History is often poorly represented and so much is being lost to current generations. If you want to learn anything about history, good luck finding any decent guided tours. You must do much digging and piecing things together to get enough insight into history to make your trip worth embarking upon. Essentially, if you want a bird’s eye view of history, go watch a YouTube video or documentary or take out books from the library on the subject. If you want to actually understand history, you actually have to become an amateur historian yourself.

The funny thing about history is how distorted and twisted its telling often becomes… You can’t really trust any one source, or even any handful of sources, to get the facts straight. We often embellish history for the sake of telling a more exciting story, and this isn’t new to humanity; we’ve been embellishing historical tales for thousands of years! 

So, don’t use a trip to any historical tourist trap as the basis of your understanding for a historical figure or event; read “actual books by actual historians” as your baseline. But, the other stuff, the ways that history becomes perceived and represented are sometimes just as interesting, if not even more so, than the history itself. This is why I’ve long preferred to look at subjects with an eye towards their place in history and the context around them. 

Time has a strange way of distorting human beings’s perceptions about facts, people, places, and things. So, I try to focus the lens a bit and provide context. Perhaps that’s why we love history so much, because everyone seems to put a new spin on it; sometimes, the results are pretty hilarious, and other times even disturbing. 

Unfortunately, it seems, history is getting lost on too many people these days, and it’s the job of people with a raging passion to keep the spirit of investigating history alive. After all, history is as much of a living thing as the present, and we can’t exist without the past. As Annette Laing of the Substack Boring History once said, “History isn’t the past. It’s how we interpret the past, and we change.” Not only do museums need to be redone and updated from time to time, but they need to be far more of a priority than they already are.

~ Amelia Desertsong