History And Slavery

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The past is unpredictable. I’ve pondered this assertion for a year now since I first heard it during my junior year in American History class. When my teacher prefaced our learning with this idea, I thought it was a little ridiculous. History, I believed, is set in stone. As the saying goes, the past is in the past. It is, if anything, predictable. But my teacher pushed me even further. He defined the subject with a mathematical expression: change over time. Assuming his definition, history becomes a variable, something that can be manipulated, changed and solved for – an unknown. The past becomes unpredictable.
As someone who once believed that history was simply the memorization of facts, I labored to resolve this paradox. I became fully absorbed in my work and …show more content…
The events stay the same, but the interpretations transform. Before the onset of new social history, scholars and historians like Howard Zinn would have you believe that the Native Americans died passively from the onslaught of European colonizers. They were helpless in the face of disease and European steel. However, as historiography changed, the analyses evolved as well. The historian Alan Taylor argues that Native Americans responded actively; they created different ways to combat or cope with the invading foreigners. Ultimately, they demonstrated agency over their fate. These new interpretations bled into other parts of history as well. Slavery did not render its subjects powerless. The enslaved were not simple, cardboard victims. Rather, they forged their own culture through struggle, actively undermining the system of their oppression by creating tight-knit communities.
From these and other examples, I have come to understand history as the redistribution of agency – the active effort of opening your ears to the voices of the silenced. I now believe that the script of the past will never stay the same: new actors enter the stage and the lines continuously
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