History, long and fulfilling, is studied all around the world.

Some historians may not know about things in a certain area of the world, but for junior Trapper Hurt, it’s different.

“I have a lot of random history knowledge in my head,” Hurt said. “So you could ask me about a country, culture or event, and I could tell you a brief history about it.”

Hurt’s love for history all started with playing a World War II game when he was 4 years old.

Ever since then, he’s just wanted to learn more.

“I honestly think it’s the same reason why people watch TV or read books,” Hurt wrote in an email. “It’s an escape from reality (even though it happened in real life). It lets me forget my responsibilities and escape into a new world.”

He played games, read books, spent hours upon hours looking at Wikipedia articles and watched the history side of YouTube just to learn everything he could about history.

Even since fifth grade, he has been looking at maps, memorizing all the countries he could. Now, he can name all the countries on the world map.

Hurt wants to put all his knowledge into his future career, a history teacher, so he can teach others about the things he loves.

When it comes to unique talents, Hurt thinks his talent is unique because not many people can tell you the detailed history of Scotland and then shift to the byzantine empire and the Seljuks.

“I really want to teach students about new things, and open their minds to new concepts and ideas, with history you can do that,” Hurt said. “But a problem I often find in the American education system is that history teachers teach us about history with a very cookie cutter approach. They select the most generic and basic of things but never dive deeper and go into more nuance.”