Post by Christy on Feb 22, 2006 9:23:12 GMT -5
So, I was thinking about my whole history love affair. and trying to figure out where the heck it came from. It wasn't always that way-- in fact, I HATED history for the first 25 years of my life. Bluech! History! Boring! In high school, I took all AP courses, except history. Somehow I fell behind and didn't make it into AP history. I didn't even make it into honors history. I just thought it was the most boring thing on the planet, and so my grades in history were some of the saddest in my educational career.
College round 1 (1993-1995) didn't do much to spread the love, either. I think I took ONE History of Western Civilization summer course, in which I was known more for my obnoxious attitude than anything else. I would talk/flirt with all the guys who sat around me all throughout the class, and when the GA would shush me, I would wink at him or blow him a kiss. Not good.
Somehow, after jumping majors from music education, special education, and psychology (and taking a three year break to be a mommy), I ended up going back to school in 1998 for college round 2, and majoring in religious studies (still not sure how that happened). While I wasn't passionately interested in history, I WAS passionately interested in religion. This led to me taking courses from 2 instructors who inspired my interest in history. I took Intro to Religion, Intro to World Religions, History of Christianity, and several directed studies with Dell deChant. In order to better understand the history of religion in general, why we believe as we do in different eras and areas of the world, how different religious traditions came to be, how they grew out of older religions usually in response to some sort of cultural shift, and all that, I had to learn quite a bit about the history and development of different areas of the world during different time periods. FUN!
Then I discovered Dr. James Strange, one of the world's foremost Biblical archeologists. With him, I took Material Culture and Religion (a course that studied how physical placement of structures and objects reveals details about the sacred even in preliterate cultures) and The Ancient Synagogue (a course that studied the literary, cultural, historical, and archeological evidence detailing the shift from second temple Judaism to the synagogue as primary place of worship). Again, I was having to put everything I was learning about religion into the context of history, which made history seem SOOOOOOOOOOOO much more interesting.
Later, in 2004, I guess, I got into genealogy pretty heavily. Up until that point, my main history fascinations had been centered around the time periods of 500 BC to 500 AD, and 1300-1700. But wanting to know about my ancestors meant having to take a look at the 1700-1950 range, too. I wanted to know more than names and dates, and since most branches of my family were poor southerners or immigrants (with a few exceptions), there weren't great records kept on the details of their lives. So studying the history of their geographical areas helps me to better understand what their lives may have been like, since poverty, the extreme hours of farm life (leaving little time for chronicling family experiences), illiteracy, and General Sherman's torching of records for entire branches of my family means that I have little else to go on. Putting all my research skills (gleaned from courses with deChant, Strange, and many other professors who touched my life) to work on genealogy, I'm able to start to build a picture in my mind of what my ancestors may have been like, what their lives may have been like, the kinds of challenges they might have faced, and what the cultural influences in their regions may have been. What's boring about that? ;-)
Anyway, that's my history journey. It seems like the key in my history interest was put there by context, and for me, that context was offered by other studies and interests, namely religion and genealogy.
Care to share what sparked your interest in history?
College round 1 (1993-1995) didn't do much to spread the love, either. I think I took ONE History of Western Civilization summer course, in which I was known more for my obnoxious attitude than anything else. I would talk/flirt with all the guys who sat around me all throughout the class, and when the GA would shush me, I would wink at him or blow him a kiss. Not good.
Somehow, after jumping majors from music education, special education, and psychology (and taking a three year break to be a mommy), I ended up going back to school in 1998 for college round 2, and majoring in religious studies (still not sure how that happened). While I wasn't passionately interested in history, I WAS passionately interested in religion. This led to me taking courses from 2 instructors who inspired my interest in history. I took Intro to Religion, Intro to World Religions, History of Christianity, and several directed studies with Dell deChant. In order to better understand the history of religion in general, why we believe as we do in different eras and areas of the world, how different religious traditions came to be, how they grew out of older religions usually in response to some sort of cultural shift, and all that, I had to learn quite a bit about the history and development of different areas of the world during different time periods. FUN!
Then I discovered Dr. James Strange, one of the world's foremost Biblical archeologists. With him, I took Material Culture and Religion (a course that studied how physical placement of structures and objects reveals details about the sacred even in preliterate cultures) and The Ancient Synagogue (a course that studied the literary, cultural, historical, and archeological evidence detailing the shift from second temple Judaism to the synagogue as primary place of worship). Again, I was having to put everything I was learning about religion into the context of history, which made history seem SOOOOOOOOOOOO much more interesting.
Later, in 2004, I guess, I got into genealogy pretty heavily. Up until that point, my main history fascinations had been centered around the time periods of 500 BC to 500 AD, and 1300-1700. But wanting to know about my ancestors meant having to take a look at the 1700-1950 range, too. I wanted to know more than names and dates, and since most branches of my family were poor southerners or immigrants (with a few exceptions), there weren't great records kept on the details of their lives. So studying the history of their geographical areas helps me to better understand what their lives may have been like, since poverty, the extreme hours of farm life (leaving little time for chronicling family experiences), illiteracy, and General Sherman's torching of records for entire branches of my family means that I have little else to go on. Putting all my research skills (gleaned from courses with deChant, Strange, and many other professors who touched my life) to work on genealogy, I'm able to start to build a picture in my mind of what my ancestors may have been like, what their lives may have been like, the kinds of challenges they might have faced, and what the cultural influences in their regions may have been. What's boring about that? ;-)
Anyway, that's my history journey. It seems like the key in my history interest was put there by context, and for me, that context was offered by other studies and interests, namely religion and genealogy.
Care to share what sparked your interest in history?
