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Do you remember anything from your high school history classes? How about college history courses? No, I don’t mean how boring they were (sorry, history fans), I mean actually remember content from those classes?

I’m one of those who dreaded history classes. It seemed as though no history teacher/professor I ever had could ever make the subject interesting. Almost as though they had lost all passion for the area. I feel like I was shortchanged when it comes to my education in that subject.

I’ve come to enjoy history more as I’ve gotten older. What I’ve found is that for any historical event/person/etc., I better understand the context (what else was going on at the time), the impact (based on current events), and the stories. In fact, through the magic of the Web, I often find myself re-learning things I should have learned in school using Wikipedia and other web sites to understand the state of the world today.

History is one of the subjects I’m passionate about making interesting to our kids as we homeschool. In fact, I recently volunteered to review a new history text (intended for homeschoolers) called History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer. I’ve read some of Bauer’s other books and I have high expectations that this will be educational as well as fun to read. I won’t be able to post a review of the book until February due to the conditions of the review, so look for it then.

Hans Rosling, while technically a doctor and researcher, is to me, a fantastic history teacher. Rosling gave a presentation at TED India recently on the rise of India as an economic heavyweight. Setting aside the main point of his talk (which is to demonstrate when India will finally catch up to the US and Britain), Rosling uses visualizations in a way that brings historical data to life. Instead of merely providing dry facts such as dates, people, and events, he rolls all of this into a highly entertaining and informative animation. I would love to see these incorporated into all history classes.

While you’re welcome to watch the entire 16-minute video, I’ve embedded a clip (2:46) below of the first time in the presentation that he uses the animated graphs. He also shares these animations on the gapminder.org web site where you can either hit play, or use the scrub bar to go at your own pace.