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Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me that your second idea is probably pretty accurate. History books (general purpose ones, that is) cover wars extensively. On the one hand, wars cause rapid and massive political and social changes, so they are obviously very important to understanding history. But at the same time, understanding what caused a war, what the political and social aftermath looked like, and the cultural perceptions of the war are also extremely important. Not to mention all the non-war history. So there is probably a good argument that history books focus too heavily on wars. So it is not surprising that Wikipedia would also focus heavily (perhaps too heavily) on wars.

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> But at the same time, understanding what caused a war, what the political and social aftermath looked like, and the cultural perceptions of the war are also extremely important.

And those paragraphs will contain the word "war" many times.

I guess there's a few reasons why. A big reason for learning history is learning from exceptional events, and wars are exceptional. Learning how to avoid them (if possible) and win them (if necessary) isn't something you want each generation to learn by trial and error.

Also, wars are kind of interesting. A good guy (us) and bad guy (them) is a fail-proof way to make a story mildly interesting.

I guess there's other lessons we should learn from history (as opposed to trial and error, or observation). Political systems are a good one - there's things we could learn from the Greeks which could apply today (like sortition, as a way to stop career politicians getting too powerful, but still giving the decision makers enough power that they have an incentive to properly study the issue). We could also learn about dealing with natural disasters, resource exploitation, and the history of moral panics.

>"Also, wars are kind of interesting. A good guy (us) and bad guy (them) is a fail-proof way to make a story mildly interesting."

And the good guys always win! (or the winners are the ones who are left to call themselves the good guys)

I suspect if you had lived though a significant war you would probably think history was overly focused on social changes and should spend more time on technology and tactics.

Even the people who lived through actual battles (where technology and tactics would be relevant) tend to tell stories that are mostly about hunger, deprivation and being cold. Shooting people and executing strategic plans hardly ever figure in them.

And this makes sense: most soldiers spend most of their time waiting around for battles or marching from one battle to the next. The actual battles themselves take up very little of their time (even if they're extremely stressful).

The stories of those that lived through wars as civilians (the vast majority of people) of course never talk about technology and tactics as they had nothing to do with them.

War is often vary 'hands on' for at least one civilian population. Did William Tecumseh Sherman decide to burn your barn? Well now you care about tactics.

But you're still not likely to tell stories of the battlefield tactics and grand strategy that led to the burning of your barn, but rather than deprivation and hardship that not having that barn caused.

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