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How Will History Remember America in 1500 Years?
Surprises from thinking about today like ancient history
The teaching of history focuses on the highlights and ignores large swaths of time and numerous events in between. Our understanding, then, tends to compress decades, even centuries, of gradual changes driven by numerous actors into a handful of transformative events caused by a few impactful leaders. We lose a lot of perspective.
But we also gain perspective because we see connections and continuities that eluded the people closer to the events.
To ancient Romans, a Gothic army defeating and killing their Emperor in 378 A.D. must have seemed unrelated to the Visigoth’s sack of Rome in 410 A.D., which surely felt distinct from the defeat of Attila the Hun in 451 A.D. Yet we look back on centuries of barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire as a cohesive narrative of Rome’s inevitable demise.
Which events, people, and movements in American history will be important enough to teach and learn millennia from now? What will historians leave out? What connections will they identify between events separated by generations? How might future historians flatten our time period into a cohesive narrative?
