History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but it can rhyme
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about how historians construct narratives about the past. One reason is that I was preparing to teach this class. My thinking on the topic deepened with the global Coronavirus pandemic.
We’re currently living through a pivotal moment in our history. The paths of our individual lives, our families’ daily activities, our connections with our local communities, have been upended.
As was the case for most of us in New Mexico and the United States more broadly, the pandemic became real for me and my family in mid-March. Within a couple of days in-person meetings at CNM had been canceled, my kids transitioned to online learning, everyone tried to figure out how to navigate the new reality of staying at home to slow the spread of the virus and flatten the curve.
We were extremely lucky because my job was already mostly online (I was teaching exclusively online in the spring term). My wife was able to transition her Art and PE classes to a video format. The kids were able to get on Zoom to finish out the school year. Reliable internet, computers and iPads, and printers were things that we already could count on.
For so many others in our Albuquerque community, though, that was not the case. Those considered “essential” continued in their jobs as cashiers, servers, and other types of service work. Many people lost jobs and others never had regular access to the internet and other types of technology. Not all jobs translate to online modes.
A couple of weeks into the new work-from-home reality, I created a video that tells the story of what happened in New Mexico during the pandemic of 1918. As with all of my videos, the production quality isn’t great and it’s just me telling a history of the past pandemic in the context of our current situation. You can view it here, if you’re interested.
As I researched the 1918 pandemic and created that video, I reflected on the reasons that I study history — why I’ve made teaching and learning about history my career. There are a lot of reasons that history is important to who we are today, but, for me, studying different groups of people from the past has helped me develop empathy for cultures, perspectives, ideas, activities, and worldviews that I otherwise wouldn’t have understood. Engagement with our history empowers us to understand others on their own terms, if we’ll allow ourselves to approach the historical record with an open mind.
Compassion and empathy are all-too-often missing from our responses to the major difficulties that we’re facing in our local communities, as a nation, and as a global community. To wear a mask in public is to demonstrate that we care about the health of those around us. To advocate for social and racial justice is to recognize that our past decisions and actions as local and national communities have created unjust and harmful realities for black people and other racial “minority” groups.
The past and the present are always in constant conversation.
Now, to shift to a “meta” perspective. I sat down this morning and wrote what came to me as I thought about this past summer. Unconsciously, several different things influenced what I included and excluded from my narrative: the format of writing on a public forum for our class, what ideas and memories came into my mind next, my personal worries, concerns, hopes, and dreams.
I left out many things and it’s crucial to identify and interrogate the silences in our histories along with what is said out loud. I didn’t, for example, discuss the reality that my kids were constantly on their iPads as my wife and I worked at home this summer. Or, the ways our family dynamics were interrupted and changed because we weren’t able to spend some time together every day at the public pool as we usually do each summer. I didn’t specifically comment on the intensification of Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder or the rise of right-wing militia activities and violence.
Those things concern me deeply. With the time constraint that I gave myself for this project and the direction that my mind went once I started putting words on the page, though, I left them out of my narrative. I alluded to the privilege my family enjoys due to our white, middle-class status and the ways that has benefitted us during the pandemic but I didn’t specifically use the word “privilege.”
The words that I write today, whether here on Medium, or on Twitter, or other social media, the videos that I created and posted this summer, the stories I tell my children all form part of what historians often call “the historical record.” Essentially, the historical record is the entire collection of archived materials that provide some sort of insight into a certain moment in time. The historical record is the accumulation of all of the known, accessible primary sources on a particular historical subject.
Because the historical record consists of the musings, reports, creations, etc of imperfect human beings with our own worldviews, biases, and axes to grind, it is necessarily imperfect. Yet, for historical study “the historical record” equals “historical evidence.” Historical narratives are based on the accumulation of imperfect perspectives on past moments.
I imagine historians in twenty or thirty years trying to make sense out of the crises, changes, and developments of 2020. If they come across my post, or across our class Medium publication, what type of a picture of 2020 will they find? What questions would they be able to answer? What silences will they be met with?
As we continue our study together this term, we’ll be the historians looking back at other timeframes, other cultural, religious, or political contexts. Thinking about the ways that we hope future historians might understand the records (not only written) that we’re currently generating should help us to find humility as we study the records of those who came before us. Apply the golden rule, build empathy.
That’s my hope.
