Thinking back to my own school days, back in the dark ages, when we rode dinosaurs, I remember saying that I hated the subject History.

Now geologic eons later, I find I am fascinated with it. I love to read about history, be it fact or fiction based on fact. It is interesting to know where we came from, and how we got here.

It doesn’t matter if it is ancient history or recent current events. I love to hear about Jason’s voyages up the Oxus river to its headwaters in the foothills of the Himalayas, as well as Bible stories of Judah Maccabee, or the formation of our american government by the likes of Washington and Jefferson.

Even my own family history, sketchy though it may be, teases my imagination.

One ancestor sails from the west coast of Scotland in 1746, while another departs Germany in the 1800’s. Another branch came with Lord Baltimore in the 1600’s to form the first Catholic colony in the new world.

I suspect more than a few were undocumented aliens escaping political “situations” in Europe!

The story of the American West being explored by Europeans, over the protest of the first americans is as unsettling as it is stimulating to the imagination.

By the way, even those first americans are now known to be Asian immigrants, also undocumented.

What I have learned from reading these histories is to draw the implications out of history. That makes this study so very much more compelling.

As Winston Churchill is quoted as saying “If we don’t learn from the mistakes of history, we are condemned to repeat them!”