[Coda]

"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."

It's not enough to know how things are right now.

Part of the gestalt of modern knowledge includes the process of how we got here. There are vital lessons to be learned by looking at the problems that occurred in the past, seeing how they were addressed at the time, and then seeing what happened as a result.

History teaches us the "why" in ways that knowledge of the current state of things can't.

Historical trivia is worthless in isolation, to be sure. Knowing that the American Civil War started in 1861 is something you can spit out on a test easily enough through memorization, but on its own that doesn't really tell you much. But when you look at what was happening in the 1850s, you can start to piece together a bigger picture that tells you a lot more about why things are the way they are today, in a way that "the Civil War was fought over slavery" doesn't. (Not least because it wasn't; the emphasis on slavery was in fact a political maneuver to deny foreign aid to the South.)

The biggest problem with high school US history classes is that they're by and large not being taught that way. My AP US History class in high school was exemplary -- we weren't just drilled on trivia to be regurgitated on the test (if it were up to Mrs. Davis, we wouldn't have been at all, but the AP exam is standardized); we were taught to synthesize information across sources and combine it with our knowledge of current events to come to a new understanding of both the past and the present.

History might not always be interesting, but you never know when what you learn along the way is going to give you an important insight.