on itself. But your point about uses of history is also true–history and nationalism are intertwined in a way that is often politically motivated, and nostalgia is an incredibly potent tool in swaying popular opinion. But I think one thing that is exciting about doing history now in a way that wasn’t necessarily true of doing history earlier is that it’s more possible to combat those narratives and find a platform for alternative histories than it arguably ever has been.