#ps I'm sorry if I made some mistakes writing but I wrote this from laptop

[the---hermit]

thank u for replying, you are so kind!! i love love love your blog btw!! i really love history but im so tired of the stigma it comes with of being a “useless” field. do you often have to battle this? and also what career are u looking to pursure? and just for fun, whats ur fav thing you’ve learned in your classes! thank u sm, i think ur awesome

Hi !!! thank you so much🥺💜

I’d like to start by saying that this morning I had written part of this reply, and then tumblr decided that it did not want to save my draft so all of that has self-destructed. I had written a long thing to answer to your first question, and I will now try to emulate that as best as I can, because it’s a subject very dear to my heart.

So, you are right unfortunately A LOT of people think that history is useless, and everytime I hear this argument I get really scared, because not knowing where you come from and what happened in the past makes you so vulnerable and manipulable. It is fundamental for us (whether you work in the field or you are just passionate about history) to fight this concept, everyone has to understand how important it is to know our history. In my self-destoyed answer of this morning I went on talking about this a lot, I’m going to just say a couple of things now, but if anyone is interested in the topic I will gladly articulate this more. 

A couple of things on why history is so important, as I said knowing what humans did in the past (both the good and the bad, expecially the bad) makes us more aware of what is happening today. It gives us a way to deduce how things will unfold, we can understand our present and how our future is going to be. Knowing our past gives us power, we can be less manipulated and controlled, we can stop certain bad things from happening, we can avoid repeating old mistakes. Another thing that is very dear to me is that by knowing history we can stop all those people who manipulate history for their own purpose. I will now explain myself a bit better. Throughout history many groups have manipulated history to back up their “theories” and “ideologies”, (as well as goverments that have hidden /manipulated history to better control people, and beware this is still happening today). I am thinking about how fascism tried to connect its roots to the roman emipire, and how a lot of nazis try to connect their bullshit to vikings and norse culture. This causes many problems, because if we are unaware of how history actually unfolded we can fall into their trap, and believe that they actually have roots in history, when in fact they do not at all. By doing this we would betray history, just as much as they do, and we would fall into their game, which is of course something we want to avoid. All that history tells us about these groups is how much damage they have done. It is our duty to protect history against them, and the knowledge of history will protect us in a way, because we won’t repeat the past. The roman empire got so big and powerful and lasted for so long because of the amazing integration of romans, they accepted, adapted and integrated. The empire started to fall apart when this integration started to decrease. Talking about the vikings, they were merchants and they traided with far off lands and to do so they came in contact with new cultures. Many of them became part of these new cultures. Also viking women had so much importance in their society, both socially and militarywise. 

I got kinda carried away again, but as I said this topic is really important and dear to me, and I will gladly go on talking about it if necessary. So yes, you will face a fight against people who will say that history is of no use, I trust in you to fight againt it, always.

To answer to you other questions, careerwise I will admit that I started university without much of a plan other that to study stuff I loved. I had finished high school feeling very unmotivated and almost resenting my old school, and so I wanted to study something that would have made me happy to wake up in the morning. At the moment I still don’t have a precise plan, if we want to talk about dreams, I would love to work in some ways in divulgation (I’m talking about books, documentaries, etc), I also love research, but unfortunatly nowadayss it doesn’t pay enough to survive only on that. Honestly I would not mind working with museums aswell, we’ll se what the future holds for me. I’ll turn this question around to you, what would you like to do, if you end up choosing history in school?

There’s A LOT of fun things I have learnd in my classes, I adored all the classes that taught me how to actually be an historian, so how to work first hand with historical sources. Trust me that can be intimidating at first but then it ends up being one of the most amazing things ever. Some of my other favourite classes were queer history (absolutly amazing, I learnt so much), anthropology of religion (I also did history of religions which was very good but the prof was kinda mean to me at the exam), and then I mean all the basic history eras were super interesting, I did some amazing readings! If you were referring to fun facts I learned in classes just tell me and I will tell you about some crazy things I learned.

Thank you so much for the questions and sorry if I went a bit off topic, if you have any other questions always feel free to ask !! I hope you'll have a great day! 💜🌿