Layers of History
This is the first year I’ve supported a World History class on my campus. Memories keep flooding back to my days teaching World History. In the first week, we asked the kids to tell us which invention they thought was the most important. We gave them several examples to choose from, but they could go off script if they wanted.
The light bulb moments are always the most fun when teaching. When you see students realize how one invention leads to others it is always a joy to watch. History has always worked that way. One event or one discovery leads to others. It’s the butterfly effect in action.
This is why the white-washing of history is so dangerous. You cannot simply erase one event from history and call it good. Those events effect other events and impact millions of lives generations later. These things seem insignificant, but nothing is insignificant.
One tiny example is the story of Henrietta Lacks. Her cells have become famous in the science world, but she only exists in relative obscurity. She died very young from cervical cancer, but before she died the Mayo Clinic harvested some cells to figure out what was wrong with her. They told her about her cancer, but in the process discovered those cells could keep regenerating. In effect, she would live on forever.
The Lacks family sued the company harvesting her cells because they never gained permission to do so. The Mayo Clinic asked the family if they could study her cells and they said no. They did it anyway. It seems like such an insignificant story, but when paired with other similar stories it helps explain why some people have a natural distrust of science and vaccines.
When we deny events like the Tuskegee Study we not only remove that event, but we remove context from our collective understanding of history. We well know these atrocities are not necessarily isolated events. Some of these events have never been a part of the natural teaching of history, but others have been. At present, there are those that want to say the Trail of Tears never happened. They want to call it something else. They want to say the Cherokee chose to migrate to Oklahoma. Sure they did.
When we remove the event and the context of that event then we fail to understand our current condition. We deny it exists. So, we explain it away as something else. People don’t have a natural distrust of people in power. They are somehow jaded because of their own failures and problems. They are scapegoating us for their issues. There is obviously no doubt that some of this is true. Success and failure both have numerous layers, causes, effects, and the like. Our lives are nuanced just like history itself. Nothing is ever that simple.
Understanding history has never been about blame or internalizing the mistakes of the past. It is simply about understanding them and understanding their impact on the current condition. If we understand then we can begin to heal and be a part of the solution. If we don’t then we continue to perpetuate it and compound it.
Nick, well put, history is one of my favorite topics [I spend way too much time on Ancestry and Wikipedia].
But to diverge a bit: “One event or one discovery leads to others. It’s the butterfly effect in action.”
Speaking of butterflies, I just noticed an incredibly sad article[s] about the beautiful Monarch butterflies.
I have lived on/near their major central flyway funnel point forever. Used to watch millions of them pass by.
Haven’t seen more than a few in about a decade or more. It’s beyond belief to be watching the extinction of a major earth species in our lifetimes.
Monarch Butterflies Added to the Endangered Species Red List:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/22/2118000/-Monarch-Butterflies-Added-to-the-Endangered-Species-Red-List
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly
1Have a book list:/Users/mikeharper/Desktop/300939843_6130032580344419_7540793256104034047_n.jpg
2BTW, The Monarch is the ‘state butterfly’ of Texas.
3In Texas now, I guess if you teach something that might make some white kid “uncomfortable”, that’s a no-no.
4On highway US 59 in a rest area near Atlanta, Texas there is an historical marker that refers to the Civil War as a “Wave of sectional patriotism in 1861” The state of Texas worded it that way to avoid using the term Civil War. What kind of state do we live in where they are ashamed to admit their own history.
5And by the way, Henrietta Lacks was the answer to 20 across in Saturday’s LA Times crossword!
6OT (sorta): When the Tuskegee Experiment was exposed in the early 70s, one of the first books detailing the decades and lives involved was “Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment” by James H. Jones (1981 The Free Press).
Over the years, some of the facts of the story have been distorted or taken out of context and, of course, there were dramatizations which played a little fast and loose with the facts. The plain truth of what happened is awful enough. However, what struck me was the breathtakingly complete absence of not only medical ethics, but simple, human compassion by everybody involved in the “experiment” for over 40 years! It took a leak to a journalist in 1972 to expose it. It’s been over 40 years since I read that book and I still can’t get over it.
It’s just boggles the mind. The damage it did, not only the participants and their families, is still happening today in the mistrust of medical science. This is currently manifest in the appalling number of Covid deaths among the unvaccinated Black population.
Then, there’s the whole other subject of Black American maternal and infant deaths. It seems to me to be a continuum.
7Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells had another major effect on research: they are everywhere. Even labs that never bought or used her cell line have been found to be infested with them, and it has thrown a serious question about much of cancer research from the 1980s on. I don’t know if this constitutes revenge on her part, but she is (indirectly) making a lot of labs clean up their act, both metaphorically and literally.
History is something I read for enjoyment and entertainment. A large number of history professors who started out in the 1960s are checking into the Horizontal Hilton, so you can find some excellent (and normally expensive) books at library book sales and at thrift shops. Their widows and heirs tend to just want to get rid of the hundreds of books they owned.
Like a lot of public libraries, our local one has an annual book sale. I highly recommend checking for local ones; the money goes to the library, and you’ll be depriving Amazon of sales.
8That’s a good tip Surly. My dad is one of those and has a pretty impressive library. Once a year our neighborhood has a coordinated weekend where people have garage sales. Every once in awhile you find something there. Ironically, we read about Lacks in our English classes where we conveniently glossed over the ethical and legal ramifications of what the Mayo Clinic did. It was more of a “wow this is cool” kind of vibe.
9I read N Carolina passed a law banning the teaching of history and science until the 6th grade (not sure that’s middle school in NC). That should solve all their problems. Now parents won’t have to answer questions about such things as the Civil War or how birds and bees multiply. I’m thinking other red states will look at doing the same.
10Correction- what I said above should have said below 5th grade, so all is well in NC.
11I was appalled when I read this story.
https://www.rawstory.com/mark-robinson-2657896870/#cxrecs_s
I found science as fascinating as history when I was in school. For many of the same reasons you cite for understanding and learning about history
Thanks for your insight.
12Hopefully many many students will have a teacher like you who will expose them to history and make them think!
“They want to say the Cherokee chose to migrate to Oklahoma.”
Huh. As if anyone ever voluntarily move to Oklahoma…
As for history and how one invention leads to another, I recommend James Burke’s “Connections”. Each chapter has a theme and traces the inventions related to that theme across both time and civilizations. It was a PB series way back when and the videos are on YouTube (complete with Burke wearing his white leisure suit!).
13https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
which invention they thought was the most important
1. sewers
142. soap
Jesus. You got everything wrong about Henrietta Lacks. I hope you teach better than that.
15Thank you for the practical lesson in hyperbole. I did say the Mayo Clinic when it should have been Johns Hopkins, but otherwise thank you for playing.
16No, you got it all wrong, not just the hospital. For example, Lacks was not uncompensated. She got free medical care.
The treatment was not effective bt that was the standard in those days.
17