A meaningful understanding of history starts with understanding not what happened but what drove it to happen, and that begins with the way people in history lived, the simplest parts of it, their houses and tools and food and clothes

There is an obsession with classification that leads to memorizing names, dates, maps, periods, other such useless trivia. This is meaningless on its own, and should be the last thing one learns

One who has spun and sewn and reaped and mown and swung a forging hammer and put on a mail coat, even briefly, understands the medieval era better than a man who can name every holy roman emperor, and he will have a much greater appreciation for medieval man

If all one knows is trivia, it's easy to believe the standard
high school history teacher's lies, that men of the past were drunken, crude, inferior, foul smelling imbeciles. Not so when one has tried to replicate even a little of his daily life

There is a kind of respect for what has been that is never found in a book, and is necessary for a real understanding of the past, less coloured by ideas of progress or "historical forces"

That's certainly a lot of words to say stop talking shit about your ancestors and go outside, nerd