Historians dig up stories that document our past the way archeologists sift through relics. The more they learn the more we realize how much we don’t know.
A stack of books in a bookstore that tell only one version of the world. (Illustration by News Decoder)
Most of what we know was told to us by our parents or schools or religious institutions or popular media, based on information passed down from other people.
Over time, the people who told the stories died off and stories got lost through fires, floods, volcanic eruptions and wanton destruction. The number of people who told the stories that survived over time ends up being quite few.
So what we know about our distant past is based on stories told and recorded by a few people who turned out to be historically influential. The mere fact that a story traveled and was preserved gave it power.
In 2018 historian Donald Yacovone wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education how he discovered thousands of text books in the Harvard University library that taught U.S. history through a white man’s perspective — one even titled “The White Man’s History”.
Few people of color had the means to write and publish. In many places in the United States when slavery was legal, it was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read and write.
Meanwhile, few women around the world had the means to publish. So their versions of history were shouted down by a male establishment and largely lost. Those whose stories survived often had to publish under male names — George Eliot and George Sand being famous examples.
Breaking the chain of narratives
There are examples across the globe of attempts to break chains of narratives passed down from one generation to another: In the United States, thousands of Indigenous children were sent to English language boarding schools. In post-Civil War Spain, Catalan children were forced into Spanish language schools. For hundreds of years British laws outlawed the speaking of the Irish language in Ireland and Welsh in Wales. In the 19th century, the Russian Empire banned the Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian languages.
Student Joshua Glazer wrote an article for News Decoder that explored how Spanish school curriculums downplayed the nation’s Moorish past.
This can be seen today in the debates taking place in the United States over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in universities, which is the study of how race figures into public policy and how our current economic, political and cultural systems have been shaped by historical inequities.
Politicians trying to win over conservative voters in tight elections argue that teaching the histories of people whose stories have been buried will diminish the established narrative.
The fear is that the teaching of histories of those who didn’t have power will expose the falsehoods of the established narrative, thus putting into question the power and wealth structure that developed as a result.
No one wants to think of their own ancestors as liars and exploiters and the money and property they now own as ill-gotten.
Digging up the past through stories
Across the globe scholars are trying to piece together missing histories — Indigenous stories passed down orally, enslaved people’s stories passed down surreptitiously, women’s stories buried in diaries in old attic trunks, stories of cultures lost because of genocide and cultural assimilation.
These scholars are often called revisionist historians. I like to think of them as re-versionists. We often have only one version of a history. We know about the Gallic Wars largely through the eyes of Julius Caesar who had the means to have his version transcribed daily and sent to Rome by runners on roads he had built.
We know about the meetings between the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and Christopher Columbus largely through stories told by Columbus and his crew.
Re-versionists try to find the experiences of the other people in the historical picture: the enslaved people, soldiers, tradespeople, plantation workers and women in all areas of life.
Understanding the power to tell and preserve the stories created a long time ago helps us understand the power of media moguls and corporations who own the media networks of today and can control which stories get retold through books and movies and how and where they get distributed.
Who controls our stories?
Consider that in the United States and Canada just five companies own almost half of all movie screens, according to data from the National Association of Theater Owners. How many people don’t buy their books off Amazon? How many people don’t stream music from Spotify, Amazon or Apple? More than a billion people around the world use Telegram, the messaging app, and that company is owned by one man, Pavel Durov.
We can’t understand our present unless we understand our past. But what has been preserved for us is largely the messages of the powerful — and they were largely white, wealthy and male.
We need to make sure that our understanding of our present is shaped by a diverse range of narratives. When there are so many forms of communication now, these media forms shouldn’t get dominated and controlled by just a few powerful, wealthy people, companies or governments.
Too many people — through the power of algorithms and selective consumption of information — live in media bubbles, convinced that there is only one way of seeing the world.
Only by interacting with different and contrasting ideas do we understand the different needs and motivations that are at the heart of most problems and only then can we reach for solutions that bridge divides.
Three questions to consider:
- Why were many stories lost to civilization?
- Why should someone seek out multiple perspectives?
- Why might a government or a group of people want to suppress the telling of some stories?
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.