What is History and Why Should We Care? — A Perspective

Introduction: What is History?

Sam Cooke sang that he didn’t know much about history. This question of “what is history?” is one I have pursued as a hobby and personal interest for much of my adult life. Several years ago, four historians were asked that question and they said History is:

- the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions and behaviors;

- the probing into the “why” and the “how”;

- fundamentally a problem-solving discipline;

- useful for telling us how we got “here”.

It was a question asked by E.H. Carr 60 years ago, and whose answer I have not adequately explored or considered prior to delving into the major historical events and epochs I have been interested in and have spent considerable time researching. These include: the historical Jesus, the John F. Kennedy assassination and his administration, human origins and journey, and “Big History,” to mention a few.

I decided to pursue the answers to this question and write this essay after reading a post on LinkedIn by a former IBM colleague and University of MN professor who has written several books of history including the rise and use of information, and the linkages between information ecosystems and history in general, and history of business, economics, sociology and technology. He is a member of the American Historical Association (AHA) and he reposted their essay regarding the importance of applying standards for teaching “honest history” in K-12 education.

My Perspective, American Centricity

I am an American citizen of European descent that grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and have lived my entire life in the state of Maryland and Virginia in the United States of America. I have traveled around the United States, the Caribbean, Europe and Mexico. I have not yet traveled to Central America, Africa, South America, Asia, Australia, the Arctic, Antarctica, or outer space. While much of this essay applies to the history of the world anywhere on Earth, it is quite US-centric as that has been my primary interest and focus. I bring this perspective to my views on history and they are reflected in this essay. I include “memoir moments” of personal stories reflecting my interest in history.

The Need for Standards and “Honest History”

The reason the AHA wrote its essay on the need for historical standards, along with their discussion and reference to the teaching of “Honest History” is because “Honest History” has been criticized and attacked from the political right as only a term of postmodern thought, or specifically based in Critical Theory and its offshoot, Critical Race Theory. This is extremely misleading but has successfully been politically weaponized within Republican-right wing controlled State houses, legislatures, and school boards, along with right wing media and voters.

The political poster child for this movement is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In his now hard to find 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” DeSantis said slavery was a “personal flaw” of the founding Fathers. As business leaders/CEOs Ken Chenault and Ken Frazier noted, this flawed and tyrannical thinking by DeSantis is “prohibiting certain ideas — whitewashing curriculums, banning books — is just a new expression of the old extremism that we ought to be studying and then repudiating, not denying and then reinforcing. The textbooks of our youth presented vastly incomplete, even misleading, portrayals of U.S. history and our forebears’ roles in it.”

As will be explained later in this paper, in historiography, the reinterpretation of a historical account is referred to as Historical Revisionism. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or timespan or phenomenon, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. DeSantis, and others of his mindset, are actually practicing Historical Negationism.

Historical Negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record, and this is a technique usually employed by authoritarians or those in power in Democracies that have reasons to distort or control an accepted historical narrative in society.

Related to this cultural and values clash, Postmodern thought, values and teachings, has its strengths and weaknesses. However, the main thing to realize is that most of America and the world do not share postmodern values, rather it shares modern and traditional values which also have their own strengths and weaknesses. Thus, we now have the clash of values occurring not just in politics, but also in K-12 and higher education, where postmodern thought reigns supreme. The way ahead is actually an approach that can transcend and include the dignities of each value system, while discarding the disasters. But, that is another project for another essay. The term for that would be Integral History using the principles of Integral Thinking applied to history.

My reading of the “honest history” idea or movement, is that it is based on the idea of teaching Critical thinking (not Critical Theory) skills in the history standards of learning, teaching “K-12 kids disciplinary and transferable thinking skills, inquiry, analysis, and civic engagement, while dramatically increasing the number of names, dates, and facts that students must memorize.” This approach has been adopted nationwide by the AHA and the teachers unions. The teachers unions in general are politically and culturally on the left, so the right wing sees it and its teachings as a necessary political target in the politically polarized environment in the United States which views winning vs political opponents in everything as the ultimate value to ascribe to.

More Honest History

There are a number of NGOs that support this approach to teaching honest history, and they are offering materials and lesson plans that are being used by K-12 history teachers. These include Honest History, Gibbs Smith Education, The Education Trust, and likely many others.

My wife and I did some tutoring of our nephew three years ago. In an email to his 11th grade history teacher I sent her a link to the Kialo mapping tool, which I suggested may be handy for student debates and arguments for history and government issues such that they could be visually captured by students while they are applying their critical thinking skills.

This cultural clash is now a major issue in the United States after the cultural and political blowback regarding what is taught as history, civics and culture to K-12 school children has become quite controversial and been politicized, particularly in the last eight years. State Governors and legislatures are targeting social studies standards and content used for educating America’s school children. In Ottowa county Michigan, the newly elected county commissioners produced a new resolution to change the county motto because the old one taught residents to “hate America and doubt the goodness of her people,” and the proposed alternative sought to unite county residents around America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.” These elected officials have their own historical narrative, and they will impose it on the voters and children of their county.

The United States has debated previously over how to teach US history — what to include and exclude. But since the election of President Trump, and the inclusion of new teachings about the history of race in America, with the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, conservatives at the national and state level are moving to challenge curriculums that are taught in K-12 history and civics classes. The issue is larger than what is taught in history class, it involves challenging who decides what is included in curriculum and how to ensure compliance. As a result of this polarization of the teaching of history, many states are passing legislation to control what teachers can teach and restrict them. Books are being banned. Much of this is complicated by the “parental rights” movement, where parents want to determine what books are allowed and what is taught in school, all while perhaps doing less parenting.

Given the current politicization of the teaching of History, as noted in the 2019 report from the Hoover Institute, it is important to remember that “history teaching in (K-12) school has a civic purpose, not only a disciplinary purpose. Sociologist James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reminds us that, “We aren’t just learning about the past to satisfy our curiosity — we are learning about the past to do our jobs as Americans.” Professor Sam Wineburg agrees: “It is not popular to talk about in an era of identity politics, but history teaching in school has a civic purpose, not only a disciplinary purpose.”

National Education Test Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that the US has hit “rock bottom” in civics education with “About three-quarters of baby boomers say they’re proud to live in the United States, but only 54 percent of Gen Xers, 36 percent of millennials and 16 percent of Gen Z members do.” The good news is that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Education Department funded the development of a roadmap that six Education Secretaries from the Trump and Biden Administration have endorsed — the Educating For American Democracy Roadmap.

History Asks Questions About the Past, Leading to more questions

So, how is history determined? Who determines it? How and why is it taught? How and why is it disseminated in popular culture? Are there standards for determining and reporting history? How is history in democracies and non-democratic societies determined? What is the role of the media in furthering historical narratives? What is historical truth? What is truth? What is marketing? What is propaganda? What is a messaging campaign, and how does that differ from reporting news or providing non-biased information? How do dominant historical narratives influence and affect political ideology in our everyday life by pre-shaping the world we live in?

How does this influence the teaching and reporting of history? How has the rise of the Internet and social media with many sources of information, including accounts of “history” and the rise of conspiracy theories, affected “honest history” or “historical truth?” How important is myth and narrative in teaching and explaining history? How important is entertainment and art for teaching history? How has the pollution of the information ecosystem, the manipulation of information for geopolitical and profit purposes, using marketing, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda affected how we view history?

I will attempt to address some of these questions. If we all knew something about history, we would enjoy more of a wonderful world in our present circumstances, and we could make better sense addressing our challenges in the 21st century. As this article notes, to meet these challenges we will need to foster an ethos of learning. This includes epistemic humility and an ability to better understand our history, all of it, and use this understanding in addressing today’s challenges.

Why Study History?

There are many reasons to study history. As the University of Wisconsin History department notes, these include:

- the past teaches us about the present;

- empathy is developed by studying the lives of others;

- history can be intensely personal;

- studying history is like completing a puzzle or solving a mystery;

- everything that one does has a history before one does it.

Stanford University says that history is more than “a set of facts, a collection of events, a series of things that happened, one after another, in the past. In fact, history is far more than these things — it is a way of thinking about and seeing the world.

To genuinely make sense of the past, you need to learn how to see it on its own terms, how to make the strange and unfamiliar logical and comprehensible, and how to empathize with people who once thought so differently than we do today. If you learn how to do these things, you begin to cultivate a crucial set of skills that not only help navigate the past, but the present as well.”

History does serve an important role in society. Properly done, the study of humanities and history “teach people how to think analytically while at the same time noting and appreciating innovation and creativity.” These are all skills that serve citizens well in their lives, professionally and personally.

As historian Gary Moulton has noted, “nothing is ever truly definitive in history, there are always new documents coming to light.” New documents provide new information. New information can change known or previously unknown or agreed upon facts. History is provisional and contextual, as is all truth. Truth, including historical truth, is in fact, relative. That does not mean there are no such things as “true facts” (vs “alternative facts”) or that certain events and actions can be measured, monitored and documented such that there is broad agreement as to what truth is, but it is subject to change given new facts and new information.

This method of knowing was codified during the Age of Enlightenment and is known as the scientific method (the values and knowledge of modernity). Of course, billions of humans for many millennia have lived by, and still live by the notion of “ultimate truth” or “absolute truth” or revealed truth by God (the values and knowledge of premodern traditionalism) or other-worldly, non-human beings.

All humans and Americans are also untruthful with one another. We spread “fake news” and “fake facts.” It’s what we do. It may have provided an evolutionary advantage for our species to have done so. Humans speak of, have spoken of, and have written history, and do so through the subjective and inter-subjective and cultural filters and perceptual cognitive biases that are unique to our own species and experiences, as we attempt to analyze, measure and map the objective and inter-objective world. .

The study and teaching of “History” as discussed by historians is a human endeavor, but history actually precedes the human animal. This is “Big History.” There was existence before humans, before life on Earth, or before Planet Earth, and perhaps even before the Big Bang. So, pre-human history requires a skill beyond the profession of history and historiography, which deals only with the history of humans. To discuss history before the written word, but after the arrival of Homo Sapiens, this period is referred to as “Pre-History” or as Deep History.

For the history of the humans before the written word, we need the skills and competencies of archaeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, evolutionary scientists, astrophysicists, cosmologists, geologists, and quantum mechanics specialists. Sometimes it is the archeologist and anthropologist, not the traditional historian, that challenge some of the dominant historical narratives of human development. Sometimes new technology, such as “lidar technology, an advanced type of radar that reveals things hidden by dense vegetation and the tree canopy,” can completely change historical conclusions for whole societies as it has done for pre-Classical Mayan society from Central America. History flows and is divided into timelines of world history, and specialties develop within each of these historical periods. This will be discussed later.

We humans are pre-occupied with the history of our species. We study it a lot. We have spoken about it a lot. We have written much about it. We like to study ourselves. We have a great capacity to believe things strongly, even if they are not true and these beliefs often come in conflict with other people’s strong beliefs. We even like to examine history itself which is a philosophy of history. For a humorous, entertaining, and informative view of our history, watch this 19-minute youtube video — “History of the Entire World” (actually an Earth-Centric, Homo Sapiens-centric view of planet earth, its origin, and the origin and evolution of its inhabitants, featuring humans, Homo Sapiens, the Moral Animal), which has been viewed over five million times, by Bill Wurtz, and skip the rest of this essay. The study of the history of non-human, extra-terrestial beings is beyond the scope of this essay, and is left to ufologists.

How History is Determined by Professional Historians

Historiography is the “writing of history based on a critical analysis, evaluation, and selection of authentic source materials and composition of these materials into a narrative subject to scholarly methods of criticism. It includes principles, theories, or methodology of scholarly historical research and presentation. It is a body of historical literature.”

The UCLA Public History initiative says history often “is usually taken to mean what happened in the past” with a collection of facts to be repeated, but it also usually involves a narrative and is “a dialogue among historians, not only about what happened but about why and how events unfolded.” The study of history is not only remembering facts. It requires following and evaluating arguments and arriving at usable, even if tentative, conclusions based on the available evidence.” The ability to provide analysis and interpretation of historical events depends on a person’s ability to comprehend the wide range of “facts” and artifacts and source materials (including primary and secondary sources), as well as their ability to understand the context of the time when historical events occur.

This means that history is always subject to interpretation based on cultural values, cognitive biases, and built in assumptions about the subject at hand. History should be open to interpretation and debate as most cultures view historical events differently. Views of historical events can and do change all the time. As an example, for the United States, Manifest Destiny of European colonizers can also be viewed as the genocide of people with a 12,000 year old culture and the systematic oppression of enslaved people to further advance the new nation and the personal interests of its founders and property owners.

Another example can be found in popular historian Stephen E. Ambrose most popular book, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, released in June of 1997 (I am reading it while writing this essay). Speaking of plantation life in Virginia in the late 18th century, and the habits, practices and norms for plantation owners, Ambrose was discussing the role of women in colonial American society. He contrasted and compared white women to black (Negro) women, and briefly discussed Jefferson’s and Lewis’s relationship with the women in their lives (wives, mothers, slaves). He noted, quoting from Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, that there was “more sexual freedom for white men meant less for white women.” Ambrose then notes that many slave owning masters did “indulge themselves” with sex with their black negro slave women, “with evidence aplenty in the form of mulattoes. Whether Jefferson so indulged himself is the subject of much speculation, argument, and controversy, all of it based on very little evidence” (emphasis mine).

There was “very little” historical evidence because not much was written by historians about this practice. There were writings about it. Ambrose later writes about an incident involving “invective and slander” during Jefferson’s Administration where a former Republican party member-turned Federalist reporter named James Thomas Callender charged in a report in a Richmond newspaper that “Jefferson had a slave mistress, “Black Sally”, who had borne him several children.” This was one of three charges against Jefferson in the article. Ambrose goes on to say that the charge of children with “Black Sally” “lives on.” Callender wrote in 1802, Ambrose wrote his book in 1997.

However, this historical fact, that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemmings, was not accepted by historians within the historical narrative that was taught for two hundred years. There was an extensive oral history of Jefferson’s relationship and children by his slave Sally Hemmings from her descendants. Many generations shared this oral history by the time Ambrose wrote his book. Only with the advent of DNA testing, which was very strong scientific evidence, along with an ancestor’s persistence, was there a corrective to historian’s written silence on the 3rd President of the United States (POTUS), along with many other slave-holding masters, and was the historical record finally updated accurately. The DNA test happened one year after the release of Ambrose’s book.

Sally Hemings brother, John Hemings, was the fine carpenter that built Jefferson’s vacation estate near Lynchburg, VA., Poplar Forest. The Hemings were family to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s relationship to John Hemings was in essence as a brother-in-law. Not so by legal marriage, or accepted social or legal standards of 1800, but because Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemmings, with them being John Heming’s Nieces and Nephews, all of them were in fact closely knit despite the fact that the black family members were owned by the powerful white Virginian Jefferson.

All families have unusual relationships, and one member “owning” the other when the owner wrote “all men (humans) are created equal”, and held the leading political office in the country, would certainly be in the unusual category, especially in 1800, but this was another instance where this history was “unspeakable” for centuries and it should not have been. We can speak of it. We must speak of it, honestly and truthfully.

Thirty years prior to Ambrose writing this, the US Supreme Court in Loving vs Virginia decided to outlaw Virginia’s miscegenation laws prohibiting the marriage of white people with black people. Richard Loving was married to Mildred Jeter Loving. My grandmother was a Jeter married to my grandfather, a Loving. As far as we know, even though that famous couple and my grandparents were from the same part of Virginia, I am not related to them. More research is required to confirm this.

Ideally, the teaching of history would incorporate all views and all interpretations because they are all partially correct interpretations of historical events and a more valid interpretation is the consolidation of all historical facts, realities and perspectives, i.e. from the winners and the losers, from the dominators and the dominated, from the rich and the poor. Rigorous historical analysis and investigations of all source material, properly vetted, dispassionately analyzed, will lead to more accurate historical narratives being written.

The importance of Narrative, Story Telling, and the Story Teller while reporting history

Humans are story tellers. Our stories have shaped and still shape our worldviews, beliefs and our place in the Kosmos, i.e. the universe(s) around us. Entrepreneur and storyteller Leo Widrich noted in “The Science of Storytelling: What Listening to a Story Does to Our Brains”, that there’s research to suggest that when we hear a story, “not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are, too.” The first history was communicated orally, stories passed on to each generation. Stories are usually subjective narratives, sometimes including objective facts, often told with the embellishment and entertaining flourishes of the story teller. A former work colleague in sales often spoke of the need to “create audience” for the product or service or for our company that we were offering and representing. For him, “no story, no sale.” That was certainly true for the best winning proposals for competitive bids.

Often in human history, these stories have served as a blueprint for how we do and should act in the present. As discussed in this BBC article, Alexander the Great used the story of Homer’s Iliad to determine the blueprint of his military campaign. The Iliad and Odyssey influenced many others in many ways. Referring again to my interest in the historical Jesus, there are those that argue about the influence of Greek poetry on the gospel writers of the New Testament, who were trained in Greek history and spoke Greek, is indicative of the quality of the historical narrative produced. This speaks to the influences for writing narratives, and how specific narrative structure is passed on and used in writings represented as historical narratives and historical fact.

To simplify the fundamental challenge of the historian or reader of history, one must be able to discern the difference in a narrative story between analysis (using objective facts) and interpretation (using subjective cultural influences and biases). I again refer to the UCLA Public History Initiative:

“Students need to realize that historians may differ on the facts they incorporate in the development of their narratives and disagree as well on how those facts are to be interpreted. To engage in historical analysis and interpretation students must draw upon their skills of historical comprehension. In fact, there is no sharp line separating the two categories. Certain of the skills involved in comprehension overlap the skills involved in analysis and are essential to it. For example, identifying the author or source of a historical document or narrative and assessing its credibility (comprehension) is prerequisite to comparing competing historical narratives (analysis).”

As historian Yoav J. Tenembaum has noted: “A historical narrative may be based on historical truth, but to believe that historical truth may not be objectively determined and thus one is left only with historical narratives is to confuse the objective existence of truth with its subjective interpretation. Historical narratives may reflect historical truth or not. Their aim is not necessarily to ascertain what actually happened in the past, but to justify what happens in the present.”

This tension of course leads to a discussion of those with power being the ones who write and shape history to confirm their own powerful interests and desired public narratives and policies. This is particularly true of fascist, authoritarian leaders. History is written by the victorious, so many have said, including Richard Friedlander. Historian Steve Cohen has written an entire book discussing this aspect of history writing, Making History — The Storytellers who shaped the past.

Lack of a Shared Historical Narrative

“In significant ways, culture is a set of shared stories, a narrative about who its members are, and what they believe, desire, and fear. This relationship between story and society is not only ancient, it is arguably the thing that makes us human. Stories tell us right from wrong, teach us our history, and, importantly, give members of society touchstones of common understanding.” David Marcus was speaking of these stories as they are being told in movies and TV. But this also applies to the stories of our history, or for how we socially interact with one another in civil society.

According to The Institute for Social Capital, “Shared narratives are commonly understood myths, stories, and metaphors that give order to human experience and solidify meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them. Narratives are symbolic actions such as words and/or deeds. Shared narratives are co-created through social interaction in the pursuit of meaning.

Narratives are an important part of our everyday experience. They give meaning to our experiences and reinforce our chosen interpretation of events and observations. Narratives are logically consistent and justified explanations of what happened, why it happened, and what it means. They are an essential feature of human nature that allows us to “experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, as conflicts, characters, beginnings, middles, and ends.”

The Open Government Partnership’s Practice Group on Dialogue and Deliberation “shows how building “shared narratives” can help governments reframe and solve difficult policy issues, from the tensions between climate change and economy to the reform of electoral systems. Narrative building helps a diverse group of stakeholders recognize and understand the role that values play in their dispute and highlights the other objectives and values they share.”

One could also say that teaching shared historical narratives helps a diverse group of students and citizens recognize and understand the role that cultural values and positions of power and control played in the history of their nation, its disputes and struggles, and can highlight the other objectives and values they share and are in disagreement about in the present day.

George Packer wrote the book, Last Best Hope — America in Crisis and Renewal. In it he describes the Four Americas, and how these four distinct cultural and political groupings share political values and narratives about who America is and was, and how each of these are at war with one another and this war includes control of narrative, politics, laws, elections and what we teach in school. To help frame a better understanding of a coalescing on a common view of how and what America is, in an interview Packer gave discussing this book, he said “American history is one way to get in touch with it. We are having history wars at the moment — in state legislatures, in school districts — and we are bringing up parts of our history that have been suppressed and that have to be brought to the surface.” In other words, we need to teach Honest History.

The history wars are a subset or extension of America’s culture wars. Each actor in the culture war is attempting to change or gain control of the historical narrative of who America was, what it represented, in the hopes of shoring up the political platform of codifying who they want America to be today.

As the (in)famous media tycoon Andrew Breitbart said, “Culture is upstream from politics.” Which leads to Steve McIntosh’s critique of Packer’s work. He believes that what Packer misses is that American national solidarity is being stunted by a lack of cultural growth. There is a case to be made for the analysis of culture within a historical process. McIntosh’s entire project at the Institute for Cultural Evolution is about furthering this cultural growth through what he describes as Developmental Politics. This approach, as I referenced earlier in the paper as “Integral History” could also be applied to the teaching of history.

Of course, I am certainly not the first person to discuss the need for a common narrative in history. On The American Narrative is a 2012 collection of essays that “explore many of the threads that create the country’s “master story.”” In 2019, Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative, a collection of essays by “leading thinkers from across the political spectrum,” with each of them bringing their own unique perspective about the American story. As Kirkus review asks,” But what story do we teach? What story do we learn? And what story do we tell?”

My answer is we tell them all, that is the American story, the good, the bad and the ugly, or the Good, True, and Beautiful. We embrace those stories. We explain them. We use the tools of historiography and write history based on a “critical analysis, evaluation, and selection of authentic source materials and composition of these materials into a narrative subject to scholarly methods of criticism.” We should inform this critical analysis with a developmental cultural perspective, or what I referred to as Integral History. We should teach this with truth AND reconciliation. We were who we were, we have done what we have done. If we did that, we could hopefully learn from it, and we improve upon it in our continuing pursuit for a more perfect union.

There Are Many other ways to learn and teach history

Beyond the scholarly definitions and standards of what history is and how it should be rendered and formally written about and taught, there are many other ways for history to be learned, taught and disseminated. That is probably a good thing because since the 2008 recession, fewer students are taking the humanities in college, including history, and that trend has continued until today. In a recent study of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of undergraduates seeking a history major fell twelve percent, with history majors coming in last. Many universities, including my alma mater, the University of Maryland, are grappling with this phenomenon in a variety of ways. Some smaller universities are even cutting history from their curriculum.

Having fewer formally trained historians is probably not a good thing. It is important for everyone to have an understanding of history and with fewer formally trained historians, having multiple outlets and channels offering some form of education in history is good, even if it does not necessarily comply with rigorous standards of research and analysis. Another consideration is a discussion about the purpose of higher education and the humanities in general, and as Daniel Bessner has noted, the changing economy for humanities professors, the implementation of adjunct professors in a gig economy for history, means that there are fewer and fewer history professors teaching history to fewer history students. As Bessner notes, this is the spiral towards the “End of History Profession” (not the kind discussed by Francis Fukuyama). He wrote “as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline.”

With more and more people learning history from non-historians, that leaves people claiming they are “doing their own research” (usually meaning google searches of every stop along the Internet super highway) with many people forming views on specific topics based on poorly sourced and vetted information and falling prey to conspiracy theories (of the false or unsubstantiated variety). The pollution of the information ecosystem and “news” media as entertainment and propaganda contributes to this issue.

Alternative Narratives or “Alt Histories”

For generally accepted history, there is a “mainstream historical narrative” or “dominant historical story-telling of our civilization,” the “dominant narratives.” These are usually, but not always, accommodated and repeated by the “Mainstream Media” and popular and “mainstream historians.” The role of Media is to report on current events as they happen and have recently happened, and to perform investigative analysis and reporting as to causes for events as they occur. The media and journalism is supposed to be skeptical of government and other institutional power and to challenge narratives as they unfold. The history of the United States shows that the press has in many instances been captured by corporate power as well as the intelligence agencies of the US government. Trust in the media, along with other institutions, is at an all-time low. It is interesting to note that Media reporting now often uses experts to reinforce or explain a current narrative for a breaking news event, and this has lately included popular e.g. American historians as “explainers” of a current event for its significance and meaning.

The availability and numerous sources of data and information available on-line today is pervasive and most of it is not mainstream. This means that as in many other areas, history and news may be offered on a spectrum of truthfulness and respected scholarship and journalistic standards, with comedian Steven Colbert’s “truthiness” located along that spectrum.

So, in addition to mainstream historical narratives we have seen the rise of alternative narratives, which reveal “Hidden History,” or alternative ways to tell the history using different interpretations of the historical record. Author Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast on “Revisionist History.” Other names for this are Deep Events, Shadow History, Secret History. Sometimes these alternatives offer theories as to why these alternative narratives have been hidden, and not told or accepted, and this usually involves the assertion that the mainstream institutions, the powerful ones referenced earlier, have specific narratives that they want to disseminate to the public as factual or accepted history.

A popular example of this is Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. It is controversial among many historians, but it has also been adopted for use in K-12 education by many educators, as part of the initiative to provide “honest history.” There is now a non-profit, The Zinn Education Project, whose goal “is to introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of United States history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula.” It offers “free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and grade level. Since 2008, the Zinn Education Project has introduced students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. With more than 150,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.”

In historiography, the reinterpretation of a historical account is referred to as Historical Revisionism. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or timespan or phenomenon, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. So the formal term for the acceptance of Hidden History by historians is Historical Revisionism.

Historical Negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record, and this is a technique usually employed by authoritarians or those in power in Democracies that have reasons to distort or control an accepted historical narrative in society. Here are several examples of this by Anurag Dhatrak.

There are many books, podcasts, investigative journalists, independent researchers and NGOs all of which are dedicated to the study and promulgation of hidden histories. Some examples include the NGO Deep History; the book Hidden History, by Daniel Boorstin; the American Prestige podcast, by Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison; some examples by writer Lily Capstick; the NGO named Hidden History; a series of books by author Thom Hartmann; an Apple Podcast by Ellis Tucci; NGO Hidden History Center; the NGO WhoWhatWhy and books, by journalist Russ Baker; and finally the work of former diplomat and academic Peter Dale Scott, who has written on the concept of Deep Politics or ParaPolitics that is based on DeepEvents, which are hidden history. There are many other examples of this. Here is one example of Scott’s writing.

American Exceptionalism or Exceptionism?

A broad historical narrative to discuss to cite examples of this hidden history is the concept or notion of American Exceptionalism. The term originated with Alex de Tocqueville, was used again the early 20th century by American communists, then later by historians and usually conservative, right wing politicians. In each case the term provided a narrative that stated the uniqueness and moral superiority of the United States to other nations for historical, ideological and religious reasons.

Viewing American history through this lens, common historical narratives emphasized America’s divinely inspired founding and positive accomplishments, while minimizing elements in its history that would undermine this narrative. The narrative was used to justify specific policies like expansion within its borders (Manifest Destiny) and beyond US borders in the late 19th century, and post WWII, as the basis for its Cold War fight vs the stated existential threat of Communism as part of what was deemed the American Century, a term coined by Henry R.Luce in a 1941 editorial as the US anticipated the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, which George Kennan established was an existential fight that would ultimately continue for 45 years until the USSR ceased to exist.

A contrast to this and an alternative historical narrative for Post WWII period is one coined by Political Scientist Aaron Good, in his book American Exceptionism which was influenced by the work of Peter Dale Scott and C. Wright Mills, among others.

A central concern of Good’s book is “the relationship between expansive foreign policy and democratic decline.” The focus of his research and this book is “upon the forces that drive the pursuit of (US) dominance.”

Good develops the theory of the tripartite state and the utility of this theory is “an attempt at sense-making using social science theory and empirical evidence — under conditions in which important political and historical events are intentionally obscured by powerful actors. The tripartite theory of the state and the concept of exceptionism have been developed herein to offer a means of understanding and explaining important historical and political realities. These matters include unadjudicated elite criminality, the ceaseless US pursuit of global dominance, and the prevailing regime’s inability to address major crises — namely economic inequality, ecological destruction, and the threat of nuclear omnicide.”

This is new scholarship that extends traditional historical analysis and looks more deeply at past events, offering a completely alternative revisionist historical narrative for America in the American Century. Suffice it to say, this revisionist narrative is not commonly accepted nor taught in most history classes, K-12 or in higher education.

Assuming that some of this alleged alternative history has really happened, how could it have happened without the press and/or historians being able or willing to write about it? How could they have been misled from “historical facts” as they occurred or when writing historical narratives about these past events? This is possible because of intentional deception by well trained deceivers. Since Good is writing about American Exception (via deception) in the American Century, Post WWII, it first helps to understand the importance of disguise and deception as key tools of war and nation-state rivalry and conflict. WWII produced many scientific and technological breakthroughs, but it also produced significant intelligence breakthroughs, and since WWII, these capacities have been significantly enhanced and continued to be practiced until the present day.

As author Stephen Budiansky has noted, “Any historian who hopes to tell the true story of secret intelligence operations, even from the distant past, quickly discovers that he is up against two formidable obstacles. First is the Kafkaesque system of government classification. Not only do U.S. intelligence agencies routinely refuse to declassify material from 70 or more years ago, they have taken to reclassifying and removing from the National Archives some previously released World War II-era files. The other problem is that spies are professional, if not congenital, liars.”

This means that specific agencies of national governments have a mission to deceive regarding their operations, and those done on behalf of those that they serve, the governed. Since much of this clandestine activity is very nasty business, and given commonly accepted historical narratives — e.g. American Exceptionalism do not include lying, deception, and nasty business as part of the story, these same agencies and their government needs to have the ability to not only disguise these operations, they need a means of communication to the public that paints a picture of reality that has been intentionally disguised.

This deception is important if these governments are democracies and want to maintain the consent of the governed. This requires both sophisticated tools, the Craft of Intelligence, but also sophisticated mass psychological techniques for communicating to a mass audience — the governed population, the ones voting and paying taxes for these services.

Paul Linebargar was an expert on psychological warfare and propaganda and taught a regular class to CIA agents out of his home while undercover in his assignment to the School of Advanced and International Studies. He used to recommend that his students read the classic book, The Big Con — The Story of the Confidence Men. The 1973 movie The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford was based on this book.

In the introduction to his book Intelligence Wars — American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda, Thomas Powers relates an interesting conversation he had with General William Odom at a party hosted by former CIA intelligence officer Haviland Smith. Powers asked General Odom how the CIA could have uncovered and infiltrated Al Qaeda before 9/11. General Odom, the former Army Chief of Staff and director of the National Security Agency said simply — “Like the Sting.” For those working in the field of Intelligence, many refer to this as The Great Game, with former CIA man Bill Hitz’s book having the same name.

So beyond disguise and deception of covert operations there also needs to be the same in communications to the masses concerning these events. In their book Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that mass communication media are effective at carrying out a “system-supportive” propaganda function. System-supportive often includes the perpetuation of commonly agreed to historical narratives. Historians can be the Mark of a Big Con as well as any citizen consuming mass media.

Propaganda did not begin in WWII, and certainly it has evolved since then. However, with the rise of the Internet and Social Media, propaganda is not what it used to be and completely new techniques are needed to manipulate and influence mass populations and influence them, their culture, and the elections they vote in.

Some theories of social control of the governed that provides consent posits that there is a power elite that has designed a society that works only for the few, while propagating social and historical narratives that keep the masses happy with their own circumstances, lest they rise up in revolution overthrowing the current order. Angelo Codevilla refers to this as the Ruling Class. Michael Lind also discusses this Ruling Class. Institutions make up this cohesive order — Mass Media, the school system, the churches, corporations, and the remainder of civil society — those myriad associations that Alex de Tocqueville marveled at in the 19th century, yet in the late 20th century and early 21st, are falling in disarray to life in the metaverse. “Digitally mediated psychological warfare” is but one of our 21st century challenges confronting us. Tomorrow’s historical narratives will discuss how well we responded to this and other hyperobjects of our time.

For the consent of the governed, consent for what the government does and how it does it, for what businesses and corporations do, for how well the system of capitalism in which businesses and the government operates, for what individual citizens can do, all within the notion of social norms, boundaries and laws, consent will be achieved if the society is cohesive in its beliefs about its institutions and the people that run them. It also needs to ideally be in broad agreement about the story of its society, or the accepted historical narrative.

As Daniel Bessner notes, at the end of the American Century, America must now use historical interpretation of how well its policies of Empire during this period has served itself and the world, as it determines its role in addressing the major issues of the 21st century. He argues that by only taking a historicist approach, can we accurately assess the good and bad of American policy during the American Century and arrive at an approach that is likely to better work in the decades and century ahead.

Popularizing and teaching history through entertaining documentaries, movies and historical novels

History can be conveyed in many ways beyond history books with history teachers. It can be conveyed by popular historians discussing history in the public domain. It can be conveyed in art and literature, movies, youtube videos, documentaries, narrative fiction, humor and satire.

Popular historians, such as Michael Bechloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the late Stephen E. Ambrose, and Jon Meacham, to name just a few, (Ambrose is deceased) are also popularizers of history and its importance. Meacham was not actually formally trained as a historian, he was an English major in college and started in journalism. He then focused on history, writing four presidential biographies for Jefferson, Jackson, Bush41, and Lincoln. He now also has a podcast, Hope Through History.

Bechloss, Goodwin and Meacham are all called upon by media talking heads to weigh in on current events to provide historical context and historical insight for what is happening now. For instance, during the Trump administration, Meacham, having written about America’s soul, was popular to help Americans gain perspective on WTF was happening to us during this period. There is a long history of the relationship of the media to history. When historians speak publicly about the present, they in part are reinforcing the importance of learning and studying history. Their appearance also highlights how journalists, which are now held in low esteem, need validation for a narrative they are promoting regarding current events but it also highlights how most modern journalists no longer do the hard investigative reporting and rather turn to the “experts” that can explain everything for their audience.

Well known historians have not been without controversy. Peter Charles Hoffer’s book Past Imperfect: Facts Fictions and Fraud challenges the accuracy of more popular historical accounts of well-known historians, which caused controversy within the historical academic community. These scandals of the early 21st century reflected a long struggle in the fields of history and anthropology between traditionalists, “who claim the production of objective knowledge as the primary goal of the discipline,” and “a powerful coalition of literary and social theorists, who dismiss such a concept as elusive, naive and fatally flawed.”

History in the movies, documentaries, and TV series.

There are many dozens (hundreds?) of movies that cover historical events and epochs. Certainly since WWII there have been numerous movies about war including WWI, WWII, the Korean War, Viet Nam Conflict, the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Civil War, American Revolution, etc. There are many lists of the best historical movies to watch: IMDb’s Top 50 History movies, All That’s Interesting’s Top 44, Good Housekeeping’s Top 33, PureWow’s Top 57, ScreenRant’s Top 15 that are the most historically accurate, Marie Claire’s Top 18, Wikipedia has a list of films by historical category, and there are lists of specific historical periods, like 20 best medieval movies, or Wikipedia’s list of films about the holocaust.

Another category of movies of history is the documentary film, which is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to “document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record.” Documentaries have been popular from the earliest days of filmmaking, the 1920s. Wikipedia has a list of documentaries from A to Z. Readers Digest has a list of the 20 best history documentaries, One37 has its top 20 history documentaries.

One of the most popular documentary makers of history is Ken Burns. His work has been highly praised and criticized. He is not a historian, but his documentaries primarily teach history. Esquire has ranked all 31 of his documentaries that he has directed.

Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer and screenwriter that has made movies as entertainment, including ones of history such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, and W that offered historical narratives. His most controversial film was JFK, which Stone did not claim was history, but certainly did provide a revisionist historical narrative that forced the US Congress to act and pass the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which established the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) which credited the conclusions in Stone’s 1991 film JFK with the passage of the act. Stone also made numerous documentaries providing historical narratives that in most cases are at odds with commonly accepted historical narratives. One of these is The Untold History of the United States.

There have also been a large number of Television series that have featured historical narratives. Some of these are: HBO’s Rome, about 1st century Roman Empire, and Band of Brothers, which was based on Stephen Ambrose’s book of the same name, and Netflix — The Who Was? Show, which was a sketch comedy focusing on historical figures. IMDb also has its Top 50 History TV Shows., What To Watch also has its list.

Even Broadway plays can entertain and teach history.

Other Means for conveying, teaching and learning history

Historic Preservation

The National Park Service says historic preservation is a “conversation with our past about our future. It provides us with opportunities to ask, “What is important in our history?” The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is an “independent federal agency that carries out historic preservation case reviews, provides training in historic preservation law and policy, conduct outreach to the American public on the importance of historic sites and community preservation, and much more.”

Preserving history is so important to society that in 1954 the Hague Convention created international guidelines for handling and preserving cultural property during times of war and conflict.

Museums and Libraries

The Museums Association says that museums have a broad impact on changing society. Many of them also serve in teaching history. Public Libraries of course are also places where one can conduct research and find books and periodicals focusing on history. Founded in 1800, The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution. For specialized history, such as a biography of a President of the United States, a Presidential Library is an important source of historical information. The National Archives also has original source documents of the nation. The American Philosophical Society was established in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, and is the “oldest learned society” in the US. It has a museum and library available for research.

Sometimes, important American history is preserved by tireless, passionate people who without their perseverance, important history would not have been preserved. Richard Stewart was one such person and his Black History Museum, preserving the history of Pocahontas Island VA is one such story.

Another story is the Baltimore Heritage Inc., a “nonprofit historic and architectural preservation organization. With a small staff, 33 volunteer board members, and a host of volunteers, they work to preserve and promote Baltimore’s historic buildings and neighborhoods.” Among their many programs, they produce a series of “Five Minute Histories” short videos. Here is one about a program from Baltimore City schools that uses a farm to educate children about farming.

National Park Service

The Department of Interior’s National Park Service teaches history. One can visit our 63 National Parks and 131 National Monuments and learn much history of the United States. One of these national monuments, Fort McHenry, used to be in my old neighborhood, and it offers an incredibly inspirational presentation of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner, the USA’s national anthem.

Most of the national parks have visitor centers with lots of historical books and videos and displays. They also have “Ranger Talks,” as well as guided tours, walks and cycling. Here is an example of one such talk, given at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, 8/1/2018 on a nine-week cross-country trip my wife and I took with our nephew. The NPS Ranger is discussing water rights in the southwest US, which five years later is a major issue. Perhaps inspired by the Ranger talks, here is our then 15 year old nephew as “Bradley” the Park Ranger, this was taken in Steamboat Rock State Park, in the state of Washington. This is the same nephew whose history teacher we previously communicated with. He has done some Improv Comedy as a teen.

Drive around and one can frequently find Historical Markers dotting the landscape. One could learn a lot of history just stopping and reading those.

Youtube and Vimeo

YouTube and Vimeo are platforms that offer opportunities to develop and store many types of videos, including documentaries. This past fall, during a trip cycling and driving along the Natchez Trace Parkway, a “trip through 10,000 years of history,” we had the opportunity to explore many great historical sites, whether visiting the Muscle Shoals Recording studio, whose documentary one can watch on youtube, located in northwestern Alabama, or the nearby memorial to Te-lah-nay, the Native American teenage girl, part of the Yuchi tribe, and the story of her removal in 1839 by the US government as part of the trail of tears forced mass migration and relocation of native Americans and her return trip five years later.

This story is told briefly by her Great Great Grandson, Tom Hendrix, who spent 32 years building the memorial to honor her story. When we visited, we met a man from Louisiana returning for the fourth time. He told a story as relayed to him by Tom (now deceased) when a car pulled up and a Native American Chief and his traveling partner arrived. According to the driver of the car, the Chief had not spoken in two weeks. He got out, walked around the memorial, then walked up to Tom and said “I will now speak.” He said he had been on a quest to find the appropriate memorial honoring a great American woman and he found it there. It is indeed a very spiritual place and perhaps not a coincidence that in the area where Telahnay heard the Tennessee River singing there is also the place in a remote part of NW Alabama where recording studios appeared where some of the greatest American music ever made was recorded.

We also visited the death and burial site of Meriwether Lewis and Elvis Presley’s birthplace, original home and museum in Tupelo MS.

The Story of Stuff Project was the brainchild of Annie Leonard. It is an NGO that has created numerous videos teaching the history of our consumption based economy, with the pitfalls associated with it as part of our modern capitalism system since WWII. Their movies are developed in a now popular style of communications as a way to not only communicate historical information, but inspiring activism on making changes.

The TED organization, began in 1984 as a conference initially focused on Technology, Education and Design, features 15–18 minute videos, available on-line on a wide variety of topics, including history. They have developed an off-shoot of this called Ted-Ed, which are short, 5-minute educational videos targeted at K-12 learners. Some of these also cover history. Here is a very recent one on the history of chickens, their use by humans for science, food, entertainment and as cultural icons. Here is one discussing how the Normans changed the history of Europe.

Historical Vacations

The trip along the Natchez Trace was primarily for cycling the 444 miles of the Natchez Trace parkway. But it was also a historical vacation. There is an entire sub-genre of the travel and tourism industry dedicated to this, with many sites offering options for those interested in vacationing, travel and learning history. Traveling by car around the world and USA, one can now find an increasing number of road signs citing “historic” site at this exit. Those are for DIY history tours, not the packaged variety. Doing a basic Internet search, there are many places offering advice for historical tours as well as packages. Here are a few: US News Best Historical Cities in the US, Tourradar, AARP, Road Scholar, National Geographic, Responsible Travel, History Travel, GoAheadTours, Royal Caribbean, GetAwayMavens, and many more.

As mentioned earlier, Stephen E. Ambrose, the late popular historian wrote his most popular book on Meriwether Lewis, his relationship to Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson’s initiative to open up the American West for the United States of America. In the introduction to his book, he discusses how his reading the journals of Lewis and Clark affected both his personal and professional life. His professional life was affected because he wrote the book. But his personal life was affected because he, his wife, his children and grandchildren all lived much of their lives re-creating the travels of Lewis and Clark, repeatedly visiting the places in America along their journey. He says:

“Through the late spring of 1976, we made our way up the Missouri River, camping at Lewis and Clark campsites in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. We canoed the river at every stop. Each night, around the campfire, we would read aloud from the journals. In late June, we made a five-day, 165-mile canoe trip through the Missouri Breaks in northern Montana. On July 1 we canoed through the Gates of the Mountains, just north of Helena.

The following week, we backpacked the Lolo Trail…, then it was on to the Pacific. We have returned to Montana every summer since 1976. We have crossed the Lolo on horseback or foot five times. We have canoed the Breaks ten times. We have camped at Lemhi almost every year. In short, we have been obsessed with Lewis and Clark for twenty years.”

So have their children and grandchildren, now all living in Montana. This historian lived his profession, having historical vacations annually with his entire family, based on a historic event that he covered in his book on the topic, his most popular.

Humor and Satire

Humor and satire is another means to both entertain and inform citizens and to even teach history. Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri has written her own book- US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up).

The HBO series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has been on TV for 10 years. Each week, Oliver spends 30 minutes on a different topic and usually includes an historical account regarding a specific particular issue. It is informative and funny.

Historical fiction

Historical fiction is a “literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting related to the past events, but is fictional. An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period. The melding of “historical” and “fiction” in individual works of literature has a long tradition in most cultures; both western traditions (as early as Ancient Greek and Latin literature) as well as Eastern, in the form of oral and folk traditions (see mythology and folklore), which produced epics, novels, plays and other fictional works describing history for contemporary audiences.”

H for History is a popular site, representing four publishers of many books.

When writing historical fiction (or non-fiction), masterclass notes that it is important to understand the difference between historic and historical. Historic “is a word used to describe a specific event in history — such as a significant occurrence, decision, or moment — that has become or has the potential to become famous or significant.” Historical “means any past event or occurrence that has happened, whether it was significant or not.”

“You have to have an honest appraisal of the past or you can’t possibly understand where we are and where we need to get to,” says Pulitzer prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. “Her latest historical fiction novel, Horse, is a sweeping tale of spirit, obsession, and injustice. The book’s main subject is Lexington, the greatest race horse in American history, and the horse’s Black and enslaved groom, Jarret. As the two navigate the years leading up to the Civil War, Brooks weaves in characters living through other historical eras.”

Columnist Hugh Hewitt believes that to best cope with these challenging times, reading novels can help one to gain historical perspective to think about how to address today’s challenges.

Hewitt concludes, like John Steinbeck, that there is “Only one story”, a moral choice between good and evil in guiding decisions. That is the wrong conclusion to his otherwise important essay about the importance of reading broadly, including fictional historical novels, to attempt to grasp the complexities of the current moment.

“Only one story” of choosing between “good” and “evil” is a pre-modern, traditional view of the world that one might expect from Hewitt. The history of humanity and its writings is about exploring all of the Good, The True, and the Beautiful.

Taking a Big Picture, wholistic view of the complexities of modern life, at the end of the American Century, in the heart of the Anthropocene, as we are confronting numerous hyperobjects amidst the Great Acceleration, as we hurdle towards the Great Simplification, is important to do, so we should all pick up a good historical novel, and learn from it.

Popularizing History

Captivating History is a popular site offering eBooks, and videos, available directly and on Amazon. It was created by author, and lover of history Matt Clayton.

Specialized History

As mentioned earlier, History flows and is divided into timelines of world history, and specialties develop within each of these historical periods. The study of History is typically the study of Human History. Broadly, these periods are:

- Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history, is the time of humans before there is writing in human societies. This period has extended in different parts of the world until fairly recently. Broadly, this period runs from the beginning of the development of the use of stone tools by Humans, approximately 3.3 million years ago, until the invention of writing systems, about 5,000 years ago. This period’s main source of information derives from archaeologists. “The three-age system is the periodization of human prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their predominant tool-making technologies: Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age.” The human prehistory period overlaps with the Earth’s geologic period of the Pleistocene, “often referred to colloquially as the Ice Age, is the geological epoch that lasted from 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth’s most recent period of repeated glaciations.” The Holocene is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 9,700 BCE. It follows the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.”

o Stone age lasted ~ 3.4M years, ending ~ 4,000–2,000 BCE.

o Bronze age was from ~ 3300 BC to 1200 BC

o Iron age — “The duration of the Iron Age varies depending on the region under consideration. It is defined by archaeological convention. The “Iron Age” begins locally when the production of iron or steel has advanced to the point where iron tools and weapons replace their bronze equivalents in common use.”

- Protohistory “is a period between prehistory and history during which a culture or civilization has not yet developed writing, but other cultures have already noted the existence of those pre-literate groups in their own writings.”

- Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by humans in the period 3000 BCE– ACE 500.

o Classical antiquity (also the classical era, classical period or classical age), also simply antiquity, is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BCE and the 5th century ACE centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome known as the Greco-Roman world.

o Late antiquity is the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, generally spanning the 3rd–7th century in Europe and adjacent areas bordering the Mediterranean Basin.

- Post-classical history refers to the period from about 500 CE to 1500, roughly corresponding to the European Middle Ages.

- Modern era is the period of human history that succeeds the Middle Ages (which ended around 1500 AD) up to the present.

Historians typically are specialists of or within each of these periods of human history. Sometimes, as with this recent study regarding the changing climate in Greenland, the history of a given people, in this case the Vikings, will be re-written through the work of Earth Scientists, Archeologists, and Paleoclimatologists. In some instances, historians focus on a specific set of battles, in this case the little known Creek War, and it’s crucial role in American expansion in the south, the solidifying of Andrew Jackson’s reputation and approach, and “how it contributed variously to the expansion to slavery and the promotion of Jackson as a war hero, as well to future Indian removal and the brewing of the Civil War,” all very significant events in the formation of the American nation.

Within this broad sweep of history, historians and people who read history assess and evaluate our development and come up with periods and events which we believe are most important and impactful to have delivered us to the present moment. Here is one such list, someone’s idea of the 100 Most Important events in Human History.

“The History Of …”

Within this broad sweep of human history, there is lots of room for specialization and focus within a specific period or culture or nation or empire or aspect of human culture. Here are just a few examples:

History of Religion, or History of God, or even Evolution of God. History of the Bible, History of the Jews, History of the Christian Churches, History of the Roman Empire, History of the Great Depression, History of Misogyny.

Robert McElvaine is a History Professor at Millsaps College and historian of renown that has written eight books and four of them are strong contributors in the “History Of” category. He has written three books on the Great Depression. His book The Great Depression — America 1929–1941 has been called “the best one-volume overview of the Great Depression.”

The book of his I am most familiar with was his ground breaking work in the “History of Misogyny” — Eve’s Seed — Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History. In the book, McElvaine introduced the concept of biohistory and that has “been explored in articles in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and his interdisciplinary reinterpretation of the human experience has been the subject of panels at meetings of the American Historical Association, the American Anthropological Association, the International Freud Conference, the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, and the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender.”

I liked this book so much I contacted the author and bought him lunch in Jackson, MS when my wife and I traveled there 10 years ago. We discussed his interest in “when the 1960s began — 1964,” and the book he was going to write about that. I see that last year he released The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, and it is now on my to read list.

Military history — given the propensity of war and fighting in the story of human history, this area of history is long and varied and there are elaborate histories of major and minor human conflicts. There is a history of culture and why societies have fought. Here is one list for fifteen of them. There are extensive histories written of all human conflicts, e.g. — World War I , World War II, American Civil War, etc.

The History of Technology and its uses. I really liked this book, written in 1997. Given its publishing date, it obviously does not capture the acceleration and development of technology in the last 25 years, which is extensive. The authors Robert Ornstein, a psychologist, and James Burke, a science historian, show that the history of the development of new technologies is really the story of the development of the human mind and human consciousness. We will close this paper discussing the challenges and opportunities of one such technology, Artificial Intelligence.

Genealogy

Genealogy is the history of specific ancestors. Two popular genealogy sites are Ancestry and 23 & me. I have submitted my DNA to both of them and started a family tree.

My late Aunt’s spouse did work on the family tree from my father’s side of the family, and only very recently shared it with me after the passing of my Aunt. From this work, along with some internet searching, I learned some things about my Great-Grandfather, Joseph Franklin Jeter (B:7/26/1837-D:7/16/1927), my grandmother Lelia Blanch Jeter Loving’s father, that I never knew before.

Joseph was an illiterate farmer. He married my Great Grandmother, Mildred Jane Woody Jeter (B:1/7/1845–5/20/1912) on 1/8/1862, just before he enlisted in the Confederate Army on or about January 23, 1862, in Petersburg, Virginia, under the command of Captain James C Johnson, when his unit, the 2nd Regiment, Virginia Artillery Company G was formed. He was assigned to the VA Heavy Artillery Regiment, and was captured in battle at Old Church VA, presumably at the battle there ahead of Cold Harbor, on 5/30/1864 (note this wiki entry does not mention his unit in this battle). According to the genealogical records, he served four years in the CSA, which would mean he was a POW until the war ended. Where he was a POW is not known to me.

Joseph of course survived and presumably he and Mildred’s 1862 honeymoon was fruitful before he went off to fight in the Civil War because my grandmother’s oldest sibling, Mary Franklin Jeter, was born 9/24/1862, and their next child, Betsy Jeter, was born after he was released “about 1866.” They had eight additional children, including their next to last child, my grandmother/Big Mamma, Lelia Blanche Jeter, born 5/24/1880.

So for the Jeter family I answered a question I have had for a long time. They appeared to be poor and did not own slaves, and at least one of them did fight for the south in the Civil War. Had Joseph been KIA and not captured at Cold Harbor, I would not be writing this essay today.

A very popular show on genealogy is Finding Your Roots on PBS, now in its ninth season, by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Biographies as History

Biographies are a form of teaching history but some historians are critical of this approach as it only focuses on the life of one person. Other historians like to use them to teach history, and certainly many general readers like them because many historical figures are larger than life. These larger than life figures play into the “Great Man” theory of history.

Presidential Biographies

For American history, a specialty is Presidential Biographies, and there is an entire genre and series of blogs devoted to this, including this one by Steve Floyd. My wife has a 35 year old nephew who prides himself in his knowledge of US Presidents. He once won an insurance sales contract, after one year of working his prospect, with the goal of displacing a long time incumbent by asking the potential client, as a last ditch tactic after being told he lost again — “Let’s do this, you can ask me any question about any US President. If I get it right, I win the contract. If I get it wrong, I leave, and you never see me again.” The potential client agreed, and asked him this question: “Who was the 10th elected US President?” My nephew explained that it wasn’t John Tyler, because he assumed office when William Henry Harrison died in office 31 days after he was elected. So technically the 10th elected was James K. Polk. The client signed the contract, with my nephew getting the business, then he was kicked out of his new client’s office. As a retired sales executive, that is one of my favorite sales stories of all time.

The 35th and 36th Presidents of the United States

I previously mentioned that the presidency and assassination of the 35th president, John F. Kennedy is one of my areas of historical interest, having read over a dozen books. There have been many hundreds of them written about him. May 17, 2023 marked the 106th birthday of the 35th President, and November 22, 2023 will be the 60th anniversary of his assassination. The most recent biography of JFK of the many written, was by Harvard historian Frederik Logevall, and released in 2020 — JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956. I highly recommend it. It was volume one of what will be a two volume series covering JFK’s entire life. I have exchanged emails with the author several times.

I have strong opinions about JFK and his presidency and death. This means I also have strong opinions about the 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. I am not a fan of his. I am not the only one in this camp. There have also been many biographies written about Johnson.

While writing this essay, I read a short article in the Baltimore Sun about LBJ and the 1964 Maryland Democratic party presidential primary, and one phrase caught my attention, causing me to email the author. It relates to the historical record, and how people interpret events differently and claim different historical facts.

The article in the Sun was about the 1964 Democratic Party Presidential Primary in MD. I was 10 years old in 1964, and grew up in Richmond VA. I lived for forty years in MD, four of them in Baltimore, so I was interested in this history. I mentioned to the author that I lived in Federal Hill where I learned that there was a Union garrison stationed there during the Civil War, under the command of Benjamin Butler stationed in Federal Hill Park with their canons pointed not out but rather facing downtown because of fear of slave-supporting Baltimore residents enflaming the Union supporting (barely) state of MD. Butler wanted to “guarantee the allegiance of the city and the state of Maryland, whose loyalty to the North was in some doubt.”

I took issue with this comment in the article — “but out of deference to his slain predecessor, he decided he would not enter his name in the handful of presidential primaries in the spring that led to the summer party conventions and the fall general election.” I mentioned the following to the story’s author.

LBJ desperately wanted to be POTUS. He “would have killed” to become POTUS (something POTUS Nixon purportedly said even he would not have done). While driving to JFK’s inaugural, LBJ told Clare Booth Luce “I’m a gambling man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got” (of becoming POTUS from the position of Vice President with the death of the POTUS, something that had happened frequently in US history, 17% with 8 of 46 having done so).

LBJ told the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Christmas Eve 1963, “Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war.” (Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History, p326).

In the Wikipedia entry on the 1964 campaign, there is a reference to Theodore White’s account of the 64 campaign and Robert Dallek’s biography of LBJ stated that his public claims of being undecided was strictly a political move for public consumption, White, p. 255. Robert Dallek, (pp. 171–172) describes Johnson’s self-doubts and a withdrawal statement drafted as late as August 1964. However, “Most everyone thought he was being too clever by half. There was no chance Johnson wouldn’t run. He was playing a political game, or so they believed.”

LBJ did run, winning in a landslide. He did get JFK’s Civil Rights law passed. He has also received all the undue credit for that. LBJ also kept the country from going to nuclear war vs the USSR and Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination, with US overseas commands in Europe and the Pacific having put their forces in a greater state of readiness closer to DEFCON III. So along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and other legislation of his Great Society, those are LBJ’s major accomplishments along with Viet Nam being his disaster, causing his justified undoing leading to his political demise.

The ultimate historical and moral question for me to answer is this — Was the political tradeoff of giving Cold War Hawks the Viet Nam war with 58,000 dead Americans and 3 million dead Vietnamese, worth the tradeoff for passing the most extensive and important legislation since FDR until this day? One could make a case for either yes or no, but there is no question that from my perspective the cost to the country has been both incredibly significant and damaging, while also providing historic and unprecedented gains for many previously marginalized, abused, and denied-their-equal-rights Americans.

As historian Frederik Logevall has noted in this 2015 journal article in Diplomatic History, all historians analyze history with the benefit of hindsight, but analyzing counterfactuals vs deterministic history is part of the historian’s toolkit, and I believe it is part of the job description of historical narrative and analysis.

LBJ himself may have wondered if the tradeoff and deal with the Devil(s) he made was worth it. In May of 1964, before he fully escalated the war based on a false pretext, he wondered about the Viet Nam war’s ultimate importance to U.S. national security. “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out,” he complained to McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, in May 1964. “What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is it worth to this country?” Indeed, what was it worth to him or the country? It is possible to assert, again as Logevall discusses in his 2015 address, that given the Cold War and racial politics of the country in 1964–65, that LBJ could only have achieved his major domestic legislative successes IF he ALSO committed to the disastrous war in Viet Nam once he chose against war vs Cuba and the USSR. He could only do butter if he also provided guns. For what it is worth, the definitive historical or counterfactual answer to that question is still blowing in the wind.

There are several examples of unflattering books on LBJ, some pretty explosive — see attorney Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money and Power, How LBJ Killed JFK. There are other books in that same vein. There continue to be debates about all presidencies, including the legacy of Johnson, particularly vis a vis JFK, who he followed suddenly on 11/22/1963. As historian Logevall noted, “The investigation of unrealized alternatives provides crucial insight into why things turned out as they did. What is more, all historians, whenever they make causal judgments, are engaging in speculation, are contemplating alternative developments, even when these alternatives are not stated explicitly. To vow to say nothing counterfactual can therefore mean vowing to say nothing at all. In response, some historians might say that that they are in the business of “explaining” rather than investigating causality. So the task is to balance out the elements of human agency, on the one hand, with impersonal forces on the other, and to write history that strives to stitch together persuasively all the causative factors and to take into account their interaction.”

The publication of Lady Bird Johnson’s diaries and other books show that LBJ was clearly a troubled man after ascending to the Presidency. He chose not to run for reelection, and he then died a broken man shortly thereafter of cancer. Some believers would refer to this as Karma.

The Speeding up of History

There is a notion today that history is speeding up, that the pace of change across multiple vectors of society is accelerating. This is not a new concept. Historian Henry Adams, related to two US Presidents, in his last work, The Education of Henry Adams, offered a Law of Acceleration, that posited that during the history of humanity, during specific human epochs progress was achieved by forces acting like a gravitational attraction caused man to increase the pace of his social and intellectual movement.

Social Acceleration is a concept that most recently was developed by Hartmut Rosa. His theory “presents social acceleration not as an individual trait of people, but as a systemic tendency of modernity as a whole. In other words, we accelerate on an individual level because our context invites us to do so, it pushes us to acceleration.” There is a “speeding up” or acceleration across three broad areas: technological, social change and the pace of life. “Together with a growing sense of competition, are intertwined, generating a cycle of acceleration that’s difficult to stop and with serious consequences not only for the individuals themselves and their families, but also for the organizations themselves.” See also Rosa and Scheuerman, High Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity, Penn State University Press.

Related theories of Accelerating Change, those postulated by Burnham, Fuller, Ulam, Moravec, Burke, Hawkins, Vinge, and Kurzweil have all spoken of the accelerated rate of technological change across multiple systems within evolution, with change occurring exponentially, leading towards a technological singularity.

Another term for this is the Great Acceleration in the Anthropocene epoch. It “is the dramatic, continuous and roughly simultaneous surge across a large range of measures of human activity, and are specifically those of humanity’s impact on Earth’s geology and its ecosystems.” This would be another of the hyperobject challenges that must be addressed this century.

Of course, some like Thomas Friedman have put positive spins on this acceleration as recently as 2016, and it appears that in the short space of time since he wrote this, the acceleration itself has called into question the optimism of his claims. Nate Hagens has postulated that this Great Acceleration is leading toward a Great Simplification. The Post Carbon Institute refers to this as the Great Unraveling.

Another current, significant, and rapidly expanding hyperobject that needs to be addressed is the wave of Artificial Intelligence technologies, using powerful Large Language Models. Danielle Allen, Political Theorist at Harvard University, discusses how they are approaching or have already arrived at “Artificial General Intelligence.” She is among the thousands who have signed an Open Letter requesting a pause in Giant AI experiments. These thousands also include Stuart Russell, a professor of Computer Science at Berkley. He spoke recently at the Commonwealth Club about these issues and challenges.

This poses extreme challenges to Democracies and Autocracies in a wide range of human activities. These algorithms are demonstrating emergent properties that can not be explained by the experts that designed these algorithms.

There is a 70-minute presentation from 3/9/2023 by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the Center for Humane Technology titled: The A.I. Dilemma, that is required viewing.

The key take away from the presentation:

1- A New Technology demands a New Class of Responsibilities.

2- If the new technology conveys power, it starts a race.

3- If the control of the race (like Nuclear Weapons proliferation) is not coordinated and regulated, the result is tragedy.

How governments choose to regulate it, if at all, is a key issue. Future historians will be the judges writing the narrative of the decisions being made now addressing this new technology and this period in the history of acceleration. The good news is that A.I. does offer potential benefits, including in teaching, offering 1:1 tutors. The Kahn Academy, a leading NGO offering educational content on-line, has partnered with Open A.I. and could, for instance, allow a student of history to talk/chat with a simulator for historical characters and ask questions or debate a historical event. Kahnmigo, their personalized teaching assistant, will tailor its assistance based on the totality of its interactions with a particular student.

The History profession’s ability to keep up with the acceleration of change will require that it adapt to these changes while also assessing the role and reality of current geopolitics, and its effect on history. When historian Henry Adams was writing about Thomas Jefferson, he noted “Time and Distance, mountains and rivers meant something entirely different to Thomas Jefferson from what they meant to Abraham Lincoln.”

They also mean something completely different to every country in the world today. With the Great Acceleration and the Great Simplification underway simultaneously, Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan points out that after the dissolution of the Global Economic System that was developed at the beginning of the American Century, these things, along with Geography, Climate, Energy, local Food production, and Demographics will all play a major role in the 21st century in determining who will be history’s winners and losers.

Future historians will need to sort this all out, assuming there are humans around to consume their histories or perhaps there will be no need for that, Generative AI will do it for us and explain it to our human heirs or perhaps the remaining robots or humanoids.

GPT4 on the Importance of Learning History

I have spent 2–3 weeks writing this essay. I submitted the following question to OpenAI’s GPT4 — “Write a short essay about the importance of learning and teaching history, explaining what history is.”

GPT4’s response, provided in less than two seconds:

“History is the study of past events, societies, and civilizations that have shaped our present and will continue to influence our future. It is a vital subject that allows us to understand the world around us, to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors, and to appreciate the achievements of those who have come before us. Therefore, learning and teaching history is essential for our personal, social, and cultural growth.

Firstly, studying history helps us understand the origins and causes of current events and issues. By learning about the past, we gain a deeper understanding of the social, political, and economic systems that shape our world today. For instance, studying the causes of World War II can help us understand the current political tensions and conflicts around the world.

Secondly, history provides us with a perspective on human behavior and society. It allows us to analyze patterns and trends in human behavior, cultures, and societies. By studying history, we can learn about the successes and failures of human civilizations, which can help us make better decisions in our own lives and in society as a whole.

Moreover, learning and teaching history promotes critical thinking and analytical skills. Through the study of history, we learn to evaluate and interpret primary sources, to analyze evidence and draw conclusions, and to identify and challenge biases and prejudices. These skills are essential for academic success, but also for making informed decisions in our personal and professional lives.

In conclusion, learning and teaching history is vital for our personal, social, and cultural growth. It allows us to understand the world around us, to learn from past mistakes, and to appreciate the achievements of those who have come before us. By studying history, we can gain a deeper understanding of current events, develop critical thinking skills, and become more engaged and informed citizens of the world.”

Conclusion

I am going to quote from, and slightly revise the conclusion of the Hoover report referenced earlier in this essay (Hoover is in italics).

“We live in a time when we seem to engage in every possible approach to history except to learn from it. We seek to erase it, cover it over, topple it down, rewrite it, apologize for it, skip it — but not to put it out there to learn from it. The evidence suggests students and citizens are doing very little learning of history as it is but, with all the bad, good, creative, and entertaining ways we are presenting history or could present it, along with the lack of formal training for analyzing history, we should not be surprised. It is time we return to an understanding that history and civics are essential underpinnings for good citizenship, and that teaching them and continuing as a lifelong learner includes, most assuredly, the basics but also interpretation and contextual understanding and an appreciation of one’s country and a willingness to be prepared to serve it.”

This call to serve can come from many places. Learning history can inspire others to serve those in the present. Inspired by his friend and mentor President Thomas Jefferson, who enlisted him in a great historic endeavor for the USA, on 8/18/1805, his 31st birthday, in his diary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Meriwether Lewis wrote “This day… I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly (sic) feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. I resolved in future… to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”

Teaching, studying, and learning from history can enable all of us to be better human beings and better citizens, in service to others, creating a more just and equitable society for all. If you have not done so lately, thank your history teacher. The US Department of Education developed this site, Teaching History, to assist K-12 history teachers.

If you have read this far, reading past the short historical video by Bill Kurtz linked in the introduction, then I will close with another similar video, done as a high school history project, inspired by and done in the style of Bill Kurtz, by krispykarim, the history of the united states, i guess.