History. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Many a young student has struggled to find the purpose in learning about "a bunch of dead people who no longer matter". The truth is that those dead people do still matter to us. They came before us. In a way they made us. We are who we are because of how they lived their lives and the choices they made.

There are sad events in history, such as the nearly-complete extermination of some tribes by other tribes after brutal wars. Whole cultures have been replaced by other cultures either because of invasion, disease, migration, or trade. People who were happily living one day might have perished the next from natural disasters such as volcanoes, storms, wars, or illness. What choices might they have made had they lived longer? What might we be like today?

These are the questions that the historian wants people to ask. We cannot truly answer them but knowing that the Roman empire dominated the Mediterranean world for nearly 1,000 years before splitting into eastern and western halves (of which the eastern half lasted another 1,000 years) tells us a great deal about why many of us speak the languages we do, observe the laws and customs we do, and live where we live.

The great empires of Asia (and their lesser neighbors) also indelibly etched pathways through human history that have led straight down to the world we know today. The 30-year-long Vietnam War might not have happened, for example, if the northern Vietnamese people had not struggled against Chinese and other foreign domination for nearly a thousand years. And what would Spain and North Africa be like if there had been no Islamic conquests of the southern and western Mediterranean world?

History also teaches us about the mistakes ancient cultures made, mistakes which we would do well to avoid making. We have read about whole cities and empires vanishing quickly because their peoples failed to manage their resources carefully, or did not know to prepare for massive ecological changes. We have studied the long-term effects of losing trade, stability, and a common language in Europe as the Roman empire declined and fell into civil turmoil. The fates of these ancient peoples could easily befall their descendants around the globe today.

History is the imprint of human social behavior upon our collective memory. We owe it to ourselves to learn from it, to avoid the mistakes of the past, so that we can continue to move forward and improve ourselves and the prospects for mankind's future.

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