Knowledge of History

John-Albert Absalon Morales ID# 027665500

Though the past may bring "a revival and restoration of the misery"(Limerick 473), I believe it is necessary to know and study our past. Through this essay I shall explain how knowledge of the past helps improve the quality of future output, satisfy our human thirst for knowledge, and understand certain polices and regulations.

Even in our everyday life we can see how past knowledge helps to improve the future's outcome. Whether it is improvement of policies, electronics or automobiles improvement is always occurring. The computer is one such item which has come a long way. It would taking up entire rooms, run very slowly, and create tremendous amounts of heat. As improvement began they became smaller, faster and more energy efficient. Today they are very small, and run at tremendously high speeds while producing very little heat. Each improvement in the computers history could not have been made without knowledge of its predecessor's blueprints. Without this knowledge improvement would be impossible, always building the same exact computers with the same problems and never realizing it could have been built in a different way perhaps with better materials or a different more efficient computer language.

In the same way as knowledge of the past helps to improve computers, it also improves the quality of life for mankind. Knowledge of our past helps us to see how humans react and deal with situations. this allows us to take preventative measures. There was a time when mankind was always at war with each other. Everyone was fighting to take each others land, food, and technology. Since then the United Nations have been created to prevent such types of pointless wars and now there are police which enforce the law and a government in which power lies in the people. There have been many bad times for humans in all parts of the world throughout history. There have been big and small wars with huge death tolls, small battles, famines, depressions, slavery and countless others events which could have been prevented if we had known what the outcome would be. Just as a person learns from their mistakes, knowledge of our history helps us to learn from our mistakes giving us insight into the future. Many events that have happened in our past no longer plague the world today. Slavery used to be prevalent in many parts of the world. It was a very common thing to see people trading slaves as merchandise. Today there is a law against slavery. Even though weapons have improved greatly wars are much less prevalent and the casualties are much less than ever before. For computers knowledge of the past has allowed it to improve upon itself. Mankind in this same way, through knowledge of our past, has improved greatly as well.

Our past knowledge also allows us to quench our human thirst for knowledge. As little children we ask our parents questions on all that we see. As humans we are always questioning the many differences around us wondering how they came to be and why. History aids us in this quest. A person may happen to come across a Native American reservation and wonder why he has never seen many Native Americans in other parts of the country, A family could take a trip to the south and wonder why a greater concentration of Blacks are situated there, or a child might wonder why the state of Massachusetts has a Native American name. As creatures of thought and great intellect, questions such as these are bound to enter human minds. Just in this country alone there is a great deal of cultural history which we as a society could never understand had we not studied the past. At the very least humans history is beneficial in allowing humans to understand why their world is shaped how it is. Whether that knowledge is of good events or "tales from hell" (limerick 472) is irrelevant, because it is the