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I'd like to use this Very Dumb tweet to tell a story about Why I Love History. I didn't like it at all in high school, but devoted much of my higher education to it. Why? 1/ https://twitter.com/JimBovard/status/1281274522709172225
History taught at the college level doesn't resemble lower grade history instruction AT ALL. It has to do with primary sources. These are first-hand accounts (or material artifacts) from the time period in question. Secondary sources are what historians create. 2/
Textbooks are tertiary sources, a narrative to encapsulate and summarize findings from various secondary works. This means all the history we learn is ground down into a fine paste, compounded with a healthy dose of patriotism and aversion to controversy for market palatability3/
and by the time you read them, they were already woefully out of day (even before your underfunded school had to use them for way too long). Because, guess what? We are STILL learning, debating, growing, changing, re-evaluating, adding to our understanding of the past. 4/
History isn't dead, it's living. It's not A Fact you can write down and believe forever.
ANYWAY, so there I am in college, learning about primary sources, and we were talking about how a whole generation of historians put forward this whole "Slavery wasn't that bad" idea. 5/
ANYWAY, so there I am in college, learning about primary sources, and we were talking about how a whole generation of historians put forward this whole "Slavery wasn't that bad" idea. 5/
And my professor brings up the work of John Hope Franklin. We were interrogating the idea of whether or not slavery was bad or not (ugh) with the lens of primary sources. What were those historians' sources for that conclusion? More importantly, when researching lives of the 6/
largely non-literate peoples of the past (spoiler alert: most people for most of history) what other accounts can we find that document their lives? So Franklin was like, "we don't have as many/as good primary sources written by enslaved people" so he pulls the receipts. 7/
He goes around to all these southern towns with newspaper archives and finds all the antebellum newspapers he can. He scours them for the ads section. In particular, he finds all the runaway slave ads he can. Why? 8/
Because they are 1. from the time itself, not later 2. published, written work 3. a large resource (there are, sadly, so, so many runaway slave ads) 4. they were written by slaveholders themselves which puts to rest any biases towards a benevolent picture of slavery 9/
And through extensive research, he proves, statistically and qualitatively the prevalence of physical injuries among enslaved people described by their (CW: physical violence) physical scars from beatings and lashings they suffered while enslaved. 10/
Anyway, it's only by the inclusion of historians of color like Franklin, and other historically underrepresented voices in History, that the field continues to expand its understanding of the past. It's an understanding shaped by creativity and access when it comes to sources.11/
Which sources are "reliable?" Are we criticizing source biases? What haven't we considered as a primary source? Why not? An extensive individual source may have value, while an aggregation of scant sources may hold even more value. It's so cool! 12/
None of this is why the original tweet was VERY DUMB though. That's just because the author relies on false equivalence. More people died in X than from Covid, so Covid's not that bad and thing X was.
