Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you

History is politics and economics and sociology. And a better understanding of it would probably help prevent some of the repeated cycles of mistakes that we go through. For example, right now feels like we are in 1936. 15 years past a huge negative financial event, on the verge of trying to placate a dictator.

I dunno either, I'm not a historian. But you seem to be inferring that it's important to ask the right questions if the past, to avoid just finding justification for whatever has been decided already.

I always quite liked history. The biggest issue I ever had with it was it is such a vast subject (obviously) and therefore schools can only focus on very small sectors of it in any kind of detail.

I mean, there is a reality that happened and a reality that didn't, and I think it's important to be custodians of the memory of the reality.

You just need to recognise that there are various epistemological and practical limits on what we can really know about what happened in the past and be vigilant and really critical when the past is drawn up for something contemporary.

Sometimes it's good and valuable, sometimes it isn't.

Entirely depends on what you mean for useful.

I guess what happened in the past is important to people for as many reasons as there are people. At the grand end you have people like Putin misusing history to reverse justify his imperial intent to annex Ukraine as part of Russia.

At the other end you have people that just want relatives or friend's role in the past recognised, for whatever reason. Whether that's a grave or an obituary or plaque or changing the narrative in a newspaper, legal recognition or whatever.

You can't really escape the past, so you might as well put some rational, logical and challengeable processes in place to make sure that we try to be as accurate as we can about the past, with all the various constraints.

Going back to the Rest is History podcast - listen to the stuff they say about Romans etc and think about how narrow the actual evidence is that that happened is.

I didn't study history at school past the age of 13 (or whenever I made my GSCE selections) because I found geography more interesting and i had to pick one - i would have been happier to do both and drop RE but that wasn't an option. the brief bit of history that i did study at secondary school didn't leave much of an impression on me but I seem to recall it being more dates/names than narratives

I now listen to a bit of history in the form of podcasts (have been listening to bits of Empire recently) but as Rjsterry points out it is more like a 45 minute story, generally framed around a main character - if it started getting too much into analysis etc then I'd lose interest pretty quickly.

Like monkimark I bailed out at the O-Level selection stage. History up to that point was very much date related and mostly Kings, Queens and battle dates. Very little to no narrative.

I suspect that the success of The Rest In History type podcasts is that people don't want to get bogged down in detail (or perhaps I am just projecting my own prejudices).

I would never sit down and read a book on the Ottoman empire but i'm happy to listen to a very brief summary, following a few main characters through the dramatic bits, gives me a vague overview of who they are and how they fit into the bigger picture of history (which I knew almost nothing about before). I'm sure I get an incomplete or possibly skewed impression of events but I'm not in it for academic rigour, just passing the time on my commute in a slightly less brainless manner.

My history teacher through GCSEs would spend an hour of the 70 minute lesson talking (in a very boring manner) then the remaining 10 minutes writing out blackboards full of stuff we had to copy down. For me the challenge was copying a board before she wiped it to write the next bit. Really ruined what was quite interesting (one of the topics we covered at GCSE was the industrial revolution which included a lot of very local stuff (as in we could see the places involved from the school grounds). The other things we covered at that stage were crime and punishment through the ages and the rise of communist China, again both should have been interesting although I did struggle a bit with the Chinese stuff. Not sure what I dropped as I did geography too whcih was aways my favourite and strongest subject.

Oh yes, I remember now, we did the Russian Revolution and Communist China too. I'm pretty sure we ignored the British Empire and America. Probably all too embarrassing, even in the 1970s.

I joke but I did ww2/the Nazis every other year from year 3 till I left university.

I still think it’s mad the English civil war is not compulsory on the syllabus.

I’ve read a lot of history over the last 30 plus years. Although I enjoyed at school I was woefully ignorant about British history, my interest was sparked when discussing the band The Levellers and a teacher friend remarked the were part of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. I then went and got several books out of the library.

Just read Culloden by Murray Pittock which dispells the myth that it was sword welding Highlanders fighting the English army armed with muskets.

If you'd told me in the 90s that the Levellers were part of the New Model Army, I would have been very confused.