As the American philosopher George Santayana wrote, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This quote explains in a nutshell why knowing history is so important: We need to understand past events and analyze them so that we can try to avoid the mistakes of the past and learn from the successes. This is why, for example, so much energy has been spent on trying to understand the rise of a tyrant like Hitler. Germany in 1933 was a democracy like the United States and was considered one of the most advanced countries in the world, so how did ordinary German people end up electing a genocidal maniac who plunged the world into a highly destructive global war? How can we make sure that doesn't happen again and doesn't happen in our own country? On the positive side, historians spend a good deal of time trying to understand events that went well: how, for example, did the founders of the United States devise a system of governance based on the will of the people (at least free male people) that worked to make the country great when they could so easily have gone in the wrong direction? Ignoring history deprives us of the valuable guidance that such examples from the past provide. In fact, the ability to record and transmit our history is part of what distinguishes humans from all other animals, who don't have any way that we know of to record or learn from events that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. Knowing and learning from our history is part of what makes us human.
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