I have always been fascinated with knowing why things are the way they are. When I was young, I loved watching nature documentaries, which meant that I always had some fact about an animal I was eager to share rattling around my brain at a given moment. After learning what I could about the behavior of modern animals, I wanted to know more about why certian animals looked the way they did, especially their skeletal structures, compared to others. The conclusion I eventually came to was that vertebrates all had the same basic skeletal structure, with some having particular evolutions like fused hips in whales, the unique tarsal structure of primates, or fused digits in ungulates. By the time I actually started reading about animals and evolution in grade school, it seemed like a no-brainer to me that vertebrates have common ancestry. This realization is what led me to gain an interest in dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals which ended up being my primary learning interest when I was young, because I loved being able to trace the ancestries of modern animals to the animals that lived alongside dinosaurs, and see how their skeletal structures changed over time.
Lo and behold, as I grew up and started wondering how society works, it didn’t take long for me to form an interest in history in a similar fashion. I started learning about how the world was today, and found clarity in my confusions by questioning how it was yesterday. I love identifying patterns as much as I love finding a lack thereof, and I love to share what I’ve learned as much as I love to learn more from others. To me, the study of history is a way to examine the story of our species, to interrogate confusion and conviction alike, and to be part of a space of collective thought where I can share and read insights into our past to better understand our story.
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I also had a naturalist phase growing up! I’d never connected it to my love of history before, but you make a good case for it. The fossil record of human society, in a sense. The collective activity of history is also one of the things I find compelling about it, that I’m not just working on my own little corner of the world, but I’m participating in a much larger conversation, building on what has come before. Some historians are against the idea of “presentism,” that questions about our present should shape our questions about the past, but to me that approach has always made the most sense. History matters most when it helps us understand where we are now, and this approach also means that “history” will never be finished–we will always be looking to the past for more insights, making more discoveries, reinterpreting what we thought was true.