History is not just something in a history book. It is not just the lives of kings and queens, wars and presidents, laws past, and treaties written. At any moment, there are a zillion different things going on in the world. They are all the stuff that History could be written about. The present has a powerful influence over how we see the past. We look back in time through the lens of our current beliefs, ideas, values, and goals. As those change, so do important historical interpretations. It is important to hold in mind that written history involves selection and interpretation and that History is written from a point of view. In some high school history classes, History is taught as if were chiseled in stone, a big block of stuff to memorize that is complete and unchanging - the last word. But, there really is not a last word, and almost any event or person mentioned in the history book is the subject of countless articles and even full-length books by historians. If you research those topics or people - move beneath the surface and more deeply into the layers of History - you would often find that the aura of complete certainty, that high school history books convey, disappears. There are unresolved issues and controversies over interpretations, missing or contradictory evidence, many uncertainties - and even the facts that we are certain about may evoke new interpretations over time. Too often high school history books gloss over these rich and challenging issues and just skim the surface. You have to go beneath that surface in order really to experience the study of History. Rather than always just accepting the second-hand account that you are given to learn, sometimes you have to wrestle with first-hand materials, research the controversies through primary sources, understand deeply the different sides of a debate, and make up your own mind. Rather than just filling your head with stuff, History should make you learn to think for yourself. So, what is to be made of

all of this? Well, you have to decide. Do not just take notes and yawn. Grab something here and wrestle with it. Throw it to the floor, and see if it gets back up. The world happens in all its countless ways, and then human beings try to find some pattern or order in it all. The History that we study is a logical story created by human beings, who make selections, judgments, and interpretations, and those change over time. The great lump of the past does not come to us neatly shaped. We shape it and reshape it. If selection, judgment, and interpretation play such a powerful role in the crafting of History, can you really study it without controversy? A powerful starting point for most learning is to raise questions rather than just memorize answers. Break the usually calm surface of textbook History, raise questions, be a skeptical learner, look at the original sources, the real core, and make up your own mind. Hold this in mind though: the fact that historical interpretations evolve and change does not mean that History can be bent and molded anyway anyone wants. Historical interpretations should not be just one set of opinions against another. In the crafting of good, solid history, there are rules of logic and evidence that govern legitimate historical thinking. If you are going to raise questions and be a skeptical learner, you have to be able to separate good from bad historical thinking and you have to understand that many people distort history for their own purposes. What is so important, is that you can identify them yourself.