A million years of history

By Lesley Guest

Why do we study history?

Of course, we want to know about the people who walked the Earth yesterday, and as a mother, my son's questions about my past and his grandparents' past make sense: he's probably curious about how we viewed life in the past, and what came before him. I do my best to answer his questions, and always recommend that he ask others as well for many viewpoints.

History is - in its very essence - a story. It's history, or as the feminists like to say, her-story. Tales of the past are still tales. The stories in the books we read or in the news we watch are still just story. The human ability to define reality for itself is infinite. Every one knows a different version of life and with enough looking within, life changes.

"It reminds me of the game 'Chinese whispers' we used to play as a child," says Holly Crandall Silver, great granddaughter of the first immigrant white baby born in Seattle. "Chinese whispers is a party game I played with my sister, where someone would whisper a message to the person sitting next to them, and by the time the message got all the way around the circle, it would be completely different."

Some truths are absolute. The dates of events. The list of presidents. The conquests and explorations of adventurers and explorers. Yet, much of history is interpretation.

At local Pathfinder K-8 School where I work as a tutor, lead teacher Lisa Clayton is telling a group of seventh graders:

"We study history to find out why we are doing what we do today." The students are studying slavery, and everyone appears deeply uncomfortable as we hear 40 million people were taken from Africa to become slaves, and the conditions were so unkind toward their basic needs that only 20 million survived the ships. Asked why we study slavery, teacher Tim Hayes-McQueen explains:

"This age group is very motivated by social justice." Over in the eighth grade, the students work on understanding the impact of race and economic status on the New Orleans natives who endured Hurricane Katrinia in 2005.

"We are studying the way the world is now so we can create a world we want to live in for the future," says teacher Ami Pendley.

The seventh graders work on research papers. When asked why he is writing about Harriet Tubman, the famous abolitionist, seventh grader Deion Berry-You finds it hard to find an answer.

Like most of the papers in the class - be they on Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas or Abraham Lincoln - this one on Tubman begins with the hard features of her life. As a slave, she endured a lot, including a head injury which changed her forever, and yet, she went on to free herself, serve humanity and to find the way to freedom for 300 slaves. Whatever she endured, she knew each night as she went to sleep that she had helped 300 people leave behind enslavement.

Clearly, Berry-You is inspired, as are the girls in class who write about Sojourner Truth. Explaining why they like the stories of the past, the seventh graders sometimes can't quite say. Berry-You explains why we study history as well as anyone when he utters: "If not for Harriet Tubman, we'd still have slaves now."

That, I believe, is the reason we study history. We study history for inspiration, for strength and for a sense of connection and for a good story. At least, that's why I study history.

Leslie Guest is a West Seattle resident and freelance writer and may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com