History

History, as Will and Ariel Durant have so beautifully explained, is vital to study because everything that has previously happened has led up to and impacted the present. The more we can understand where we’ve been, the better able we’ll be to explain and understand the present and what might lie in the future. While from one perspective it might seem like we’re going round and round in circles, if you change your perspective, you might notice that we’re in an ever-improving spiral of progress.

The old Mark Twain cliché that history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme is why studying history can be so beneficial (Dialectical Materialism). If we can tap into and learn from the past, seeing the patterns which have unfurled over eons, we can understand both the successful and unsuccessful actions of the past, using history as a pattern which can influence how we act in the present. Deep fluency in history is a master key solution to working smarter, not harder. This, of course, isn’t meant to eliminate or detract from the thousands of beautiful books written about nearly every important person and epoch of history, I humbly hope to lay the groundwork to help us better understand why this is an important and valuable use of time. More than the exact date something happened, strive to understand how events and people tie together, what the context was, what reverberations it had through history. This not only makes it easier to remember what happened but also allows you to understand why it happened and its impacts on future generations. This type of horizontal and vertical understanding of history is what makes projects like Big History  so powerful and fun. We are attempting to do something similar with The Latticework. If we are successful, this resource will make it much easier to understand (remember, to understand is to know what to do) these core ideas and disciplines, how they come together, why they matter, and how they can benefit you in your day-to-day life.