Besides often being hilarious, memes also help tie us closer to other people. After all, they use some shared piece of information or context to communicate the idea or punchline. It is actually quite beautiful that we as humans have so much shared experience, or history, as some might call it, that groups of people can all enjoy the same images overlaid with text.

Most of the images here rely on two things, the reader understanding the frame of reference for the image, which are from general meme templates and media, while also understanding the text, which references some historical event or fact. Educators should pay attention since this mechanism actually promotes learning by connecting something new with something more familiar. At the very least, students won’t be falling asleep in class.

In their defense, history teachers and professors have their work cut out for them. They need to convey huge amounts of facts and context to people who often don’t understand the point of the entire exercise. “Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it,” goes the adage by writer and philosopher George Santayana. This perfectly illustrates the issue of history, as the actual quote goes:” Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But most people don’t always even learn from their own life experiences, so it’s a pretty tall order.

We can think of history as trying to put together multiple jigsaw puzzles, with an unknown number of missing pieces and boxes that may or may not be lying about what the actual image looks like. Anything older than a few decades has already lost its primary sources and older history might cover periods where the language has died out or perhaps writing didn’t exist yet. Some historians go as far as to say that our history really is just a history of civilizations that developed writing.

Even worse, people have short memories, and certain ideas and facts often just lose their relevance. The term “ash heap of history” or “dustbin of history” reflects the reality that as ideas and artifacts lose their importance, they end up forgotten, to the detriment of future historians. The same can be said of language and texts, particularly for works that have yet to be digitalized. In his arguably most famous work, The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, said “manuscripts don’t burn.” While that may be true, they can still be simply forgotten.

So historians have the thankless task of trying to find those bits of data and information that have been left buried in some archive, tomb, or museum basement. The first historian, at least to our knowledge would be Herodotus, who lived around 450 BC and is sometimes called the “father of history.” Though due to his habit of covering folk tales alongside real events, modern critics sometimes label him the “father of lies.” Historians can be a hard crowd to please.