Life Stories by Latoinette

Life Stories by Latoinette - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

The subject that I enjoyed so much in high school was history!

So often, history seems like only a never-ending list of facts that have to be memorized: ’In that year, that country was bombed,’ or ‘that country was conquered,’ or ‘that government was overthrown.’ It all sounds quite boring, if not more than a little useless and not worth much effort of trying to commit to memory.

Thankfully, I was blessed to realize and understand that history is really an assemblage of stories, and not just a too-big collection of random, unfeeling facts. Most importantly, these stories are about real people who lived real lives and had real feelings. They were just like us.

I learned that history is not just a way to learn about things that have happened. It is a way to learn about people. Reading about and learning about a person from the past is the next best thing to actually getting to meet and know him or her. Studying history is a way to learn from those people.

Not only can history teach us about the mistakes and successes of people who lived before we did, but it can also explain and illustrate why people today may act or think in certain ways. After all, though situations and experiences may be different from one generation to the next, feelings and emotions are the same. History should not be thought of as descriptions of events, but instead should be thought of as what it truly is: stories about lives.