I think
that history is often taught the wrong way. Kids learn history as unconnected
chunks of stuff they have to memorize, as boring lists of names and dates - as
stuff that happened once upon a time a long time ago.
I
recently read "The Last of the Doughboys" by Richard Rubins. The book
is a history of the American involvement in WWI told through interviews with
American veterans of the war. The author conducted the interviews in the early
2000s. One interview I found particularly interesting was done in 2003 with a
man who was then 110 years old. He talked a bit about his experiences as a
combat engineer in 1918, repairing railroads for the Allies and blowing up
German bridges. He also talked about his parents, who had been born slaves in
the antebellum south and had been married, as free people, just after the Civil
War ended.
My
personal connection to history only goes back as far as the 1920s, to the
depression in Germany after WWI. My grandfather often told the story of how he
got a million marks for his birthday,
and that was just enough money to buy a candy bar in the store around the
corner. Yet in 2003, while I was in college, there was a man in this country
who could remember his parents stories, the experiences of people who were
adults when Lincoln was elected. I've been to a few Civil War battlefields. I've
read the markers and looked at the memorials and cannon and tried to imagine
what it was like to have been on those fields when those guns were firing. As
recently as 2003, there was someone who could remember his parents telling him
what it was like to wait for news of those battles.
That's
what history is - and how it should be taught. History is memories; the stories
told by our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Anyone who could
have talked to this man about his life would have listened to his stories. When
people get together, that's what we do. We trade stories about our lives, about
our personal histories. The older the stories and the more different than our
own, the more interesting they are. People who found it boring to memorize who
Lincoln and Davis were, to remember names and dates like Fort Sumter, 1861 and
Appomattox Court House, 1865 would have found it easy and interesting to listen
to this man talk about his parents.
As a
rule, the best histories are the ones that, like novels, focus on the
experiences of a handful of main characters and tell the story of the events through
their experiences. When history is, "This happened at this place to these
people on this date, and then this happened to these people on this date, and
then…" it's artificial and boring. When history is used as a tool for
moralizing, such as the apocryphal story
about Washington and the cherry tree, it becomes a fairy tale: something that
happened once upon a time a long time ago to story characters who aren't like
us or anyone we know. When history is the stories people tell about themselves,
their family and their friends it's real things that happened to real people,
anecdotes that we would happily spend an afternoon trading with friends.
