During my freshman year of college I took two semesters of a compre- hensive world history course. For the first semester class I had to purchase an expensive, hardcover history book, which was fine. However, when I returned for the second semester, which was being taught by the same professor, the textbook he assigned was a newer edition of the book that we had used during the first semester. I decided to stick with the copy I already had. My way of thinking was that history happened already and unless they were adding new history that had occurred since the previous edition was released, something that we probably wouldn’t be covering anyway, there couldn’t be many differences between the two editions. Well even though I thought that history couldn’t be changed, the textbook sure did somehow. And I soon learned that the pages that the professor assigned us to read weren’t aligned with the edition of the book that I owned.

However, as I later learned with my own history book, history does indeed change and the way it is presented is an ongoing task. For one, history is unending. Every second in the future becomes history two seconds later.

 

Read the rest of this article on page 38 by clicking here!

 

 

 

Be sure to sign up to get Old School Gamer Magazine for free by clicking here!

 

Leonard Herman Leonard Herman (26 Posts)

Leonard Herman, The Game Scholar, is regarded as one of the earliest and most respected videogame historians. The first edition of his book Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Home Videogames, which was published in 1994, is considered to be the first serious and comprehensive book about the history of videogames. He has written articles for Videogaming & Computer Illustrated, Games Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly, the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Pocket Games, Classic Gamer Magazine, Edge, Game Informer, Classic Gamer Magazine, Manci Games, Gamespot.com and Video Game Trader, which he also edited. He has also contributed articles to several videogame-related books, including Supercade, The Video Game Explosion and The Encyclopedia of Video Games. Mr. Herman has also written the book ABC To the VCS (A Directory of Software for the Atari 2600), a compendium of game summaries. He has also written and designed user's manuals for the following Atari VCS games: Cracked, Save the Whales, Pick-Up, Rush Hour, Looping, The Entity and Lasercade, as well as the user's guide to Ralph Baer's Pinball! for the Odyssey2. In 1994, he founded Rolenta Press, a publisher of videogame books, whose catalogue included Videogames: In the Beginning, by Ralph H. Baer, the inventor of the videogame console, and Confessions of the Game Doctor by Bill Kunkel, the world's first videogame journalist. Two Rolenta Press books were included in a list of the top ten videogame books of all time by Game Informer magazine in 2008. Mr. Herman has served as an advisor for Videotopia, Classic Gaming Expo and the National Videogame Museum. He has appeared in several episodes of G4's Icons and in the documentary, The King of Arcades. In 2003, Mr. Herman received a Classic Gaming Expo Achievement Award in recognition for his accomplishments in documenting game history