Watching History

I watch a lot of history on TV: on PBS, and this includes The American Experience http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/ and on The History Channel http://www.history.com/. 

Tonight I watched the episode on The American Experience about John F Kennedy http://www.jfklibrary.org/.  I almost did not watch the show, because I knew the outcome. But, I did watch the show. It was well done, and touched on many aspects of the President Kennedy's life and presidency. 

I watched the show and felt at the end, the very emotional loss experienced by the death of President Kennedy.  While I sometimes have an emotional reaction to the history I watch, the intensity of my reaction to the death of President Kennedy was very powerful. Maybe not as in depth as the sadness we all felt when he was assassinated, but still very powerful.

Watching history is sometimes a dispassionate activity for me. But sometimes, it evokes from me a great deal of emotion.  Sometimes, going into the show, I know that I will be emotionally moved. Very often, I do not realize how deeply a history show will impact me.

When I was in junior high and high school, history was a compilation of memorizations of dates and facts.  I hated history.  When I was in college and had to take a history class, a medieval history course fit into my schedule.  I was studying to be a social worker, partly because I find myself fascinated by people's stories.  I enjoy reading biographies. And had been reading history books that covered the human story, not the facts.  Well, this college course was about politics and human stories, not facts, and I found out that I really do like history.

One of my best friends in Lubbock was a junior high school Texas history teacher. As we walked our dogs, she regaled me with stories of Texas history.  The stories were not facts and dates, but the human stories that fleshed out those facts and dates.

I am a very firm believer that we must learn history, because we can learn from history, from the mistakes in our history.  Mankind makes the same mistakes over and over again, but we stand a chance to improve our story if we can glean some things from the past that can help to teach us how to improve our future outcomes.