Commencement 2009: Still Don't Know Much About History

"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance."

- Socrates

"Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use"

– U.S. Comstock Act of 1873

First off, CONGRATS GRADUATES! The Class of 2009 is about to cross the finish line and I speak for all former high school graduates when I wish you every success.

Well done.

Now, if you would all please turn to the first page of your History of the World and beginning reading, mindfully, to yourselves.

What? Why, no. History lessons are not over. History is never over, and you're probably already behind. No one told you?

Well, you're not alone. Plenty of people are very forgetful of history and are more than willing to let whatever they retained for their sophomore final exam seep completely out of their brains two weeks later. Some students reload the program long enough to pass a college class, but then it's erased and lost forever. They make no effort to stop the leak or refresh the information. And, I'm sorry to speak so harshly, but it makes people kind of clueless.

Without a working knowledge of history to cloud your intellect, you fall prey to all sorts of silly opinions and world views that are mostly formed by media personalities and political party propaganda. If you aren't careful, you may find yourself tossing around tea bags, bellowing out some nonsense about "taxation without representation" that is historically inaccurate. Worse, you may naively turn the noun "tea bag" into a gerund by adding an “ing” and in doing so, make yourself into a hilarious running joke for your mistaken use of a naughty term.

We can probably recover from whatever consequences result from releasing tea bags into the environment, and this is all already yesterday's dumb news. But if you don't understand history, your tea bags and your opinions are just wee-wee in the wind – just uninformed sheeple reactions to what someone else tells you to believe. All of which can be avoided by a quick dip into any comprehensive source of American history (with the caveat that historians don't necessarily agree – see Boston Tea Party following).

The Boston Tea Party and the dumping of a shipload of tea into Boston Harbor in December of 1773 was not primarily an issue of taxation. The English Parliament artificially supported the almost bankrupt East India Company by giving it a monopoly to supply tea to the colonies. Tea was then distributed exclusively through Loyalist merchants and the colonists were effectively cut out of the retail trade. Samuel Adams and John Hancock, already wealthy men, were highly disturbed by the future specter of London controlled monopolies on imports and they conceived of trashing the entire tea shipment carried by three British cargo ships anchored in Boston Harbor (they left all the other cargo intact).

Before you grab your box of Lipton and head out, read up on the Boston Tea Party and reacquaint yourself with the definition of "representation", "tyranny" and "fascism", and see if, maybe, you don't want to join a different protest to express your displeasure. You'd be more aligned with colonial history and the battle cry of "no taxation without representation" if you started spreading around sugar using the Sugar Act of 1764 as a rallying point, or burning a pile of your Time magazines in sympathy with the Stamp Act of 1765. Of course, the reality that we vote for our representatives in this country kind of kills that whole outrage thing to begin with. We've got plenty of representation – we just don't always like the results of it.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

First off, I want to assure you, graduates, that you are not to blame for what might be a gap in your learning. Older Americans like to wax affronted by your shocking ignorance of history and the political process, but I'm here to tell you, surveys indicate that they don't know a lot more themselves. They have the advantage of living through a period of history that you did not, so, presumably they know more because they were on the spot and remember. But go back a few generations in American history or (gasp!) test your folks on a general knowledge of world history and they don't know so much either. Throw them a few easy ones like who fought in the Peloponnesian Wars. Don't ask them to name the city-states, just a general region. Ask "What is a Holy Roman Emperor? Name one." And, "Who were the Ottomans, and don't say a ‘footstool.'" Ask them to take a swing at the significance of the Magna Carta in 1215. Watch the adults flounder helplessly.

But, treat them kindly, as their blank stares are not necessarily due to their mental laziness. The problem with history (meaning "written") is that there's a lot of it. Most of what we know about ancient history comes to us from people who were trading and interacting pretty closely around the Mediterranean and Near East Asia back in the day. They kick-started the written word, but it doesn't mean that they were the only significant cultures. Many more civilizations were rising and falling on completely different timelines and did not leave a written record to explain themselves. Thus, a lot of history is shrouded in a mysterious past with few clues to who the people were, where they started from or what happened to them.

Innovations such as navigation, settled communities, written language, agriculture and metal working gradually appeared (if they appeared at all) around the globe within thousands of years of one another. Some civilizations like the ancient Indus River Valley people and the Olmec of the Americas achieved a large population, developed architecture, accumulated wealth and military power, flourished and then vanished. Some groups traveled widely carrying their knowledge, genes, customs and skills wherever they roamed; other people stayed firmly at home, anonymous and isolated.

All of this makes it impossible to stick with a single chronology that starts at point A and concludes in a tidy line at point Z. Historically significant events happened all over the place and, often, at radically different times. So, a high school world history teacher has to condense the entire story of humans into a few hours during one or two semesters. History has to be crushed into little bite sized bits, and, in doing so, the entire historical adventure becomes disconnected and painfully reduced to a short list of dates and non-controversial facts. Even the most dedicated American history teacher is expected to cover at least a couple of hundred years in three or four months, and most teachers completely run out of time and steam by the Civil War. Accuracy and interest are sacrificed for a dry and hugely inaccurate synopsis of what is, actually, a terrific story.

Furthermore, American history teachers are charged with motivating you to bond with your country. In much the same way that Sunday school teaches you to believe in your religion (and discourages you from asking too many uncomfortable questions), high school history classes try to teach you to appreciate America (and discourage you from asking too many uncomfortable questions). Eventually, this will be YOUR country and you'll be responsible for carrying the torch into the future, so your curriculum coordinators feel a responsibility to sell you an idealized version. Maybe you wouldn't love America quite as much if you knew all about her flaws and imperfect beginnings.

Our country was founded by extraordinarily brilliant and courageous men and women who believed in self-governance (for white men, at least) on principle. Certainly, there was an intense desire for personal freedom (isn't there always?) and a willingness to fight for it, but alongside, the Colonies provided a unique opportunity to get rich. Colonists may have deeply resented rule from a foreign government, but our founders were also keen to exploit a New World overflowing with natural wealth and keep the profits for themselves.

Additionally, American history gets a makeover because morality and ethical behavior had a different aspect in those days and teachers have a tendency to edit out the more colorful parts for fear it would diminish your loyalty. Educators secretly worry if they let out the truth that our founders were less than ideal, you won't think so highly of their accomplishments. If you learn that presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, did not believe that the black man should be granted equal status with the white man (citizenship, the right to vote, the right to intermarry) or that Ben Franklin, that libidinous American icon of statesmanship and invention, urged the Pennsylvania Legislature to approve a bounty on Native American scalps (so much for brotherly love), you might become a little cynical. You might lower your opinion of the framers of our most sacred Constitution.

If you are a female and understand that women had few civil rights, could not vote let alone participate in the political process until the 19nth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and were generally considered the property of their husbands under the law, you might get outraged. Your high school history text will not, likely, make mention of Margaret Sanger who was a public nurse and witnessed the suffering that repeated childbearing caused for impoverished families. Her defiance of the Comstock Act of 1873 that was used to suppress the distribution of information on birth control, sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases led to her indictment for "mailing obscenities." Shortly after establishing the first birth control clinic in New York around 1917, Sanger was sent to a workhouse for creating a "public nuisance." But, her arrests and many prosecutions led to the overruling of the Comstock Act in 1938 (see New York v. Sanger), thus allowing doctors to advise married women on birth control and contraceptives with the permission of their husbands. (Let's pause for a moment to thank Ms. Sanger who was reviled in her day by both the press and the Church.) You might become ambivalent about the Land of the Free if you got an inkling that until recently (and still in the area of equal pay) the much lauded freedoms of our nation didn't extend to the part of the population that runs on estrogen.

So, we whitewash the whole story. We make it sound like, besides that moral blip known as slavery (and really, EVERYONE was doing it anyway…even the Vikings were getting slaves from the wilds of Russia to sell in Middle East slave markets), we've been a great people from the get-go. It's all about the democracy and the freedom, and the less said about the racism and the genocide, the better. We need you to believe and, thus, most students leave high school with the following misconceptions:

Only Caucasian men of European heritage did anything worthwhile.
Women's only contribution to history was a little sewing, a little nursing and loving spousal encouragement.
The Founding Fathers were righteous men who loved freedom and were not in the least bit interested in wealth or power.
Columbus discovered America.
The yearning to practice religious freedom means that tolerance and compassion follow, rather than repression and cruelty.
The principles of democracy are what made America great, and all the free land, guns and whiskey and diseases that wiped out the First Peoples, slavery and forced labor, and pristine natural resources had nothing to do with it.

If you never open another history book again for the rest of your days as an American, then that may be the sum total of what you know about American history. You'll be wrong, of course, but few will question your accuracy since it's what a lot of other people believe to be true as well. They may even take such pride in their ignorance that they will tell you to either love the false and romanticized version of our past, or go live somewhere else. You're going to have to make a little effort on your own behalf to turn this around.

Now, I'm not saying we should be ashamed of our history. Much of it doesn't reflect well on those of us with European ancestry, but we can take some comfort that the rest of the world wasn't behaving that well either in the 1700s forward. And, you and I weren't around and aren't responsible for everything that happened since the settling of Jamestown. I'm sorry things were so awful and I like to think that I would have been a better, more enlightened person, but I wasn't born yet so we'll never know.

Also, moral codes and ethical behavior are subject to their time. While slavery and the trade in human beings is an unspeakable evil, it was so commonplace and morally neutral in the Old and Ancient World that it's referred to in the Bible without prejudice.

Although our Founding Fathers were not the saints that high school history texts like to make them out to be, (even Thomas Jefferson's DNA has turned up where it shouldn't be a couple of hundred years later*) they did an astonishing job at, literally, making a government out of nothing but an untried philosophical position. France and England had been kicking around the idea of self-determinism at the same time thanks to the Enlightenment philosophers (Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant), but our founders hammered together a couple of documents that have withstood every conceivable assault. And, while some would say they have gotten a little battered as of late, they remain both relevant and inspirational. They form the bedrock of our law and liberty and no one, seriously, argues that the Constitution needs a new release.

But here's my point…the world is getting more complex all of the time. If you, the high school graduate, don't know what human beings are capable of doing, both the glorious and the corrupt, you will be living out of a very shallow understanding of the world. You need to be fully conscious that the genocide perpetrated by Adolph Hitler in Germany was completely legal and Martin Luther King, Jr's non-violent social protest in America was not. The people of the past are not dead and gone – their beliefs and opinions and blood feuds have been passed down to you through the vehicle of culture. The struggle for civil rights in America did not start at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro or on a Montgomery bus in the mid-1900s. It started when traders brought in the first African slaves to Jamestown to labor in the tobacco fields.

You need a complete history to shine the light of perspective for you, even if it's not particularly pretty.

There is a common phrase that historians like to bat around... "those who don't understand history are bound to repeat it." Perhaps a more accurate way of expressing that is from historian Kenneth C. Davis who takes the position that those don't understand history are bound to suffer the consequences of it. For example, the Treaty of Versailles signed in June of 1919 ended World War I, redistributed the boundaries of Europe and the Middle East and apportioned the spoils to the European and American victors. It also caused a young Vietnamese student in Paris named Ho Chi Minh who wanted to gain independence for his own country from France to go to Moscow to study revolutionary techniques. At least 58,000 Americans died or went missing in action in the Vietnam War waged forty years later to, presumably, halt the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.

The Treaty of Versailles allowed political and religious extremism to flourish in the Middle East and, eighty-two years later, the Twin Towers came down. The winner-takes-all-the-toys approach to international relations is satisfying to us even today, but it breeds contempt. Keep the losers down long enough and they start…oh, I don't know…another world war or obtaining yellow cake uranium for weapons. People who educate themselves in history see a bigger picture. Since you're inheriting America, it will be in the world's best interest if you learn what worked and what did not work.

Also, really…do you want to end up like Janet? A friend of mine held a high-profile political position and often met with dignitaries and officials. One day, a group of visitors presented him with a beautiful coffee-table-gift-book about the life and times of Winston Churchill. His secretary, Janet walked in and exclaimed, "Oh, what a nice book. Now...Winston Churchill…he's the man that shot JFK, right?"

All anyone could do was stand there in the thunderous silence, and send out wordless pity to the hapless Janet for her monumental ignorance. It's one thing to forget why the Teapot Dome Scandal was scandalous, but it's entirely another to confuse Sir Winston Churchill and the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Knowing a little about what went before, also, prevents you from falling into the vat of "revisionist history" – that is, the tendency to view the past as safe, moral and suffused with ethical behavior. Apparently, there was a mythical time when men were honest, women were modest, children were respectful and everyone was god-fearing. In comparison, the modern time (whenever that is) is dangerous, immoral and disrespectful of tradition.

Read a little Roman history and you'll find that parents, even then, despaired that their offspring preferred to just hang around with their friends and had no interest in visiting the temples. While we honor Christopher Columbus every year for being a brave explorer, it may counterbalance our view of him to know that he crucified Taino natives in groups of thirteen (one to represent Jesus and the other twelve to represent the disciples…seriously) on Hispaniola. Apparently, the Taino weren't making a sincere effort to supply him with the gold he needed to take back to Spain. The reality that there wasn't any gold in the first place elevated the ironically named Chistophero to the status of being one of the worst (supply your own expletive deletive here – mine rhymes with "brass moles") to ever navigate the seas. Things may seem grim in some sectors today, but crucifixion has largely gone out of style.

Then, you know, history is just cool. It's full of great accounts of characters and events so crazy and outrageous that it's like being in the library at storytime. Someone else has done all the work for you, and you just have to sit and be entertained. Whether you read, download audio-books, watch PBS and the History Channel or rent DVDs, you are likely to be just mesmerized by it and swept away in your imagination. History is made by people…people who died in horrific plagues and people who profited from the same plagues; people who martyred themselves to noble causes and people who died for stupid ideology.

Even Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code can't compete with the true story of Martin Luther in terms of suspense. Luther, the German priest generally credited with loosening Roman Catholicism's grip on Europe and opening the door for the Renaissance, was just as batty as they come. He waged a constant battle with Satan, who often came to him while he was sitting in his privy. According to Luther's own writings, Satan usually got the worst of these encounters since Luther had a ready supply of his own feces to fling at him (giving an interesting twist to the phrase "get thee behind me, Satan").

The only reason that Rome didn't burn Luther at the stake for heresy was that he was secretly protected by the various rulers of the loose association of Germanic kingdoms. The kings weren't men of God, or, God at least wasn't there foremost interest. They were men of commerce and, probably, didn't give a fig about the Reformation in terms of its Christian significance. What they really cared about were the massive tithes and taxes they had to pay to Rome, and when Luther nailed up his objection to the peddling of indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg, they saw an ideal opportunity to break with the Vatican. They could have given him up any time, but Luther's preaching was having such a powerful impact on the common folk that they saw his rogue ministry as working to their advantage.

But maybe the most persuasive argument for learning history is not just to be good caretakers of democracy or avoid being a Janet or because the stories are engaging. History is about you and me and what we carry along with us in our very cells. Recent advances in genetics indicate that your entire ancestral history lies buried in your mitochondrial DNA. This is inherited through your maternal line and is highly resistant to mutations. Thus, it acts as a marker generation after generation with very little variation. It's becoming increasingly easy and inexpensive to trace your ancestry back to, essentially, a primary mother and follow the diasporas of people outward from there. So, say you think your ancestors are Swedish, but your DNA traces you back in a matrilineal line that ends in modern day Iran. Hey… you aren't all that Swedish…it turns out that you're Persian!

Your people were the architects of civilization and have a fascinating history. It makes you think differently about Iran just knowing that you started there so many thousands of years ago. In the 7th century AD, the prophet Mohammed decreed that all Muslims (I'm guessing by "all" he meant all males, but I won't quibble) must be able to read the Koran, the sacred text of Islam. Other religions left reading and interpretation of scriptures to priests, and most of the rest of the world stayed illiterate until fairly recently.

The Arabs got busy, learned to read the Koran and then, like all bookworms in every century, read everything else that was available, mostly classical Greek and Roman texts in philosophy, science, engineering and mathematics. Their knowledge of medicine was so advanced that Europeans were still using Persian medical textbooks centuries later. The Arab world was filled with the brightest minds anywhere at about the time Europeans were still hunkered down in their vast forests. (You may be less pleased to learn that the Arabic world also gave us algebra as well as the concept of zero.)

When it's all said, our story is so vast and convoluted that no matter how much time you devote to your education (or I devote to this article), you're likely to discover that you still don't know much about history. Don't despair. History doesn't end, and you are about to go out into the world and make some history of your own.

Go forth, new graduates, and make us proud of the chapters you will write.

*DNA testing has proved that a male in the Jefferson family fathered children with a female slave. While such behavior does not stand up to moral scrutiny in modern times, DNA evidence cannot prove which Jefferson male is responsible for the offense.

Thomas has gotten a posthumous slap-down for an affair that was not likely consensual, but we could, reasonably, offer him the benefit of the doubt.

Ref: Haugen, Peter, World History for Dummies, 2001
Davis, Kenneth C., Don't Know Much About History, 2003
Hochschild Adam, Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, 1999
Massie, Robert K., Dreadnaught, 1993

< Previous column

Next column >

Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

editor@sanjuanislander.com

About Us | Advertising Info | Contact Us | Privacy Policy