I’m pretty sure that “histrophile” isn’t a real word. I think I just made it up. But the more and more I think about it, the more and more I realize that it is a great word to describe myself - a great way to brand my blogging avatar on the internet - because it clearly outlines what this blog is going to be about.
I hope that the name “histrophile” denotes that I love history, because I do. I’ve been enamored with it ever since I can remember. And there is one very embarrassing, but very illuminating story I must tell to illustrate my adoration for everyone in the blogging community who doesn’t know me personally.
In the living room of my house, we have floor to ceiling book shelves covering one of the walls. When I was in elementary school - I was probably eight or nine - I dragged a kitchen chair and two laundry baskets into the living room, stacked them one on top of the other, and climbed to the very top of the tower so that I could retrieve A History of the British Monarchy to read. It may come as no surprise that I proceeded to lose my footing and plummet to the ground from the top of the second laundry basket. But, I got to read the entire book, (in secret because my mom told me I wasn’t allowed to) so I think of it as a tradeoff.
This blog is a year-long, out of the box, sort of open-ended assignment for my high school English class. I chose to use history as my “lens” for three reasons. First, the obvious, as I’ve already articulated too many times, I love history. Ergo, writing a blog about it will bring me some personal happiness. The second reason is that I am a senior this year, and my “plan” at this point in time is to study history in college in hopes of becoming a history teacher or professor. If I am going to be teaching students about history later in life, I need to learn how to make it relevant and informative and interesting for the average Zhou (Chinese history pun…) who isn’t the history nerd that I am. Writing this blog will, with any luck, help teach me to do just that. The third and final reason is that I think history is a window into the past and a message for the future. I am a strong believer in the ideology that history is perpetually relevant and should never be forgotten. And blogging is a way I can broadcast that to the world.
Future posts will follow a somewhat kitschy, yet somewhat helpful, structure. I plan on each post being centered around a short profile of some historical person, or group of people, or event. Then I plan on relating that person, group of people, or event to something modern - be it a current event in the news, a social issue, a topic brought up in a novel or movie, etc.
My wish for this blog is that it will become the breeding ground for intellectual and worldly discussion - a place where people can virtually come to bump heads and have discourse on historical and modern topics. I may only be 17 years old, but I hope people will find my thoughts reflective, analytical, and original. Most of all, I hope that choosing history to focus on for this blog won’t cause me to take a tumble and fall flat on my face as it did many years ago.
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