Which centuries interest you the most?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My first love historically is actually Western Europe's fourteenth century, which should tell you a lot about my morbid inclinations. Latterly I've become interested in the "short twentieth century" and in periods going further back into the Middle Ages and Antiquity. In East Asian history I'm interested in the seventh, twelfth, sixteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

I disagree with Beet that history ideally deals with matters not relevant to current politics. Current politics is still dealing with the fallout of events like the French Revolution and even the Spanish conquest of the Americas that are clearly "historical" by even the most stringent definition. The still-extant cultural and political fault line between Western and Eastern/Northern Japan is discussed in the Tale of the Heike! I do agree that there's a certain mystique to events that no one now alive remembers, but even with events like World War II that are still well within the memory of very elderly people there's a danger of engaging in mythopoeia rather than history.