Maybe History Should Not Repeat Itself

Within the first few days of this 2008-2009 school year, our class learned, that among several other reasons, that history is taught so that people can look into the past and discover the proposed solutions that did not work to solve problems. It is essentially taught so that people will not repeat history, and so that people will attempt different solutions that may potentially work in the future. While I fully agree to learning from mistakes made in the past to try and benefit the future, it seems that this method is not widely used among the world. I feel that this year especially I have heard the term “history repeats itself” several times. With the stock Market plunging just as it did in the 1930’s, it seems as if this country is not learning from our past mistakes and making the same ones again. Essentially, in the 1920’s people bought things such as furniture and cars through cheap credit and loans. Once the people found that they could not pay off the loans they started to buy less of other products. This decreased the demand for many products, and therefore many businesses suffered as well as the people who were not receiving money for their loans. This problem, along with many others, was one of the reasons for the cause of The Great Depression. Unfortunately present day banks did not look into the past to learn from these mistakes, and history is therefore in the process of repeating itself in 2008. Banks gave out several loans to people to buy houses, people that may not necessarily be able to pay off those loans in the future. When it came time for those people to pay off those mortgage payments, they could not afford it, so they therefore purchased far less of other products just as people did in the 1920’s. Now the banks are in need of the mortgage payments, and other businesses around the country are suffering from less demand. On top of this, the stock market crashed just as it did in the 1920’s. So because the banks and others did not look into the past in an attempt to learn something from it, the United States is in the process of possibly another depression.

Along with this issue, our discussions of The Crucible also lead me to believe that people should learn more from history. Similar events to the Salem Witch Trials happened several times throughout history, with things like The Red Scare, and more. When The Crucible was translated into Chinese, people could not even believe that it was not based off of things that occurred in China’s past because the events were so similar. Arthur Miller, author of The Crucible, even writes, “…The play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.” (Miller) While touching upon the fact that this event has occurred several times in the past, Miller argues that it is because something is imbedded in the mind of humans that causes them to create the same mistake again and again. However, if people look into the past and learn that these similar methods will never work, then these things will not repeat themselves. One of the reasons history is learned is so it isn’t repeated, but it still is. I think people around the world need to look into the past, and if something does work, they should repeat that method, but if it does not, those mistakes should be learned from, and history shouldn’t repeat itself.