History of America, the part you don't usually hear about.

[seishonagon]

I apologize to those of you on my f-list who will see this post linked repeatedly, but there's a reason for it.

My friend rushthatspeaks has made an awesome post about the history of the First Nations, and the ways in which American history has been rewritten

Comments

[skaly2]

Not something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. But I can think of recent incidents where our historical amnesia has caused us problems, such as our reenacting the banking/housing problem that Japan experienced in the 1990s. Was there really a need to repeat their mistakes?

Too much of our culture is wrapped up in the problems of the present and in speculating the problems of the future. No one ever looks back. No one ever looks outward, save for where threats may come from. I was never particularly interested in history, and yet I've figured this out. Yes, it's all true: History is important. It's our memory. Our fingerprint. We need it so that we may know who we are.

Out of curiosity, Sei, what was the defining moment for you? The one that ignited your passion for history?

[seishonagon]

For me, it was actually realizing how awful our high school history textbooks were, when I was in 9th grade. I became furiously angry at the subject matter as it was taught in the high schools, and I still have a great degree of disdain for it, though it has certainly improved some in the last fifteen years.

I wanted to find out what was really going on. What really happened. The truth, or as close as I could get to it. Even at fourteen, I wasn't sufficiently naive as to think that I could actually get all of it.

At the same time, I read Machiavelli's The Prince, and realized the degree to which the same word can be used to mean utterly different things in different historical contexts, and I became fascinated with philosophy and its own history, and how that related to event history.

I still hated the subject in high school. When I got to college, I thought I was in heaven - here we were, studying history as a process of inquiry, rather than as a process of memorization and sequencing of events. And that was it.