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Anonymous
History major is terrible 2017-09-15 12:21:11 Post No. 10024362
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History major is terrible 2017-09-15 12:21:11 Post No. 10024362
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Howdy. I finished my lit major last semester and could have graduated, but decided to start a history major. That means the next year and a half of my college career will be nothing but history classes. They're absolutely awful, for a few reasons.
1. History is always a narrative with clear biases. Its impossible for me to trust anyone's historical opinion, and thus can't form a basic ducking understanding of what happened before I was born.
2. History majors are, for the most part, circle jerking asswipes. They're all convinced that they know more about particular topics than you do. Some of my classmates literally shake when they don't get to answer a prof's question, as for them it's always an opportunity to figuratively nut on they're classmates.
4. It's just so boring. So fucking boring. Every night. Every god damn night I have to somehow muster up the emotional, physical, and intellectual to give a shit about the Babylonians, or about the Korean War, or about some shithead in the Arabian peninsula who started a shitty religion. I just don't care.
Every night I start reading out of one of my textbooks and eventually find myself reading philosophy or jacking off. How do I end this vicious cycle.
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>>10024362
>doesn't care about history
>starts a history major
Retard, also wrong board >>>/his/
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>>10024362
Why don't you transfer to philosophy, and why did you want to do history?
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>>10024464
>>10024362
ANSWER ME FUCKFACE
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history is pretty cool
the manliest of the humanities
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>>10024362
I think you're in the wrong major. Some pointers from a current one
>biases
Agreed, but this is easy to work round. The easiest way to work round this is to read what the people wrote themselves, if you are a >translations fag most relevant pre-1600 stuff will be written in fairly easy Latin. The other way is to stop reading "textbooks" (college history classes have textbooks? wtf) and instead read historians (journal articles are better because they get to the point, but most of the time just read non-popular history books) and find historians that really disagree with each other. Work out for yourself whether historian A's argument is better than historian B's argument, or are they missing C that's crucial.
>arrogant
True, but you can beat them by reading outside of a narrow definition. Simply knowing some basic economics will allow you to spot weak arguments quickly (the broken windows fallacy comes up a lot in history books, for example). You say you studied literature, I'm hoping you should have a good knowledge of cultural movements behind said literature, and are aware of some basic philosophy. A lot of your peers won't, and you should be able to win arguments that way.
>boring
Probably wrong major. Again, read primary texts. If you don't like focusing on specifics you should be able to specialise in more "macro" questions (the big one: what makes some nations more successful than others?) and that can sometimes make it more interesting if you don't care about specific characters/events.
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