Many Americans today are skeptical as to the necessity of History in educational curriculum. They also wonder about its everyday application. The biggest argument I can give is this:
In order to know where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve been.
The reason we speak, write, communicate, dress, indeed function the way we do is a direct result of the decisions made by our ancestors, who made their decisions based on the decisions of their ancestors. A common theory that has sprouted out of this view of a world changed by decisions made, wars fought, and nations created is that of the Multiverse.
The simplest way to describe the multiverse is to look at a fork in the road. Or in the words of Robert Frost, “I took the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference.” Every decision a human makes can be characterized by a fork in the road under this theory. If you’re making a sandwich and can’t decide whether or not to put mayo on it, you have two choices: Take the road where you do put mayo on it, or take the road where you do not.
Each of these roads will have forks in them, and those forks will have forks, until you have an infinity of forks in the road. Ergo, the Multiverse theory stipulates that there are an infinite number of universes, all created and changed by the forks taken in their path.
Obviously that’s a very generalized and dumbed-down version of the very complex Multiverse theory. You’re probably wondering what does this have to do with history though?
I’m trying to emphasize that where we are today all depends on the forks in the road that our ancestors chose to take. And our descendants will be affected by the forks we choose. Which is why History and the Past are very important.
There’s a very distinct reason why I separate those two. There is a distinction between them, one that is important. I will attempt to explain both using my fork in the road analogy.
The past can be very simply defined as every event that has ever happened before the current time. In other words, it is the fork that has been chosen. Events of the past have all affected our arrival at the present.
History, however, is our perception of the past. It is us explaining why our ancestors made the choices they did. Perception of the past changes daily it seems, and from text to text. Prior to 1900, Western textbooks labeled Native Americans as savages, and a huge emphasis was placed on the superiority of the white race. This perception of the past even trickled in the South until as late as the 1970s.
Perceptions can also be misleading, as they are directly influenced by the beholders beliefs, customs, and society. An often overlooked, but major, example of perception’s role in changing events and world history as a whole can be found in the history of European colonisation of Africa.
By the early 19th Century the world’s continents had been well mapped out by Western powers, the exceptions being northwestern North America, and the entirety of Africa. African tribes lived along the coastline, trading with Western Merchants. But no European was allowed inland. This led to a Western theory that most of Africa was barren, and empty of Peoples. Thus it was Europe’s responsibility to go into this “Empty Land” and bring forth the fruits of its soil.
There were small Portuguese settlements along the bulge of Africa, and Britain had made an inroad in South Africa. As the British expanded north they encountered natives, but shrugged them off as little more than savages. The Empty Land Theory, which conveniently meant that no civilization (other than the Egyptians, who were not considered African) had existed on the African continent.
The theory had a major hole poked into it with the discovery in modern-day Zimbabwe of the ruins of a major city. Through the lens of their Eurocentric views, the British explained it away as an old white settlement that had been abandoned centuries before. Modern archaeologists today have confirmed it instead to be an ancient African society.
The perception we have of the Past is our lens through which we see. Modern America has slowly had an effect on the lens, and we do see world history from a less Eurocentric light. Unfortunately, it’s being subtly replace by an Americentric viewpoint. More on that later.