London, England - "The South Sea Company did not trade in fish," says Alice Procter, as she shows visitors around Queen's House, a maritime museum in Greenwich, southeast London. "They traded in something far more valuable to the English monarchy - slaves."
The 23-year-old Australian art historian is behind the "Uncomfortable Art Tours", a series of museum visits in the capital exploring history with a twist.
She focuses on what she describes as racist narratives and an ideology that underpins the objects displayed in European exhibitions from the colonial period, which isn't always mentioned.
Everything we believe is a story.
That red in a traffic light means “stop” while green means “go.” The idea of Western scientific thinking as free of bias. That peanut butter and jelly is the perfect kid’s meal. The American dream. Everything.
Whether they’re good stories or bad stories isn’t the point. What matters is that they’re all things we’ve collectively decided or have been taught to us as being true, and we don’t usually question them.
We’ve all been shaped by the stories the world has given us from the day we were born. They’re wallpaper in the house of our minds. They subtly color how we think; they’re the lens we use to make sense of the world.
i know this is aiming at 17. and 18. and 19. century fashion, but i really wanna bring back those dresses that only basically start under the boobs, like that little number Minoan snake goddess figurine is wearing
warmsleepy
that was actually what i was thinking of! ive been obsessed with that figure since i was her in a history book as a kid lmao
the ultimate look!!! 2 titties out 2 snakes in hand
People want to be medievalists for a lot of different reasons. Some are drawn to the Middle Ages because it offers up a time of supposed ethnic purity, a lost ideal, a culture of sacred obedience, or an admirable ethos of warrior heroism.
Our outlook for medieval studies resists all this. We welcome the weirdos, the obsessives, the lovers of the minute, the constitutionally uncertain. We welcome those drawn to the Middle Ages because it calls to them as a time forgotten and disdained by the demand that we be “up to date” and only “of the present.”
Our medieval studies would not be possible without feminists, without queers, without posthumanists, without those who insist that the paired notions of a “white medieval Europe” and a “Christian Europe” are cruel anachronisms. Nor would it be possible without the joy of sharing our love in discoveries about, say, ascenders in late English script, or the trade in coconuts, or the transport of stories of holy greyhounds, in knowledge that maybe no one else values.
Our medieval studies is attentive, excited, empathic, at times sad, and above all careful, of itself and of its community.
has someone made a list of which subjects are banned/censored in which states? I can't imagine sending my child to school and finding this shit out. how do we find places where our children are educated about actual history? is this possible?
As far as I can tell, the only way to know this is to be very involved in your child’s education, or for that matter, your own. What you learn about history and how you learn it varies wildly not just by state, but by county and district, even between individual schools, and certainly by instructor/teacher/professor. Not only that, but the standards are changing literally all the time.
Conflicts about how to teach children American history began almost as early as the subject itself. This school year, the fury is over the new U.S. History Advanced Placement course—in particular, whether its perspective is overly cynical about the country’s past. The controversy raises significant questions about the role of revisionism in education: How should students learn about oppression and exploitation alongside the great achievements of their country? And who decides which events become part of the national narrative as more information comes to light?
Nowhere is the tension between revision and respect for historical figures and events more apparent than it is in classroom curricula. School boards and state legislatures have great influence over what and how children are taught—as do historians. However, the media and lawmakers often reduce revisionism to two poles: a liberal left that pursues an overly "negative" reinterpretation of U.S. history versus a conservative right that just wants students to memorize a list of names and facts—and "smudge out the ugly parts."
But biases have come from across the political spectrum and have worked their way into history instruction for every generation, Ward shows. In his research, Ward has compared U.S. textbooks from different eras and has found both biases of exclusion—whether an event is discussed in the first place—and biases of description, or how the event is portrayed to students.
Coverage of the feminist movement exemplifies how modern textbooks have evolved. In contrast to earlier decades, the story of women’s rights had by the 1990s expanded "exponentially," with debates around stereotyped occupations and gender roles being featured on television. At the same time, history, as Ambrose wrote, abounds with ironies and contradictions. The challenge is to teach high-school students the critical-thinking skills that allow them to recognize the biases in their textbooks and to appreciate the troubling paradoxes of America’s past.
And that’s the meat of the real problem. Too many people seem to want an easy answer about what “really happened”. The idea that there can be an unbiased source, a faultless font from which The Truth springs, is inherently flawed.
The problem is, from a pragmatic perspective, even if you ask two friends who were at the same event last weekend, you can get two completely different versions of “what happened”. That’s what history is, in the microcosm.
My general issue is that we need to take a more critical look at what constitutes the macrocosm. What’s the “zoomed out” version of accounts of events? Who exactly decides whether a given historical events was a good thing or a bad thing? How is it being presented to people learning about it? Who decides whether or not a given person, place or event is “important”? How is it relevant to people living today?
And this is also what I mean when I talk about how diversity of perspective is important when you’re trying to make decisions about what is and isn’t important or true about history (or, you know, anything). If there is to be a consensus on history, it needs to be a consensus reached among diverse people.
If history only serves to uplift and promote privileged perspectives while ignoring or erasing other narratives, it is a form of violence and injustice. Colonialism destroyed many peoples’ histories and replaced it or erased it. If you don’t work to correct it, then it’s a continuing injustice, and it nourishes further violence and injustice the longer it remains in place.
Because the dominant narrative in many schools, various media, popular culture and the popular consciousness is inundated with white supremacist and pro-colonial perspectives, I think it’s paramount to try and demonstrate the existence of a counternarrative. I’m centering the marginal in order to help people develop the critical thinking I believe is necessary to make informed and thoughtful decisions about what is or isn’t true, and what is important to themselves and their communities.
Digital technologies and social media only partially account for the willingness of museums to explore, at least tentatively, relaxing their control over historical authority. The current trend is in part a legacy of the New Social History of the 1960s and its interest in telling history “from the bottom up.”
Having worked for a generation to tell stories that de-center elites, museums are now de-centering elite storytellers, too. The anti-authoritarian bent may be as well a legacy of the so-called culture wars of the 1990s. The fierce backlash against revisionist historical interpretations in the Smithsonian’s The West As America and in the planned Enola Gay exhibition may have made museum administrators more than happy to hand off interpretive authority to outsiders.
Finally, we must consider the impact of changes in realms much broader than the museum world. The country’s growing ethnic diversity and its economic crises have pushed museum leaders to recognize that the field’s traditional business models need to be revamped. Instead of taking public support for granted, museums are desperate to prove their worth to their communities, a stance that makes them more receptive to outside partners, voices, and interpretations.
A few years ago, I taught a Year 2 class in East London. I had built up a good bank of multicultural picture-books and resources and shared these with the class whenever seemed appropriate. When it came time for the class to write their own stories, I suggested that they used the name of someone in their family for their protagonist. I wanted them to draw on their own backgrounds, but was worried about ‘making an issue of race’. When it came to sharing their stories, I noticed only one boy had acted upon my suggestion, naming his main character after his uncle. He had recently arrived from Nigeria and was eager to read his story to the class. However when he read out the protagonists name he was interrupted by another boy, who was born in Britain and identified as Congolese.
“You can’t do that! Stories have to be about White people.”
I’m confident the boy who announced this was being sincere and indeed, in the ensuing class discussion there was a fair bit of uncertainty about who could and couldn’t be in stories. I was surprised and confused by this. Why did they always write stories about children from very different backgrounds to themselves? And why were these characters always White? After all, I had shared a number of stories about children of colour with the class.
I just hadn’t realised what I was up against.
More than a century after its discovery in a ninth century woman’s grave, an engraved ring has revealed evidence of close contacts between Viking Age Scandinavians and the Islamic world.
An inscription on the glass inset reads either “for Allah” or “to Allah” in an ancient Arabic script, the researchers report February 23 in Scanning.
Scandinavians traded for fancy glass objects from Egypt and Mesopotamia as early as 3,400 years ago (SN: 1/24/15, p. 8). Thus, seagoing Scandinavians could have acquired glass items from Islamic traders in the same part of the world more than 2,000 years later rather than waiting for such desirable pieces to move north through trade networks.
Yeah this is incredibly cool but I love how whenever they find something like this everyone is always super surprised that ancient people like…interacted with each other.
This one is always especially funny to me because in one of my classes on the Vikings, I read a first hand account of some Muslim people encountering the Vikings and commenting on their lifestyle and habits and such.
And as long as the dominant sociocultural and educational narrative maintains that European cultures were created in complete (geographical/religious/racial) isolation in order to bolster white supremacy, findings that oppose this narrative will continue to be sensationalized.
thank you so much!! photos were EXACTLY what i was looking for, but didn't know the search terms to use to make them turn up, rather than opinion pieces and such. i hope i can learn how to find primary sources as well as others seem to!
It's really hard to phrase things outside of the way they're presented to us. When phrases like "veiling tradition" are the only way you HAVE to describe what you're looking for, when the only terms you have ever learned about it reflect imperialism, it traps you into a virtual world of misinformation.
That is how misinformation creates a tangible wall between someone who WANTS to learn, and the information they are desperately trying to find! And it shows just how important a counternarrative can be for effective research.
That is why I'm so effing committed to this project; so that a young writer can acquire the tools to find a gold mine like this one. If we keep relying on "trickle-down academia" to correct misinformation in popular culture, we're locking ourselves and others away from truths like the amazing visual history of women living in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire:
Thank you for helping to promote this, it’s so important!
I have to thank you as well, and everyone else who sits up and takes notice! I am, after all, only one person, and neither capable of nor qualified to make every change that needs to happen. But you all are. Even one transcriber who's actively engaged with the material at hand, one beta tester sending analytical feedback, can make a massive difference in how this information is presented to others.
I've spoken many times about how much the writing that accompanies museum displays can either challenge us to think about ourselves and these works in relation to society and history, or can carefully preserve prejudices, devaluation, and erasure by being passed through unquestioning minds and unengaged hands.
The last thing I want to see is the perpetuation of stereotypes, ignorance, and oppressive assumptions being passed on yet again to the digital age of museums and art history writing. We are in fact at a very important tipping point, and this is a time for active minds to get involved. As more museums digitize their collections and embrace open source, each and every one of us can help prevent being force fed the same old stereotypes about people of color, history, and art.
This actually reminds me of something that came up at the end of the Medievalpoc panel last WisCon…about dragons really “being white”. It couldn’t have been more of a total non sequitur, especially in that context, but it’s one…
Related: A few years back, a friend of mine was starting an Exalted (tabletop RPG) group with some other friends of ours. He commented that, of the five players he’d rounded up, four of them wanted to play characters from the East and one wanted to play a character from the West. He was down for this, except he couldn’t come up with a way to get the Western character to the Eastern lands aside from “the obvious way”.
"What’s the obvious way?" I wanted to know.
"Kidnapping for slavery," was his response.
I was quite taken aback by this. How was this reason “obvious”? I quickly offered what I thought was a much more obvious reason: Make the character’s family traders or merchants. My friend thought this was a good idea, and it promptly became that character’s backstory.
Still, the incident nagged at me, and I spent a few days after that trying to think of other (more) ‘obvious’ non-violent ways to get characters of different races into different areas. Here are some reasons I came up with for why people of various races might be in a place the average person might not expect:
* As mentioned above, maybe your character is a merchant, or a family member of a merchant. There are bound to be countless different races and cultures represented at the average port town especially.
* Education. Maybe there’s a town or city where your character is going or staying that has a university or other prestigious learning institution that would draw students from around the world.
* Money. People will go where there are jobs. It could be that people from Country X heard that Country Z is the land of opportunity; it could be that a town was ravaged by some natural disaster and its people displaced; it could be that your character just lost their job and burned all their bridges and now just wants to get as far away from their old life as possible. Sometimes a place that’s far away is the answer.
* Religion. Your character could be a pilgrim on a journey to visit a sacred site or relic, or to seek advice from a holy person, or trying to convert some non-believers.
* Diplomacy. Gotta keep those inter-country relations strong and healthy! Are they ambassadors from a foreign land? Or maybe there’s an arranged marriage going on between two different countries and the one traveling to the new land is bringing some companions along.
Also keep in mind that, while your character could be any of the above or visiting a foreign country for any of the above reasons, they also could be:
A) People who were doing one or more of the above things and then fell in love with the land they were visiting;
B) People who fell in love with someone who was visiting from a foreign land or who fell in love with someone they met in a foreign land;
C) Children of any of the above.
There are so many options to choose from, and you don’t even have to choose just one! This is hardly a complete list, either. As @medievalpoc said, there are infinite possibilities out there.
This leads to students given the impression that many different people of color somehow "showed up" just in time to be exploited by slavers and colonizers (think of how "First Contact" narratives are commonly the first mention on Native Americans in US History, or "Chinese Immigrants" show up in time to build railroads and then mysteriously disappear), and contribute to the misconception of a socially and racially isolated Europe in perpetuity.
Which of course leads to this phenomenon in popular media:
As if merely stating the location and the time is a total justification for ubiquitous whiteness in casting. If you were actually interested in historical accuracy, it might be noted:
By the eighteenth century the black population in England, particularly in London, had indeed become a community, with a concern for joint action and solidarity. When in 1773, for example, two black men were confined to Bridewell prison for begging, more than 300 black people not only visited them but provided for their economic and emotional support. In the later eighteenth century there were black pubs, churches and community meeting places, changing the picture of isolated individual domestic servants and roving beggars on London streets to that of a thriving and structured black community.
The problem here is that if the visual narrative shows a person of color, especially a Black individual, who is not being subjected to horrific violence, dehumanization, or is not literally a photograph of a dead body, it's seen as an "exception" or "anomaly". Note the tweet above that cites the use of lynching postcards, a terrifying example of how racist murders were not only common, but normalized.
I think that if these kinds of images are used as the only types of images from history students see of Black people, that is absolutely a form of racial aggression and even violence that has been embedded and institutionalized in American culture.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly."
If you are an educator, you hold a piece of that power.
It's important to tell the truth about oppression, violence, and genocide in history. But beware of making that the only stories that are seen and heard.
Part of the point of Medievalpoc is to try and create a visual and textual narrative in which people of color can also enjoy history as playground, as a point of pride, as somewhere they can see themselves, ourselves, as something other than subjugated.
How can we foster educational environments where these topics can be discussed without putting the onus on students of color? Without making students who may already be "the only" one in their learning environment feel even more singled out?
Given my own experience in educational and professional spaces, I try to be more sensitive to what it feels like being “the only [insert your category here]” in class and to be more mindful of how the particular composition of the classroom can inflect a discussion.
In one of my classes, we were discussing the Travels of John Mandeville and its description of “Ethiopians” and discourses of blackness and beauty. There happened be only one black student in class that day, and as we approached this topic many of the classmates’ glances began to drift, as if on cue, toward this person…perhaps in anticipation that this student would soon speak up, or otherwise just to gauge her reaction; in any case, it was an unconscious and unspoken shift in the class dynamic that “singled out” the student in a way that obviously made her uncomfortable.
This student avoided eye contact with me as this was happening (clearly she did not want to be called upon) and, picking up on this weird classroom dynamic, I redirected the conversation by inserting myself in the moment. I said something to the effect that “as a nonwhite person I find these Eurocentric racial discourses cause me great discomfort. We obviously have both white and nonwhite people in this room, so what are some ways we can all approach reading this passage today?”
I found that at this point all the students felt they had more of a “way into” the discussion and there was no longer this perception that only one “type” of person bore the burden of responding to this passage. It was one way to give us all permission to openly acknowledge the many different bodies in class and to engage in a shared discussion.
Although I touched base with this particular student later about things in office hours and we had a productive conversation about this and made sure she hadn't felt alienated, I don’t doubt that I could have done better—but I at least tried to “call out” a (subtle) shift in class behavior as it was happening and do something productive with it.
Hi, i don't know if this is too early for you, but is there any record of free black people in Roman times, specifically pre-empire? My father was saying that it was "very unlikely" for it to have been, but i think otherwise.
This is just another example of the overwhelmingly pervasive idea in our culture that no matter where or when you go in history, anyone who wasn’t Black and who SAW a Black person immediately thought, “Hey! Thisperson and everyone on earth who looks anything like them would make great slaves!” So…before we play remedial education, can we all take a moment to think about how horrible that is? That the idea of Black people=slaves is SO dominant that we project it into ancient history???
Okay, first of all, slavery in the Ancient Mediterranean was not the same as American chattel slavery. It was not race-based slavery. Your race had nothing to do with whether or not you were enslaved.
Basically, what you’re asking about (roughly) is the Hellenistic Era.
After Alexander the Great’s ventures in the Persian Empire, Hellenistic kingdoms were established throughout south-west Asia (Seleucid Empire, Kingdom of Pergamon) and north-east Africa (Ptolemaic Kingdom).
This resulted in the export of Greek culture and language to these new realms, and moreover Greek colonists themselves.
Equally, however, these new kingdoms were influenced by the indigenous cultures, adopting local practices where beneficial, necessary, or convenient. Hellenistic culture thus represents a fusion of the Ancient Greek world with that of the Near East, Middle East, and Southwest Asia, and a departure from earlier Greek attitudes towards “barbarian” cultures.
The Hellenistic period was characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization (as distinguished from that occurring in the 8th–6th centuries BC) which established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa. Those new cities were composed of Greek colonists who came from different parts of the Greek world, and not, as before, from a specific “mother city”.
As explained above, what you would have had is a “melting pot” of many different languages, “races”, cultures, schools of art, ethnicities, et cetera.
The art of this period reflects that.
Greek architects and sculptors were highly valued throughout the Hellenistic world. Shown on the left is a terra-cotta statuette of a draped young woman, made as a tomb offering near Thebes, probably around 300 BCE. The incursion of Alexander into the western part of India resulted in some Greek cultural influences there, especially during the Hellenistic era. During the first century BCE., Indian sculptors in Gandhara, which today is part of Pakistan, began to create statues of the Buddha. The Buddhist Gandharan style combined Indian and Hellenistic artistic traditions, which is evident in the stone sculpture of the Buddha on the right. Note the wavy hair topped by a bun tied with a ribbon, also a feature of earlier statues of Greek deities. This Buddha is also wearing a Greek-style toga.
In general, Greek attitudes towards anyone with Black or dark brown skin were sort of ethnocentric, but not negative OR associated with slavery. After all, the idea of “white people” wouldn’t exist for another 1,500 years at LEAST.
Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks by Frank M. Snowden contains many, MANY invaluable interpretations and translations of primary sources that help to really explore attitudes and philosophies that the people in the time had about appearance, human difference, and personality traits. From page 86:
If you want something a bit more definitive, The Image of the Black in Western Art Vol. 1:From the Pharaohs to the Roman Empire explores the Greek and Roman preoccupation with physical type+personality traits as a form of PROTO-racism, but please note that nothing in their writing or art indicated the association of Blackness or Black skin with slaves or enslavement/enslavability:
"Race" as we have this concept today did not exist then. the "races" they are talking about have to do with ethnicity and culture, NOT skin color by necessity. In addition, the "proto-racist" writing is describing geographical origin and climate to correlate with personality type, with the “perfect balance” being conveniently, Greeks.
"We’re looking at a population mix which is much closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had suspected," Hella Eckhardt, senior lecturer at the department of archaeology at Reading University, said. "In the case of York, the Roman population may have had more diverse origins than the city has now.”
Isotope evidence suggests that up to 20% were probably long distance migrants. Some were African or had African ancestors, including the woman dubbed “the ivory bangle lady”, whose bone analysis shows she was brought up in a warmer climate, and whose skull shape suggests mixed ancestry including black features.
"We can’t tell if she was independently wealthy, or the wife or daughter of a wealthy man — but the bones show that she was young, between 18 and 23, and healthy with no obvious sign of disease or cause of death."
The authors comment: "The case of the ‘ivory bangle lady’ contradicts assumptions that may derive from more recent historical experience, namely that immigrants are low status and male, and that African individuals are likely to have been slaves. Instead, it is clear that both women and children moved across the Empire, often associated with the military."
Well, here's the thing. A lot of people seem to think it's "wrong" or "ahistorical" of me to "project modern views of race" onto the past. My point is and always has been that this already happens. The above is just one example of of how this happens, and yet the majority of Americans (and I'm sure people elsewhere as well) believe that race determined status in Classical Antiquity, the Roman Empire, pretty much everywhere and every when.
To the point where it's like walking into an avalanche uphill trying to say any different. We all owe it to ourselves and everyone else to think about WHY that is.
"The only plausible explanation for these findings is that a considerable number of transoceanic voyages in both directions across both major oceans were completed between the 7th millennium BC and the European age of discovery." I'm sorry, but that's some of the stupidest shit I've ever heard. From an academic standpoint, the mere idea of ancient Egyptian sailors visiting the western hemisphere is laughable right off the bat. Do you really believe this stuff?
I always really wonder what kind of reaction people are expecting when they send messages like this. Are my feelings supposed to be hurt? It’s not like I wrote that paper.
I don’t even have to check; the quoted sentences are from an article from the Sino-Platonic papers, related to the Warring States Project at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The whole point of the project and the format change of the publication to open access was as a challenge to academic gatekeeping, with a focus on unconventional research.
Not sure where you’re getting the “ancient Egyptian sailors” thing from. But it’s a sad academic world indeed if saying that no one ever traveled across the Atlantic ocean in this particular 2,000+ year span, NO EXCEPTIONS EVER!!! is perfectly reasonable, but saying that it’s possible that someone may have done so since that is a massive amount of time is “laughable”.
But hey, who am I to challenge the assumptions and easily-memorized generalizations you’ve accrued in your undergrad education? I’m sure you’ll go quite far without ever questioning what you’ve learned from your textbooks, which of course could never possibly have some kind of agenda like a free tumblr blog does. ;) Yay! you win! Enjoy your life full of self-satisfaction over your extremely narrow, yet widely accepted worldview.
sevcanz
Not to mention “wah wah its so stupid” isn’t an argument at all.
Which I'd only really point out if it wasn't so obvious that johnconley expects me to be very emotionally invested in their personal approval of things I post.
I'm pretty sure that part of the point of colonization in the first place was the end result that your great great grandchildren can stomp around like Godzilla yelling "COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA NO EXCEPTIONS" and receive near-universal applause for doing so, or at least an A+ in Intro to World History class. And then you get to call anyone who questions this rather questionable narrative "laughable" and "the stupidest sh*t [you've] ever heard".
It doesn't matter whether or not "wah wah it's so stupid" is a real argument. You can go your whole life without ever questioning it or challenging it, and you'll be rewarded. And if you're white, you get the added self-esteem boost of "only white people ever did anything worth mentioning in History classes." And actually enforce this narrative by making it illegal to teach anyone otherwise. What's not to love?
You get to push everyone else's history out of the way, make them electives, call them nonsense, and laugh at them. You get to marginalize other narratives.
That's not news to me. This project is about questioning these narratives, and coming to my inbox to inform me that you learned NOT to question these narratives isn't something I'm obligated to give a crap about. In no uncertain terms, everything about the original message says "I have already made up my mind". My reaction is, "good for you; I'm still interested in learning something new."
You're right, of course, "wah wah it's so stupid" is NOT an argument. And I don't think it was meant to be one, either. So maybe we should all think about what it is meant to be, instead.
i'm a history major, and i just wanted to say i *lovelovelove* your blog! even now, a lot of history texts don't pay attention to the presence of peoples of color in Europe, and you really have to hunt for anything beyond footnotes, so it's wonderful to have found such a rich resource. thank you!
Thank you!
It’s true that it can be very difficult to find anything but footnotes…and a lot of the content here comes from hunting down those footnotes, and the footnotes to the footnotes, and getting lost down research rabbitholes until I find something interesting and worthwhile to share with everyone.
So many of these artworks are framed as exceptions, anomalies, and written about as if they are totally unique or “the first” of their kind. But what happens when you taker all of these exceptions and footnotes and bring them together with documentation from multiple disciplines?
Well, then you have an entire History unto itself. A new story that challenges our assumptions and gives us insight into the past. And that’s what I’m hoping people can find here, in an accessible, readable, and easily shareable format.
One year, I taught this (Sociological theory) class and only used female writers. The journals were written by women, the textbook was written by females. Do you know what kind of responses I got on my student evaluations that year? {…} That I was biased, that I was only looking from one point of view… that I was basically a man eater. That’s the kind of things I’d get from the students… The semester before, I used only male writers. Do you think I got any kind of feedback like that then?
"Not a single word."
Dr Rebecca Erikson, my professor, in her introduction of epistemology and challenging the main narrative
I like this quote because it underscores not only how important it is to create a counternarrative to the dominant ones, but how much opposition, backlash and pushback there is to even the simplest challenges to the status quo.
My position? That just means we need to push even harder.
The 14,000 members of this Association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship.
History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time.
There is no single, eternal, and immutable “truth” about past events and their meaning.
The unending quest of historians for understanding the past—that is, “revisionism”—is what makes history vital and meaningful. Without revisionism, we might be stuck with the images of Reconstruction after the American Civil War that were conveyed by D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era. Were the Gilded Age entrepreneurs “Captains of Industry” or “Robber Barons”?
Without revisionist historians who have done research in new sources and asked new and nuanced questions, we would remain mired in one or another of these stereotypes.
I was thinking about this quote when I reblogged the post from katelliottsffusing the phrase "Restorative History" as a response to the negative associations we've built around the phrase "Revisionist History".
If you read the linked article, it goes into how revision/revisionist has acquired a pejorative meaning, and why this is a bad thing. Too many people have been erased, maligned, and demonized by the popular-cultural-consciousness version of European and American history.
I like the idea of restoring the missing or twisted narratives, although the process of doing so remains a revision process; a re-writing and critical analysis of what currently exists. After all the only way to grow and change as a society is to take another look at what we "know" to be true and why/how we know it.
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