Be me, in high school

Or you wind up forgetting that the mongols did it pretty successfully

Or to wage land war against China, which is a classic blunder.

It was warm period at the time.

this.
also, it's generally fucking educational. what are you, stupid?

Because you might need it if you decide to pursue a career in history or... Humanities.

Same as chemistry basically. And unlike chemistry it has some marginal uses such as being able to tell when someone is selling you bullshit about ye old times.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

Congrats, your answer is a common phrase.

History is bunk. Ford was right about pretty much everything. All it does is hold you back.

fpbp

K.

This. All current events are a culmination of history.

Everyone else has basically spat out the same answer, but it's the truth. How can you understand what's happening now if you don't understand what happened before? How can you appreciate what we have, how can you see persistent issues, notice patterns in social, economic, and political areas? A good history professor will ask you to think critically, analyze cause and affect, word your arguments better, and be able to back them up with cited facts. If you study on your own as a hobby, you should be doing these on your own. Any information is valuable information. At the very least you'll score some points at trivia night and have something interesting to say next time you need to make small talk at a party.

I have a cousin who says, "who cares? they're all dead/it already happened/it's boring," every time the fact that I'm a history major comes up. When I try to explain he interrupts me and says it again.

I'm tempted to ask him why we need chemistry, and after he answers say, "I guess, but you're not doing that. You're unemployed."

>majoring in history

either already rich or retarded

who invaded it in winter?

>Studying history because it is "important."
Kek.

It isn't. History is just is: the study of the past.

Studying history for the sake of "looking for trends to predict where society will go" is not history, it's fucking prediction.
Studying history for the sake of "not repeating the same '''''''''mistakes''''''''" is not history. You clearly have an agenda in mind considering you branded some things in history as mistakes and some things in history "proper."
And dear god, don't study history to validate some political/religious standpoint. You're just going to fuck it up.

Looking for what is "important" tends to fuck up the study of history.

History is knowledge, which in itself is valuable, but history is uniquely valuable in the ways it teaches us in the workings of politics, war, science, plauges, the effect these things have upon society, i would not be as scared of a reimmergence of a plauge as i am if it weren't for reading about the plauge that struck byzatium under justinian, it allows you to look into the failures and triumphs of governmental systems, of the dangers and advantages in despotism, in how Suileman murdered those he loved, in the ways the ottomans would ensure that nobody would know about the sultans death untill the heir was found in order to prevent civil war, or how napoleon did so much as an emperor.

History can effectively be seen as stories that utilize almost every single field, to understand mathematical or philosophical issues of the times you must expose yourself to them, to understand the great schism you must have knowledge of why the church split.

History makes men better because it pushes people to scrutinize stories, to find evidence, to build upon the narrative that we have found through effort and struggle.

Try this:

Would you want to wake up every morning with no memory of anything that happened before that day?

That's what it would be like to be born into the world and never learn any history.