Importance of History

Many students wonder why the study of history is so important in today’s curriculums. A simple answer to that is, one cannot proceed without knowledge of the past, or to say that one learns from others mistakes as well as their own. This being true, another reason to study history is to see, not only our mistakes so we may learn, but also to see the good influences that molded the world and culture we live in. The ancient civilizations of the Greeks, Hebrews and Romans contributed to our modern civilization, not just the eastern-European but western civilization as well. Those cultures and civilizations shaped eastern-European culture which intern shaped our western culture, so for us to truly study our cultural history we must revert back to the values and ideals of these first civilizations. Our modern western culture is intellectual with a strong central government and mostly monotheistic in religion. How did we come to be like this? How can we learn about those ancient cultures? By their literature mostly. The literature of a culture directly reflects the society in which it is written. By analyzation of ancient poems, stories, myths, and folklore we can decipher the basis of many cultures.

The ancient Greek civilization suffered a period in which little to no learning took place called, “the dark age of Greece.” Through this dark age came a body of oral epic poetry in which tales were told and passed down generation to generation. This oral epic poetry helped shape the ...