Academic/General Training Module by Adam Smith First Published in 2015

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be 
The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely 
on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know 
why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the 
American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans 
History should be studied 
because it is essential to 
individuals and to society, 
and because it harbors 
beauty.

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 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
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or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes 
fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to 
look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can 
we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the 
factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements 
of an institution or a society persist despite change. 
The importance of history in explaining and understanding change in human behavior 
is no mere abstraction. Take an important human phenomenon such as alcoholism. 
Through biological experiments scientists have identified specific genes that seem to 
cause a proclivity toward alcohol addiction in some individuals. This is a notable 
advance. But alcoholism, as a social reality, has a history: rates of alcoholism have risen 
and fallen, and they have varied from one group to the next. Attitudes and policies 
about alcoholism have also changed and varied. History is indispensable to 
understanding why such changes occur. And in many ways historical analysis is a more 
challenging kind of exploration than genetic experimentation. Historians have in fact 
greatly contributed in recent decades to our understanding of trends (or patterns of 
change) in alcoholism and to our grasp of the dimensions of addiction as an evolving 
social problem. 
One of the leading concerns of contemporary American politics is low voter turnout, 
even for major elections. A historical analysis of changes in voter turnout can help us 
begin to understand the problem we face today. What were turnouts in the past? 
When did the decline set in? Once we determine when the trend began, we can try to 
identify which of the factors present at the time combined to set the trend in motion. 
Do the same factors sustain the trend still, or are there new ingredients that have 
contributed to it in more recent decades? A purely contemporary analysis may shed 
some light on the problem, but a historical assessment is clearly fundamental—and 
essential for anyone concerned about American political health today. 
History, then, provides the only extensive materials available to study the human 
condition. It also focuses attention on the complex processes of social change, 
including the factors that are causing change around us today. Here, at base, are the 
two related reasons many people become enthralled with the examination of the past 
and why our society requires and encourages the study of history as a major subject in 
the schools.