Fighting the Battle for History
I’m a history dork. I love reading history books and biographies, visiting museums and historic sites, and talking with anyone willing to share interesting anecdotes and ideas. I’ve made a living teaching history at various points in my life, and even now I would consider history a serious hobby. For years I’ve wanted more people to be interested in history, and it seems of late I’m getting my wish, but not in a way I ever considered or hoped for.
For several years, I’ve watched debates over how history should be taught percolate just beneath, or sometimes just above the surface. Today, it seems opinions on how history should be taught has exploded into pseudo-popular culture, a strange thing to consider since most people haven’t given a moment of thought to history since they got a B- in it their junior year of high school, and unfortunate, given the reasons the debate has become so prominent.
Every time I encounter these arguments, a quote from author Hilary Mantel comes to mind. “For a person who seeks safety and authority, history is the wrong place to look.” I like this quote because it reminds us that history is messy, muddled, contradictory, and sometimes uncertain. Many believe there should be a singular, approved version of history. After all, a thing happened – we should know what the thing was and teach that. But history is in some sense the weaving together of billions of single stories featuring the complicated, convoluted, sometimes inexplicable lives of human beings. Worse, those stories are corrupted twice by interpretation, first by the person who was there, and second by the historian. There simply isn’t a singular history to teach and to suggest there is, is folly.
That’s not to say that facts don’t exist. D-Day was June 6, 1944. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2, 1964. I was born in 1983 – a major historical moment to be sure. But history isn’t the recitation of facts. History is the interpretation of the sources available to try and make sense of what happened in the past, in hopes that we learn something relevant to our present and future. And, when enough sources corroborate, an interpretation becomes widely accepted. For example, the American Civil War was caused by slavery is a widely accepted fact because the sources support it. (Don’t believe me? The second sentence of Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession reads: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest in the world.” Need another example? Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated, “The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” And so on…)
So yes, there are facts, and there are accepted interpretations based on the sources, but anyone who suggests that there is a singular way of interpreting and teaching history, and there seem to be a lot of people making this suggestion very loudly at school board meetings, simply doesn’t understand what history is. You can view history through an economic lens, a political lens, a racial or ethnic lens, a religious lens, a feminist lens, or any other number of viewpoints. But, you must support your interpretation with the data that exists and you send your ideas out into the world, where everyone is free to agree or disagree with your view. That’s history. Supporting your preferred interpretation with, "that's the way I learned it," isn't good enough.
Frankly, it’s good for students to examine history through different lenses, so long as those interpretations are supported by sources and are open to challenge. That is, after all, the point of education – to have our ideas challenged and tested so that we can learn and grow. To suggest that students should not engage with difficult, emotional, thought-provoking, sometimes contrarian ideas is utterly backwards. To suggest that students should view individuals in history as infallible, rather than their complicated, messy, human selves, not only perverts what truth we can establish about the past, it makes history less relevant, meaningful, instructive, and inspirational for us today. We should get into the muck of history. We should ask how a man like Thomas Jefferson can author a document that speaks so eloquently about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while owning other human beings. We should try to understand how he justified that obvious conflict because seeking that answer may help us identify the stories we tell ourselves today to justify actions that don’t live up to our ideals. Leaving out either facet of his life, founding father and slave owner, diminishes our opportunity to learn from his story.
History, as Hilary Mantel wrote, history isn’t safe. It’s full of the best and worst of us. To obfuscate that is disingenuous and potentially harmful. To understand the awful things in our past is not the same as condoning them. To study shameful moments in our history isn't suggesting that I or anyone else is personally responsible for that moment. When history acknowledges the wrongs done to people, it isn’t suggesting that you or your children are personally at fault. But, we do have a responsibility for our actions right now. It is our responsibility to examine history from multiple perspectives. It is our responsibility to find evidence for different interpretations of the past. It is our responsibility to challenge interpretations that lack data or sources. And we do have a responsibility to seek the truth, understanding that it is rarely definitive, but knowing that the value is in the pursuit.
History is better when we add stories and experiences, not limit them. History is better when we understand it as ours – all of ours. History is better when we have more voices enter the conversation and share reasoned perspectives. We are not made better by banning books. We are not made better by legislating and restricting perspectives, sources, and well-supported interpretations in favor of unproven or sometimes disproven ideas that only exist to make a group of people feel better. We are not made better by threatening lawsuits against teachers who don’t teach exactly the way we want something taught and offering bounties to those who identify such teachers. (For what it’s worth, I can think of other, historical examples of this type of behavior, and it was never in a good cause. Just sayin’…).
We cannot possibly hope understand our present by ignoring how we, all of us, got here. Understanding our past – all of our past – the good and the bad, isn’t a threat. It’s the opposite. It’s the only way forward. It’s the only way we can truly understand how we got to this place. It’s the only way we can understand each other. It’s the only way we can move forward together.
