Hello! I just want to document things I've been going through for the past 2 to 3 months, and I thought maybe it's a good idea to write it for everyone to see. If you guys didn't know, I'm in my final year of being a graduated physical therapist, and because of that, this semester is very heavy when it comes to subjects, practical exams, and the idea of treating patients in general, so this will unfortunately affect my reading process about Palestine and Palestine's history. The purpose of this post is to write about all the things I learned from reading a history book, such as how to write notes and how you can have a voice and an impact to help the Palestinians or to have general knowledge about history as a whole.

Why I started reading history

Before I start writing about how to get into history books and stuff, I wanted to write a small intro about why I chose to read history in the first place. I love reading books in general, and I've been reading since the beginning of my university year in 2019. I started reading novels, nonfiction books like self-improvement books, and books that talked about interesting things to me, like scientific facts and others. It was all normal until the problem of October 7th happened, and from this day on, everything that was related to reading changed.

The problem between Israel and Palestine made me realize how ignorant I am about history—not just about Palestine but about history in general. The amount of misinformation I got made my brain melt. So I made a decision with myself that I have to read something that can make information clear for me and reach the point where I can detect what's wrong and talk about what's right. I started reading history books in February, and from this month on, everything changed for the better.

Taking notes

I'm not going to spend all the time talking about my experience, and I'll talk about how to start your journey into reading history books and writing notes that actually matter. Firstly, you need to determine the type of notes that you're going to take when reading any history book. From my point of view, writing notes in general is divided into 2 types:

Simple: taking quotes, writing a brief introduction about characters
Advanced: summarizing events and characters

It all depends on how free you are and how serious you are about knowing and documenting what you understand from the book. Most people will choose the first option because it's simple, won't take much effort, and isn't time-consuming, which for the most part is an amazing option. I'll talk about every stage and what apps could help you when reading in general.

Simple ?

In a simple way of taking notes, you won't focus that much on writing but will focus more on reading. I'll recommend some good apps that you can use when taking notes. These apps are Google Keep, Evernote, and Standard Notes. These apps provide a simple and easy interface to write whatever notes you want to write. You will focus mainly on taking quotes from the book and characters. For me, I use Google Keep because it's on all my devices and it's very easy to use.

Advanced?

In the second stage, you will focus on more things than usual, with the aim of knowing more and expanding your knowledge by using the information in the book as a starting point. I'll say this is the best option for a history book because you won't rest on the information that the books give you, but you will search more for the sake of knowing more. There are some great apps that can serve as your main note-taking apps, and these apps are Notion, Obsidian, Capacities, and Remnote. All of these apps provide an advanced way to take good notes with features that will make taking notes a more fun process. For me, I use both Notion for an overall view of the things I want to read and Obsidian for taking notes from the book itself.

When reading a history book, you should always think about the components of the book in general. For me, I divide any book into characters, quotes, places, and events. It should look like this for everyone.

From here, once you read and see interesting information, you put it in a suitable place, and believe me, you will have an amazing knowledge base that you can rely on for the future. This is what I collected when I was reading "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappe.

Stop taking notes !

I'll stop taking notes for the next month due to my final exams, but I wanted to make this post for everyone who wants to read about history and take more notes. I'd like to say one thing.

Knowing more about the occupation and Palestine is RESISTANCE.

Consider following me so, In the future you get all my works !

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