> It shouldn't be, although at school level it tends to be like that. When I look back, high school history was mostly the study of significant dates, but undergraduate and graduate level history was more like the study of processes. Significant dates among these processes were just punctuation. History is primarily about people and what they do; this is probably why school history is so incredibly boring to a lot of kids. Memorising dates of prominent events gives you a join-the-dots perspective, not a continuum.

I believe you're right, yet despite all that, history was always one of my favorite subjects in school. The history classes I took, both in high school and college, are some of the ones that I remember the best, and know I enjoyed the most, even if I'm unable to recall everything I learned. And maybe I enjoyed it so much because I had good teachers who understood that history is more than just memorizing dates, people, and places.

Gri"tries to land on the yellow squares more than any other color when playing Trivial Pursuit"shny