I’m far from what anyone ever could label a historian, but I do love learning about history.

I love touring small, local museums like the McKinley birthplace in Niles, which I visited many years ago with my son as he researched his third grade “famous Ohioans” report, or the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor. During a visit there, I pored over exhibit after exhibit, reading every word about America’s steel industry as I conjured up images of my grandpa sweating in the hot, gritty steel mills of Johnstown, Pa., where he worked more than a half-century ago.

And I love spending entire days traipsing through more massive buildings that tell American and global history like the museums in our nation’s capitol, and like the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh or the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Heck, after going stir crazy last year, my husband and I spent a day social distancing and reliving even music history inside Cleveland’s Rock Hall.

A vast of knowledge of all kinds of history, I believe, is critical to understanding how we got here and how our heritage might evolve as we move into our future.

That includes even (or especially) when our past is not so enjoyable, or pretty.

We should all know, for instance, in great detail the horrors of war, including the suffering by sailors trapped or burned on vessels in Pearl Harbor during the attack that drew our nation into World War II. So many of our men — indeed, the Greatest Generation — fought bravely in unbearable conditions for liberation and to preserve America’s future. Of course, we must never forget the unimaginable atrocities inflicted on Jews by Nazi Germany during that time.

There also are the painful injuries, starvation and death that plagued soldiers during the establishment and evolution of our nation, including the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

My interest in history is why I was so intrigued at every word written recently by this newspaper’s correspondent Sean Barron when he traveled in late July and early August with 19 students and adults from our region into America’s Deep South during an annual trip known as “Sojourn to the Past.” Together, the group traveled an American history course through civil rights sites, meeting people who had stood for social change in America.

Sean, a gifted storyteller, wrote a story every day of the weeklong trip, which we were proud to publish and share so you, too, could envision the journey and learn from the group’s experiences.

In his final story about the trip, a first-person commentary, Sean called the trip “the ultimate emotional roller coaster.”

“I witnessed tears flowing from some in our group as they sat in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., yards from where four terrorists planted a bomb that exploded and killed four girls who were just starting their lives, to pure elation and rejoicing as they interlocked hands each evening, and on the journey’s last day, to sing songs that uplifted them — the same ones that had that effect on the civil rights workers of 60 years ago they were honoring,” he wrote.

Sean described the series as a journey back into a rather recent disturbing slice of American history, but said it also was about capturing reactions to a period filled with courageous actions that shaped our country, but too often are scantily included in many history books, if at all.

That statement encapsulates exactly why we must never place limits on the lessons that we offer to students of history.

Indeed, traveling into the South to experience firsthand the hatred of racism and the courage of rising up against it is a lesson all Americans should experience. But realistically, I know, for varying reasons, it’s not a trip we all will be able to take.

That’s why complete and uncensored history books, museums, documentary films and other methods of sharing history must be complete and available to all.