In a post from Sunday, I’m Very Disappointed in You abc123 used a term I’ve not heard or maybe not noticed before, “Honest History.”
It is a term that I am going to add to my standard vocabulary. Phrases such as “inferior courts,” “Second Amendment protected,” and “criminal illegal alien.” All of these terms, in my opinion, create a truer representation of the situation than some word games being played by the media.
What is “honest history?” It is a statement of what happened to the best of our knowledge. There is nothing left out, nothing hidden, and no lies.
Was there slavery in the United States? Honest history requires us to say “yes.” We need to go on to report that it was horrific, immoral, and evil.
Honest history then requires us to fill out that picture. That not all white men were slave owners. That some slave owners were black. That the primarily white northerners spilled wealth and blood to free the slaves.
There were northern states that did not repeal their slavery laws until after the 13th Amendment was ratified.
Or how about the honest history of the trade triangle? Yankee ships left Boston with holds full of rum. They sailed to Africa, where the rum was traded for slaves. Slaves captured by blacks. The slaves were then transported to Caribbean islands, where they were traded for molasses. That molasses was transported to Boston to be turned into rum.
At every stop, the traders made a profit. Triangle trade routes are more profitable than bidirectional trade routes.
Honest history includes telling the history of women and underlings that contributed to great inventions. There is evidence, I don’t know how strong, that the cotton gin was created by Eli Whitney’s wife.
Today, there are too many people who can’t give us honest history. Compare the pure drivel of Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States. His telling of history is dishonest. It is told to hide the truth. There are more books debunking his drivel than Zinn wrote.
The 1619 Project is another example of dishonest history. Are parts of those histories true and correct? Likely. Do people come away from reading those books with an honest understanding and view of history? Unlikely.
I enjoy studying history. There is something I learned over time: different viewpoints make for different stories.
When I read stories about Vietnam, the story was often told from the viewpoint of a single soldier. I remember one book where a recon team was marching through the jungle. One of the soldiers had to switch to his glasses because his contacts were bothering him too much. Another had a bad case of diarrhea. This caused him to cut the bottom out of his pants so he could just squat over the side of the trail and let it all come out.
These were personal stories. They may or may not have been entirely fictional, but they allowed me to hike through jungles in my mind’s eye. They felt honest.
But there are other books that big picture. Oh my goodness, Winston Churchill’s The Second World War is a godawful read. Not because he was a poor author, but because his story is at such a high level you need notes and maps to follow along.
It is full of dates, names, and places. The names are generals and political leaders. The places could be as big as a country or as small as a town. Troop movements were often expressed in terms of corps being moved. I think the smallest unit I remember was a division.
Unless you know the geography much better than I do, it requires a map to follow.
Churchill’s histories are honest with an honest statement of his point of view.
Today, we are much more likely to be told what to feel and think rather than an honest history.
Who? What? Where? When? Why? are the questions that should be asked and answered.
These questions might never be answered in a “news” story. But you will walk away knowing who you should hate. Who is the villain. Who is the victim.
Take the time to read any headline, and you can spot the biases and likely lies without even reading the rest of the story.
I’m curious about your opinion regarding this “honest history” moment: https://www.kqed.org/news/12049405/muir-woods-national-monument-exhibit-removal-trump-executive-order-national-parks-history-under-construction-sticky-notes
Re: “criminal illegal alien.”
A person can not be illegal; only their actions can be illegal/unlawful.
They are simply “criminal aliens” because they have illegally entered the USA, breaking U.S. immigration laws.
Zinn’s book is fiction.
As such, it is an interesting thought experiment. Tell the history from the perspective of the conquered, not the conquerors. The view of events varies based on where you stand on the outcome. But, fiction it is, nonetheless.
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Unfortunately, too many people think it is reality. They look at Zinn’s novel and declare it is a true retelling of history. And, that is the problem. No one really thinks there was a guy named Jack Dawson on the Titanic, no one really thinks General Maximus fought the Emperor in the Colosseum, but they think Zinn’s novel is real.
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Honest history is a good response to that mindset. I will add that to my vocabulary as well.
Excellent points, all around.
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Who? What? Where? When? Why? are the questions that should be asked and answered.
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And sometimes “How?”, if known and/or important. But this is a key concept in how history is recorded and read by future generations.
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Churchill’s The Second World War is a whole lot of Who, What, When, and Where, but seems very short on Why and How. IMO, it’s the Why and How that make history interesting, so Churchill’s book is very dry.
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The problem is that the Why (and to a lesser extent, the How) can be easily misinterpreted or falsified. This is one thing “dishonest history” excels at. It would be hard to say that — for example — the southern States seceded from the Union starting in 1850, not 1860-1861; the historical record is pretty conclusive on the Who, What, When, Where, and How.
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But the Why, though. The Left says racism and slavery. The Right says increased federalism, a power grab by the federal government at the expense of state sovereignty. The reasoning you choose to examine GREATLY changes the context, meaning, and significance of the entire conflict. And the reality is that racism and slavery were part of it, and encroaching federalism was part of it (probably a bigger part) — and so are a thousand other things that get overlooked because of those two.
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Those are high-level reasons, but they don’t give the full picture, either. This is where lower-level and personal stories can help. Why (and How) did Kentucky try to stay neutral while Tennessee and Virginia aligned with the South? Why did So-and-so and his four brothers enlist in the Union army? Why did Such-and-such fight for the Confederacy (it was probably NOT to perpetuate racism or slavery at a systemic level)? On a VERY personal level, why did one man join the South when he knew his first cousin — or brother, or uncle — had joined the North (again, probably not because of slavery for either of them)? These stories and Whys do much to enrich our understanding of the context surrounding the rote “names and dates” version of history.
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And I think “honest history” should examine some of those in-depth, too. It’s said that those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, but just learning that two nations went to war on this date and ended it on that date won’t do anything to prevent the next war. We need to understand the Whys and Hows, too — the real Whys and Hows, not the dumbed-down, over-simplified versions that folks of all political bents push.