Much of what I learned about history I learned in college. It turned out that a lot was left out in twelve years of catholic school education. I recall as a college freshman in 1969 writing a research paper for a history or political science or philosophy class. The opening sentence went something like this: “Human history is based on 6,000 years of warfare.” I didn’t start out with that thesis, but that is what I discovered in my research. As it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg. And here I was a college student at the height of the Vietnam War, really completely oblivious to how we got there.
As a teenager in the 1960s, I was profoundly idealistic. By my mid-twenties, I had evolved into a sullen cynic. That transformation took place for a lot of reasons, but higher education was in large part the medium for that transformation. As an undergraduate, I learned about things like the Protestant Reformation for the first time. I knew nothing of it before then. I didn’t know anything about key historical figures like Martin Luther. (How did I miss that part of world history? It was never mentioned by the nuns who were my teachers). Perhaps the cynicism came with my nagging curiosity about the “why” of things. Those things that had no answers or that were steeped in contradictions. My descent into a feeling of absurdity and meaninglessness began in those years.
I was a late bloomer of sorts, so I didn't consider graduate school until the early 1980s when I was in my early thirties. That endeavor continued in two different universities (SUNY at Albany and Carnegie Mellon University) for more than a decade! A cynic in search of meaning?
In graduate school one of the first things that shocked me was learning about the decimation of Native American peoples through disease, brutality, and manipulation, all starting with Christopher Columbus's "discovery" in 1492. This information had not pierced my educational bubble. As a graduate student, I majored in American History so, of course, I learned the basics of the settling of our nation and the glorious Western migration and manifest destiny and the gilded age and the rise of robber barons and the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern society. But my academic focus was on “social and cultural” history. It was here that the bubble of my American idealism started to burst.
The late 1970's and 1980's was a time of academic change. American historians broke free of old story lines and wrote vociferously on the "darker" side of our country's not-so-glorious past. The Civil War and slavery were only two of many "reimaged" topics. (It is with grave misgiving and intellectual despair that I see the revelations of that short period of time being swept under the rug, or "deleted" from the written record).
I read dozens of those books during my "graduate student" era. I felt at times that I was reading Dickensian fiction! I knew about slavery, but the brutality of it didn’t fit with the rather pastoral picture I had somehow acquired in my youth. Then there were the masses, the common people that I was studying. The pioneers who struggled to survive the wilderness. They still fit the idealist's dream. But it was the abject poverty, the abuse and degradation of laborers in the cities, and the enrichment of the few on the backs of the many that, quite honestly, shocked me. Histories (stories) about factory conditions and disease and destitution and infant death and the creation of nineteenth-century institutions to house those who could no longer bear the burden of the “golden” age: insane asylums, poorhouses, orphan asylums, not for the orphaned as much as for the working parents who could no longer feed their children. (See: Mother Donit Fore the Best: Letters of a 19th Century Orphan Asylum, written under my previous married name, Judith Dulberger.)
In the early twentieth century Progressive movements emerged to right many of these wrongs. But even the most basic rights were hard fought: unions, women’s right to vote, child labor laws. Slums persisted for decades and disenfranchisement pushed against cultural norms that couldn’t be broken. And racism and segregation overshadowed American society like a funeral pall. The 1960s brought change and hope but little true "freedom" to America's oppressed. And the road to racial equality was rocky and bloody despite its non-violent philosophies. (Despite positive change, we now find ourselves in a nightmare of blatant, crude racism and white nationalist cultural ideology legitimized by the President and supported by half of the United States Congress.)
America's modern age, the twentieth century, was not spared engagement in war. In fact it was punctuated by some of the most brutal human acts of violence, power, and hatred known to mankind. World I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. Wars accompanied by the utter obliteration of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese by the atomic bomb, the gruesome deaths of 6 million Jews in the holocaust, Stalin’s murder of perhaps as many as 20 million of his people; Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide of the cultural elite, and a death count of nearly 600,000 Americans in all four wars combined. (Shockingly, only somewhat less than those who succumbed in America's Civil War alone in the 1860s.)
With the rise of Communism after World Wart II, America set out on a path of its own version of "eradication of unsavory populations" from the work force by the House Un-American Activities Committee. And in the last half of the twentieth century movements for equality, opportunity, justice, and fair treatment of all peoples continued: LGBTQ, disabled, all nonwhite minorities. And the struggles that had started at the outset of the 20th century --hard fought movements for equal rights and voting rights and environmental accountability continued. (Many of these rights summarily dismissed by government "leadership" today.)
Twenty-first-century America opened with an egregious act of terrorism --attacks of September 11, 2001, the death of over 3,000 American citizens followed by twenty years of war with terrorist aggressors in Iraq and Afghanistan and the death of over 7,000 US soldiers. During this time, our lives seemed unfazed, at least for those us not directly involved in combat. Economic prosperity, which is the only "true" barometer of American health and happiness, rose for a time. But twenty-five years down the road, we have become aware of societal undercurrents that have only recently surfaced with a vengeance: anti-democratic, racist, politically divisive, classist, xenophobic (angry, hateful, even cruel for cruelty's sake).
In the last decade or so, my idealism-turned-cynicism has been eclipsed by utter disbelief and profound despair. In looking back, I think I never really let go of the youthful idealism that launched me into adulthood. Now in later life, as I reflect on my long search for "meaning" through immersion in our nation's history, I realize that there have always been dark and divisive undercurrents and they arise out of a single, unresolved human emotion. Fear has been the driver behind our human condition and the exploitative nature of our relationship with our earthly home. It's not an American phenomenon. It is global.
Elsewhere on this website and My Blog, you'll find my writing on topics of fear and separation and where new directions and life experiences have taken me in recent years. Perhaps it is a place apropos to old age, or maybe it was always there and I didn't see it.
Thanks for Listening!
Judith
Everything I Learned About History...