I once heard a disk jockey say that the text he had contained a typo because it said Johnny Cash was from Dyess Colony rather than Dyess County. But Dyess Colony was the New Deal community for the poor where Johnny Cash started picking cotton at eight years of age. I had just observed history being rewritten or written, I’m not sure. Like everyone else for 500 years I believed that the Roanoke Colony failed. But it has been recently proven that Secretary of State Francis Walsingham intentionally sacrificed the colony to politically defeat Walter Raleigh. The American Pageant, our local high school American History text, defines Roanoke as “… hapless… mysteriously vanished, swallowed up by the wilderness.” But not mentioned is another “failed” colony, the French Huguenot Fort Caroline, burned to the ground by the Spanish with the inhabitants slaughtered. But I can’t fault the authors for summary or omission, since they had so much material to condense.
But editing such as this has consequences since these frequent judgment calls are often influenced by one’s ideological goal. Along with experience we all make decisions or hold political viewpoints based upon what we know. So what we know and what we don’t know takes on great importance. Not surprisingly French philosopher Voltaire said: “History is the lie that everyone agrees upon”.
Is the New York Times going to run an article about the exemplary record of the National Rifle Association helping blacks arm themselves against Klan violence? The 1960’s play, The Deputy, paints Pope Pius XII as indifferent to the Nazi horrors of his time. Everyone I knew believed it to be true. But after the Cold War it became known that it was an East German/KGB effort to divide those in the Western World. In the late 1920’s the Muslim upper classes told the Palestinians not to trust the Jewish settlers because they were helping oppressed Muslim tenant farmers organize unions. Is this a bit different that the Crusader narrative we’ve all been fed? Most people believe that an item is priced at $2.97 because they think that the merchant is trying to fool them about a $3 item. But the opposite is true. The $2.97 price forced the clerk to ring the sale and make change rather than just slip the $3 into their pocket.
We all see the world through our limited lens. While this is nothing new, it has taken on critical importance today as Common Core and allied endeavors change our history before our very eyes. Future generations may inhabit these shores, but they won’t be Americans as we understand it. There is even a movement to tear down statues of Thomas Jefferson. As John F. Kennedy said at a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” As much as we owe to Jefferson and others, they were flawed humans. But do we want anyone else in charge, then or now, that isn’t?
Copyright 2015, Mark L. Bennett
We all need to understand the process of writing history and the perceptions that gives us. When I taught college I knew the images in my students’ minds were from a handful of movies, Gladiator being a good example. But if you look closely all those riding horses used stirrups because no one knows how to ride today without stirrups. However, the stirrup hadn’t been invented until after the Roman Empire. Following its invention the well known medieval jousts began. The excellent Granada Television series of Sherlock Holmes was shot in a smaller, untouched British city that still looked like Victorian London. Homes and Watson went everywhere by carriage on carefully choreographed streets of carriages and pedestrians. But the real Victorian London was jammed with horse dawn and later electric trams (streetcars). Yet those inaccurate images live in our minds and frame our perceptions.
ReplyDeleteYes, watching movies does not help very much when trying to understand history. For many years they were mostly propaganda from the right, and over the last fifty years it has been mostly propaganda from the left.
ReplyDeleteAs Mister Bennett has mentioned the use of settings and props often give viewers a total misunderstanding of time and place when it comes to events. The best example I can think of is John Ford's movies involving the U.S. Cavalry in the 1870's. He always showed the troopers wearing blue shirts and suspenders along with white hats. In reality that uniform was used by the army during the Spanish American War. Ford figured it was fine for his movies. There are a number of books showing what the army of the 1870's really wore. Those uniforms do not match Ford's movies at all.
As a kid, who loved history, I quickly learned to look for flags with the incorrect number of stars, revolvers and repeating rifles that came much later when muskets and muzzle loaders should have been used etc.
Learning real history is like doing book reports. Watching a movie and writing your report afterwards isn't going to work.