Why do we need to know about history?

History is a study of the past. Either good or bad that happened in the past is history. People think that they should learn their history. And there are so many books and movies about history to let us know. Also history is one of the basic curricula in high school. But not all of us can answer precisely why do we need to learn history? And how does it affect us? It is a question that cannot be answered by one single answer. This can be answered those who know about history.

My father knows lot about history, even about world history. He really likes to study them. Thus, there are huge amount of books in our bookshelves. He always encourages me and my sister to read those books. By reading those books, I started to learn about history so that I can give the possible answers to the question mentioned above.

The most obvious reason that comes to our mind first is that the history is a source of knowledge and information. By studying history, we can learn more about our culture and tradition. There is a book, called The Secret History of the Mongols, which was written in 13th century. It is great historical source that should be read by all Mongolians. When I was reading it, I learned lot about what our ancestors did, what was their culture and tradition and how those are different now. For instance, Mongolians have nomadic lifestyle in the past. It somehow “disappears” nowadays because half of the populations live in the capital city. Thus, we, new generations, do not know much about that. But there are still people who live in nomadic lifestyle and they must continue this culture. Knowing history of one country is good way to learning one’s lifestyle, culture, etc.

Also, the history can be the source of informatio...

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... for knowing history is to learn from the past. And this is the most significant one. There is a saying that “Study the past if you would define the future”. If we have same circumstance which occurred in the past, we know how to deal with that because we learned it from history. Let’s say that the economic in Mongolia is decreasing. We had this experience in the past. We learned from the history that what action would make the situation worse. Thus, we try to avoid those actions and find other solutions or use the method we used to deal with situation in the past.

What we did, what we are doing and what we will do is history. Maybe few decades later, our new generations will talk about what we did to them, why and how we did it. Everything has the beginning. In order to know about something, we start from their history. Therefore, all of us are part of history.