Why is History so Boring?

Think Tank #76

The past is interesting.

Seeing the common thread that runs through all human life, how different cultures in the past responded to threats that are totally different from the ones we face today and yet somehow almost exactly the same.

Understanding that people built everything we have today from nothing—full cities, with roads and plumbing and electricity, all from the ground up. We can’t even conceive of it now. What would we do if we had to start from scratch?

It should be fascinating to think about this, but most people have no conception of just how cool the study of history can actually be. The past seems so dead and boring. It has the potential to be vibrant and innovative and novel and exotic. Yet what do we think of when we think of ‘history’? Stones with people’s names etched on the front of them, lifeless replicas in museums, our ninth grade history class where we memorized names and dates, mundane sequences of events with no real explanation as to why we should care.

Sure, when you visit a historical site, those crumbling statues and buildings and old monuments all look pretty dead. The color has been washed off of them, the entire context in which they were built is gone, replaced with long lines of tourists absently walking around and taking photos. But what if you imagined what those things looked like in their prime?

I’m realizing this now, but I’ve been guilty of being ‘bored’ by history my entire life. The way history is taught is just dull.

You ever read a book about history? Most of them manage to be written in the most boring, tedious way possible.

I’m not knocking historians. They do awesome work. However, most of them are scholars, not writers. They are held to a certain ‘standard’ by their profession, and, to a certain extent, they find it difficult to ‘dumb down’ their writing so that it can be relatable (and comprehensible) to the common reader.

The result is that history becomes this impenetrable discipline, in which every text requires prerequisite knowledge that you just don’t have.

And it seems so overwhelming, too, as an adult trying to gain an understanding of the past. Where do you start? At the beginning? That seems so alien. Plus, who says what the ‘beginning’ really is?

I guess history is ‘boring’ because of its scale. It’s so big, the average poorly-educated person trembles at the face of it. Plus, there’s such a fear of getting things wrong, laymen hesitate to speak publicly about it.

There are exceptions to this. Popular nonfiction writers who write books that are engaging to read, YouTubers who distill thought-provoking historical stories into fun, twenty-minute videos.

Let’s keep the trend going. Stop taking everything so seriously. It’s time to make history fun (again).