History is about dead people. Archeology is about dead people. So is art history. Even literature is mainly about dead people, unless you somehow confine your attention to living writers.
I've been interested in literature for a long time and studied it in college. If you're into some of the really old literature, I think you almost inevitably find yourself concerned with the history of the period as well, and in fact I did. And within the last few years I've acknowledged to myself an interest in archeology.
So, I'm interested in lots of old stuff, even antiques. And I find it disturbing to consider that a lot of people have no interest in the past. I'm sure that the course of study that a lot of people follow in post-secondary schools includes little or no study of the fields that have to do with old stuff or with dead people.
It's disturbing to me and I think it's unfortunate; but I understand it pretty well, I think. There is money to be made, livelihoods to be earned, if you study really new stuff, such as the newest computer hardware and software. By contrast, I might know a lot about Old English poetry, but who values that knowledge and will pay me for knowing it? Where can I put that knowledge to any use, let alone to profit?
So maybe the people who want to learn about some of these areas are not practical-minded, don't care enough about whether they're going to be equipped to make a living. And it's really only sensible to worry about having a field that will produce an income.
Wanting to study IT rather than history is not a new phenomenon. In the protest days of the 1960s and 1970s, students and others were not just protesting a war. Demonstrations on college campuses were protesting that college curricula were not "relevant." And curricula changed. A mark of so-called academic liberalism is that students might study Puerto Rican poets rather than Shakespeare. And while these poets may not be "classic" like Shakespeare, and maybe not as good as Shakespeare, they have the merit of being living. Let's study and worry about our world, and not dig up dusty old books where the language is funny and hard to understand.
The debate over what, if anything, the past has to teach us is ongoing and endless. I for one don't feel that the past has to prove its relevance. Some human concerns are timeless and unchanging. Twenty-first-century people—no matter how much our world seems to have changed in some respects—are not freed from the same life events, emotions, worries that have been aspects of the human condition for thousands of years.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Do We Need to Teach Gay and Lesbian History?
One of our radio stations, which I don't usually listen to, just had a commentator talking—negatively—about a bill in California to introduce the teaching of gay and lesbian history in that state's schools.
There was a phone number for listeners to call with comments. I didn't phone, for a variety of reasons, including my lack of confidence in my ability to organize my thoughts in anything like a persuasive manner while speaking. That plus—this needs to be mentioned--the fact that I stutter.
One of this guy's points was that history largely includes bad guys, like Hitler. So he said, "Okay, if you want to find a gay marauder to include. . . ."
But I thought he missed the point. History and other courses in our schools have been tilted and slanted to favor sort of a majority, history-gets-written-by-the-victors point of view: male, white, Euro-centric, and of course heterosexual. As just one example: We might learn about Jane Addams and Clara Barton. But there were lots of very fine woman painters. How many can you name? Possibly, at most, these three who are very well known: Georgia O'Keefe, Frieda Kahlo, and Mary Cassatt. And it's not a coincidence that two of those are pretty modern; earlier ones never got much attention.
In the last few decades women and African-Americans have become vocal in pointing out how their contributions have often been overlooked or downplayed. It's a similar story with the contributions of countries and civilizations outside of those which, for several hundred years, have conventionally been thought to be in the path of the transmission of civilization from East to West. In other words, it's been Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece, Rome, Europe, and the U.S.
As just one little example of how wrong this is: It's been found that bronze smelting and casting was done very early in Vietnam. Is Vietnam and its contributions to world civilization included in our history?
Now, as to gay and lesbian people: In many fields there have been contributions by people who were gay or lesbian. Leonardo, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and so many more. Their sexual orientation has usually been very deliberately omitted from discussion when these people are discussed in our schools. Forster was not free to publish a homoerotic novel he'd written. Whitman was forced to change the pronouns in his poetry, changing them from talking about love of males to females. When history is thus "cleaned up" or sanitized for consumption by our students, not only is an injustice done but we find ourselves in the business of dispensing half-truths which are masquerading as truths.
So it's just a case of how far we feel we need to go to redress the balance. In a way it's the same issue as with affirmative action: Do minorities who have been overlooked, suppressed, discriminated against, now need special emphasis or consideration? They would not, if they had been getting a fair shake all along. And, your answer to that question might just reveal what your prejudices are.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
There was a phone number for listeners to call with comments. I didn't phone, for a variety of reasons, including my lack of confidence in my ability to organize my thoughts in anything like a persuasive manner while speaking. That plus—this needs to be mentioned--the fact that I stutter.
One of this guy's points was that history largely includes bad guys, like Hitler. So he said, "Okay, if you want to find a gay marauder to include. . . ."
But I thought he missed the point. History and other courses in our schools have been tilted and slanted to favor sort of a majority, history-gets-written-by-the-victors point of view: male, white, Euro-centric, and of course heterosexual. As just one example: We might learn about Jane Addams and Clara Barton. But there were lots of very fine woman painters. How many can you name? Possibly, at most, these three who are very well known: Georgia O'Keefe, Frieda Kahlo, and Mary Cassatt. And it's not a coincidence that two of those are pretty modern; earlier ones never got much attention.
In the last few decades women and African-Americans have become vocal in pointing out how their contributions have often been overlooked or downplayed. It's a similar story with the contributions of countries and civilizations outside of those which, for several hundred years, have conventionally been thought to be in the path of the transmission of civilization from East to West. In other words, it's been Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece, Rome, Europe, and the U.S.
As just one little example of how wrong this is: It's been found that bronze smelting and casting was done very early in Vietnam. Is Vietnam and its contributions to world civilization included in our history?
Now, as to gay and lesbian people: In many fields there have been contributions by people who were gay or lesbian. Leonardo, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and so many more. Their sexual orientation has usually been very deliberately omitted from discussion when these people are discussed in our schools. Forster was not free to publish a homoerotic novel he'd written. Whitman was forced to change the pronouns in his poetry, changing them from talking about love of males to females. When history is thus "cleaned up" or sanitized for consumption by our students, not only is an injustice done but we find ourselves in the business of dispensing half-truths which are masquerading as truths.
So it's just a case of how far we feel we need to go to redress the balance. In a way it's the same issue as with affirmative action: Do minorities who have been overlooked, suppressed, discriminated against, now need special emphasis or consideration? They would not, if they had been getting a fair shake all along. And, your answer to that question might just reveal what your prejudices are.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
What Happened to Ancient Civilizations?
I'm quite interested in ancient history and archeology; and I continually come across names of peoples, kingdoms, empires, civilizations that are "lost"—that is, they disappeared, and many of the names of these cultures are not even widely known today.
What happened to these peoples? Well, in one case it's pretty well known what happened. Take the Celtic people known as Britons, who inhabited England before England was invaded by the Angles and Saxons (German peoples) around 450 A.D.
These Britons were driven west, into what is now Wales and Cornwall; and also many of them fled across the English Channel to Brittany (now you know how Brittany got its name).
Also, undoubtedly, many stayed where they were and lost their cultural (and linguistic) identity by being absorbed through intermarriage or acculturation. This might be somewhat similar to what happened to native peoples in the U.S. and some other countries, except that the process had a longer time to operate so it could have been accomplished more thoroughly.
Sadly, a very common scenario is conquest where many people are killed. In the case of many kingdoms and empires of the past, it's clear that the capital city fell in war. Surviving remains show evidence of siege and burning. For example, Alexander the Great (4th century BC) wanted to avenge the Persians' conquest of Greece. So when he, in his eastward march of conquest, came to the Persian capital of Persepolis, he was quite merciless in his destruction. Pretty much any conquest involved destruction: sacking, looting, burning. Many great cities were pretty much reduced to piles of rubble.
So what became of the people? Again, many doubtless were killed: by the sword, or they perished in the widespread conflagration of their city. As one example: Genghis Khan was renowned for his ruthlessness, and when he conquered a kingdom in what is now Afghanistan, he slaughtered nearly every last inhabitant.
Consider those who might have survived: What would you do if your house was burnt along with all your possessions? You'd pick up your family and try to escape and flee to some place that you considered safe, or that you knew about (and had an idea in what direction it lay) or where you might have had friends or relatives.
Of course the people who fled war and found refuge somewhere else would have been immigrants in their new home and would have eventually been absorbed, learning the new language and customs and so losing their original cultural identity.
The last scenario for the fall of an empire or kingdom might be called internal collapse. Two examples are the Hittites and the Maya. In these instances, the people did not necessarily or literally simply disappear off the face of the Earth.
The Hittites had a great kingdom in Anatolia (roughly modern Turkey) up to around 1100 B.C. Why their empire fell has only recently come to be understood, and it looks like it's pretty much a matter of internal strife, more or less civil war. In this case we know that the Hittite Empire was succeeded by smaller "Neo-Hittite" kingdoms. In other words, the people were still there, and they tried to pull things together after the great tragedy of the fall of their empire and get an organized society going again.
The Maya, who had a complex civilization in Mexico and Central America, are another case to look at. They (like a great many peoples) built "city-states." Some of these were rivals so again there was war and conquest. But even before the Spanish arrived to do their conquest thing, some of the great Maya city states apparently simply collapsed, their great ceremonial cities abandoned. Exactly what happened is not completely clear (one idea is that the people just sort of kicked out their kings). But the people, the race and language, are very much still alive.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
What happened to these peoples? Well, in one case it's pretty well known what happened. Take the Celtic people known as Britons, who inhabited England before England was invaded by the Angles and Saxons (German peoples) around 450 A.D.
These Britons were driven west, into what is now Wales and Cornwall; and also many of them fled across the English Channel to Brittany (now you know how Brittany got its name).
Also, undoubtedly, many stayed where they were and lost their cultural (and linguistic) identity by being absorbed through intermarriage or acculturation. This might be somewhat similar to what happened to native peoples in the U.S. and some other countries, except that the process had a longer time to operate so it could have been accomplished more thoroughly.
Sadly, a very common scenario is conquest where many people are killed. In the case of many kingdoms and empires of the past, it's clear that the capital city fell in war. Surviving remains show evidence of siege and burning. For example, Alexander the Great (4th century BC) wanted to avenge the Persians' conquest of Greece. So when he, in his eastward march of conquest, came to the Persian capital of Persepolis, he was quite merciless in his destruction. Pretty much any conquest involved destruction: sacking, looting, burning. Many great cities were pretty much reduced to piles of rubble.
So what became of the people? Again, many doubtless were killed: by the sword, or they perished in the widespread conflagration of their city. As one example: Genghis Khan was renowned for his ruthlessness, and when he conquered a kingdom in what is now Afghanistan, he slaughtered nearly every last inhabitant.
Consider those who might have survived: What would you do if your house was burnt along with all your possessions? You'd pick up your family and try to escape and flee to some place that you considered safe, or that you knew about (and had an idea in what direction it lay) or where you might have had friends or relatives.
Of course the people who fled war and found refuge somewhere else would have been immigrants in their new home and would have eventually been absorbed, learning the new language and customs and so losing their original cultural identity.
The last scenario for the fall of an empire or kingdom might be called internal collapse. Two examples are the Hittites and the Maya. In these instances, the people did not necessarily or literally simply disappear off the face of the Earth.
The Hittites had a great kingdom in Anatolia (roughly modern Turkey) up to around 1100 B.C. Why their empire fell has only recently come to be understood, and it looks like it's pretty much a matter of internal strife, more or less civil war. In this case we know that the Hittite Empire was succeeded by smaller "Neo-Hittite" kingdoms. In other words, the people were still there, and they tried to pull things together after the great tragedy of the fall of their empire and get an organized society going again.
The Maya, who had a complex civilization in Mexico and Central America, are another case to look at. They (like a great many peoples) built "city-states." Some of these were rivals so again there was war and conquest. But even before the Spanish arrived to do their conquest thing, some of the great Maya city states apparently simply collapsed, their great ceremonial cities abandoned. Exactly what happened is not completely clear (one idea is that the people just sort of kicked out their kings). But the people, the race and language, are very much still alive.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
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