Importance of Studying History

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1. The importance of the study of world history to me personally as an American is very significant because I hope to find a career where I will work with many diverse people and I not only want to know them, but I want to have an understanding of where they came from in order to associate with them better. Another reason is that an American can be from any culture from around the world. Americans aren’t any certain race or religion, so we have to understand our fellow citizens just as they need to understand us. I was in definite need of a course like this because before I started taking this class I had no idea of the simple concept of the different beliefs between Hinduism and Judaism. I had heard of the different religions vaguely in high school, but was never actually taught about them. I didn’t even know that Jews did not eat pig because they thought it was a descendant of the devil. If I weren’t to know that, somewhere down the road I might have offered one of my Jewish friends a ham sandwich and that would have been a very embarrassing situation. I now believe that I am a better informed American about fellow man in other parts of the world, but I still hope to learn more about them because I feel that we have only scratched the surface in class. I now know about many different religions such as: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and even more about my own religion Christianity. Although I know what they believe and how they came about their religious freedom, I hope to learn about how they celebrate and worship their religions and maybe to see how their cultures are influenced by them. Such as if there are certain holidays where they might get out of work, or how the people of different religions react towards each other and their holidays. I now realize that because I am an American and my country is a super power, that I do not have a right to think that my religion or culture is more important than anyone else’s. I must respect their beliefs just as they respect mine. I bet if you were to ask anyone from any culture what Christmas was, they would know automatically that it is a Christian holiday. And because of this I think that I should know what Hanukkah is, or who the Buddha was and what he represented.

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