Looking Back brings to life history from the boomer’s era.
Excerpt
Chapter Two
Shared Heritage: History Then and Now
Discovering history – Stories passed down – Cultural influences
“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”
-John W. Gardner (1912-2002) U. S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare 1965-1968
History was not my favorite subject in school! And it wasn’t apparent at a conscious level at any moment that I was living through what would someday be called history.
Yet now I’m writing about history because it’s clear how knowing the past—the lives of parents and grandparents and what they lived through—explains so much about the present.
Maybe I didn’t care for history in school because it was such a boring, abstract subject, made even more so by passionless teachers who stressed memorizing dates of important events in history. That was probably the only way they could measure whether students were paying attention in class. Yet, I doubt that they really knew history other than what they had learned from textbooks. I don’t recall ever hearing any of them say they had visited the places told about in history books. Not one of them showed any real passion for their subject.
And after all, wasn’t the school’s mission to teach readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic? History was taught mostly as an afterthought.
History textbooks were no more revealing of human emotions than the teachers who taught from them. There was no background on how or why things happened, what individuals were thinking and what helped form their society’s beliefs, hopes and dreams. There was never any information on how significant events affected people. There was definitely no way to understand how history related to my life. We students only learned the facts: that a war happened on such-and-such date, and on another date a famous person was born, died, or did something significant.
Add to my disinterest the fact that my family never talked about the history of our ancestors, or told about how some had settled our country before it was a nation. Although I knew I had Native American ancestors, I knew nothing about them until I was grown. And we didn’t travel, so there was nothing that would spark my interest in historic places and the roles they played in the heritage of our country.
When I finally started traveling, I quickly realized how little I knew. I could remember place names, and could tell anyone “this is where something important happened.” However, I often couldn’t remember what or why it was important.
The first time I can remember being truly affected by history was when we visited Vicksburg, Mississippi, and toured the Civil War battleground. As I listened to the self-guided tour tapes, I could see how close the troops were to each other as they fought. They were close enough to see the terrified expressions in each other’s eyes as they fired their fatal shots. Then at night they lay down to rest on the bloody battlefield where they had fought because they didn’t want to lose the precious piece of ground so hard-won the day before.
That Vicksburg’s families had to hide in underground dugouts and that many almost starved before the 47-day siege on their city ended moved me to tears. Women and children had tried to escape when the Union Army moved in, but found their routes closed and turned back to seek shelter. By the end of the siege, many of Vicksburg’s citizens and its soldiers were reduced to eating shoe leather to survive.
I wondered, had they become part of this War Between the States willingly? How many were slave owners, or believed in political independence and states’ rights, and were standing their ground for what they believed was just? Certainly there were innocent families, especially slaves, who didn’t believe in the Southern cause, but had become victims of the vicious battle because they had nowhere else to go. Everyone there paid a high price.
Southern Roots
I was born and raised in the “southern” state of Arkansas that had, at first, chosen to be neutral in the conflict between the North and South because the majority of its citizens believed reunification of the nation should come through compromise rather than coercion. They elected a majority of Unionists for a convention to consider secession. Before the matter could be put to a popular referendum in August 1861, 780 of Arkansas’ citizens were called up to form a regiment for the Union army to wage war on the South.
At the time, only one in five families in Arkansas owned slaves or were related to slave owners, most of whom were planters in the southern and eastern lowlands. Most of Arkansas is dominated by hilly to mountainous terrain that isn’t conducive to large-scale farming, so landowners living in those regions had no need or desire to own slaves. Besides, most who had settled in Arkansas were individualists who believed in political independence; they had left the confining culture of the South and East to find more freedom west of the Mississippi.
While choosing to side with the South wasn’t in the best interest of eighty percent of Arkansas’ citizens, suddenly the state’s leaders had to choose sides to keep from becoming an occupied territory with no say in how their people, land and resources might be used.
Conflicting opinions about going to war divided the state as it did much of the country. Families were torn apart by the Civil War as some brothers, fathers, and cousins chose opposite sides in the fight, trying to do what they believed was best for their families. (See related essay on page 16.)
Ancient history
Long before paper and pen were invented, ancient peoples realized it was important to leave behind a record of their lives. Thus, storytelling became the way to pass down memories of people, their accomplishments, battles, and records of everyday activities, such as planting and harvesting crops. Native Americans have always used storytelling to pass on legends and traditions, which still play an important role in modern-day Native American rituals and ceremonies. Their history has always been valuable to them.
While many ancient people created paintings in caves and on rocks to document their lives, little is understood about the meaning of most of these symbolic depictions. Without storytelling traditions, modern people would know little or nothing about the lives of ancestors.
Read more about LOOKING BACK and Kay Kennedy HERE.
Copyright 2008 Kay Kennedy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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