“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Edmund Burke “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Mark Twain “To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.
” Cicero “History is not history unless it is the truth.” Abraham Lincoln There is an intriguing page on Facebook titled “Mankato Memories.” Once you start reading some of the posts, you understand why it’s “Memories” and not “Facts.
” History, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, it seems, because memories vary. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that Kyle Ward, the director of social studies education at Minnesota State University, loves teaching students interested in becoming history teachers themselves. But it’s also why he saw the need to write the book “History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years.
” Because there is another history quote — “History is written by the victors,” often attributed to Winston Churchill — that indicates the truth within recorded history may not be easily proven. “I went and looked at old U.S.
history textbooks going back; I think 1796 was the, quote/unquote, ‘earliest,’” said Ward, who wrote the book as part of his Ph.D. studies at Indiana University.
“I wanted to track and go, ‘OK, this story was first told in this year. What did they say? How did it change over time? And what was impacting it that made those changes?’” In a word, that is “historiography,” the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline. Before your eyes glaze over, we can talk about it this way: History is not always complete and it’s certainly not static.
As with any story, it is only as good as its source materials, the breadth of those source materials and, as Ward tells it — and Churchill alluded to — who wrote it. Most states have a schedule for updating textbooks used in the classroom. Minnesota is behind schedule in making those most recent changes, Ward said, but when they are made they will reflect what is, and isn’t, considered important for students to learn.
“What is funny is that so many people just assume that you grab a little history textbook and put it in front of you and here’s all these facts about American history,” he said. “But, in reality, society has a huge impact on what’s actually being written in these books.” The past shapes us In his 1882 book “History of the Minnesota Valley,” the Rev.
Edward D. Neill wrote in the preface: “(T)he past is not simply a stepping-stone to the future, but a part of our very selves ..
.” Not only can we not ignore the past, but to fully understand it, we need to take into consideration many of those factors. We need to know the complexity of sources and what the people who contributed as sources may have known or wanted people to know.
At places such as the Blue Earth County Historical Society, the history they preserve sometimes takes a hard turn when they get more information on a subject or have previous information disproven. Executive Director Jessica Potter uses the analogy that history is like a pendulum, swinging toward different perspectives that become the lens through which historians peer when making recordings. Regarding the American Civil War, for example, “it’s about the battles.
No, the pendulum swings and it’s about slavery,” she said. “The focus is on what is being presented, what is being shared, what is being dissected.” In a perfect world, she said, the pendulum would tick, not swing, so that it is able to cover all aspects of the time or event being studied.
Sometimes, a change in history literally walks through their door. The lens through which BECHS looks at history is local impact since their mission is to collect, preserve and share the history of Blue Earth County. “A big way we do that is through the history center, by having exhibits and programs and our research center, all available to the public to learn more about local history,” Potter said.
“Again, we’re based on the fact that somebody wants to bring something to us and save it and tell us that story,” added Archivist Shelley Harrison. “And we look at it as an opportunity to go, ‘Awesome. This is fabulous.
Tell us the story.’ But the problem is, is that a story that they were told or that they know may not be factual.” When BECHS researches the artifact, if they find the ancestor who owned it was born in Wisconsin and not Germany, for example, everything else becomes suspect.
Sometimes the source is the newspaper which, especially in the past, those who read it would have known had a specific political stance. So, even though the newspaper is considered a primary source, it should often be considered an unreliable primary source, peering through its particular lens. History’s ‘first draft’ Jean Dolan Matua is someone who tells a lot of those stories on which history is based.
As the publisher and editor at Tri-County News in Kimball, she brings a context with her, having lived in the central Minnesota town she now serves since 10th grade and graduating from high school there. After going away for college and the start of her adult life — Oklahoma, Virginia/Washington, D.C.
, and northern California among them — she came home to live with her husband and then a son. And a wider view of the world around her. “I do believe that we newspapers write the first draft of history,” she said.
“Our stories may become a part of something bigger, or they may fade off into oblivion. But we’re the ones with ‘boots on the ground,’ so to speak, documenting in some way, up-close and personal.” Having the bound copies of past newspapers is a tangible way to retain and be able to refer back to what has happened, especially in a small town.
As Matua noted, some stories will become multi-episode dramas while others may burst onto the scene and die a quiet death without any other mention in the paper. For most papers, however, bound hard copies of the publication have become as extinct as many small town papers themselves. Matua started creating digital archives for the Tri-County News in 2000, even before she owned it.
Today, she said she consults the archives several times a week, confirming a date, name, dollar amount or any other detail that can help complete today’s story. While government workings are important, a small town also lives and breathes high school sports. It’s what makes those towns vital.
So she also enjoys being able to recount results in past rivalry matchups. She delves into archives frequently when preparing for the Rooster Bowl, a trophy given to the victor in a football game between Kimball and the nearby consolidated high school. Named for one of the biggest football fans in the area, Rooster Arnold, winning the game and trophy is a source of great pride, she said.
“Two weeks ago was the Rooster Bowl and our school, for the first time in 25 years, won the Rooster Bowl trophy back,” Matua said. “So, I was able to look up on the website the information that I had done in a story previously.” From that, she recounted such facts as when the competition began, names of family members and when Rooster died.
Matua knows that it’s the people of a community who generate news. For that reason, obituaries are a key part of the archives of any newspaper and historical society. The Blue Earth County Historical Society has a card file that includes local obituaries.
When you find the right card, you are connected to one of the many three-ring binders, down to the page, the obit can be found. Also on the card are connections to news articles that may include that person. It’s not a perfect system; volunteers are essential to maintain such a system, for example, and with different volunteers come varying ways of doing things.
But for descendants wanting information about a long-ago relative and other family members, it can be an invaluable starting point. The next generation When Abbey Botko showed up for a meeting to talk about becoming a history teacher, she was obviously excited about the topic. “Excitement” doesn’t often accompany “history” in any context, but she’s got it.
“I just came from Spanish class, so now I’m switching to English,” she said, correcting herself to being a fourth-year student at MSU, not a fourth-semester student. “I always knew I wanted to work with kids and do something with teaching. I wasn’t sure what subject or what age group.
And then in high school I had a really amazing social studies teacher, Mr. Slizewski.” Her future, it seems, was set.
Botko is excited about a student teaching position Ward helped her get in her hometown school district at Anoka High School. Ultimately, she’s hoping to tie in her Spanish major and maybe teach Latin American history. “He just made it really fun, activities-based critical thinking, not ‘memorize this,’ but what can we learn from this event?” she said of being in Mr.
Slizewski’s class. “And he really emphasized not a Eurocentric, white-wash view of history.” For example, she wants her students to study not only Christopher Columbus’ journals, but also reactions from and effects on Indigenous people.
And she enjoys learning about different movements in the United States, from civil rights to the LBGTQIA+ community. “I might be a little biased,” she said, “but I really like history and learning about how we got to where we are today, where we still need to go, and how everything came about to get to where we are today.” What we do with it Professor Ward also spoke about the pendulum of history as we today look back and reevaluate those people in history who have been portrayed exclusively as positive role models.
“Now I think we’re looking at it going, ‘OK, they may have done some good things, (but) they may have done some bad things as well.’ It’s going to be interesting to see what we decide to do with our history,” he said..
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Instead of being static, history evolves as facts are added, adjusted
“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”