Professor Foret's helpful hints for studying history (and by extension, other things.)

I particularly like this bit of advice:

Yes, I’ll admit: I’m crazy about History. I get excited over historical questions, and love learning the answers, either from other historians, or even on my own as a practicing historian. I know that’s difficult for most of you to understand. After all, our culture in general has little use for history: Henry Ford spoke for many of his countrymen, then and now, when he dismissed history as “ more or less bunk.”[1] And most of you are barely out of your teens, and lets just say that you have other concerns. (I was once that age myself, you know.) One day, you probably will become interested in history, too. I say this only because I have been told, over and over again, something along the lines of, “I hated history in high school/college/when I was younger, but now I can’t get enough of it…”

Why do I love history? Part of it is simply that History speaks to me. What do I mean by that? I see patterns, shapes, forces in the past, and I want to know where they came from, how they became what they were, where they went, and why. I love mysteries: Sherlock Holmes, Brother Caedfel, Jim Chee, and Joe Leaphorn are among my favorite fictional characters of all time. History, for me, has the same excitement of the mystery genre with an added bonus. History not only gives us answers to interesting questions, but those answers help us understand our world and how to get around in it. True, History’s answers are not always as nice and neat as the ones Brother Caedfel and Joe Leaphorn give us. But that just gives us another mystery to solve, doesn’t it. History, like life itself, is as much about the journey as the destination.

And this:

We also think that you need some history if you are going to be a good citizen in our representative democracy, and that idea goes at least back to George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other notable figures you may have heard of from the late eighteenth century. We don’t believe as a culture in everything they believed in, but we still think an educated citizenry is a pretty good idea.

(emphasis mine).

I found this by searching for some stuff on virgin soil epidemics for an upcoming ecology of disease lecture, but it was too interesting to me not to read.