WEEK XI

History is like Sand: it’s Coarse and Rough and Irritating and it Gets Everywhere

The moment I became serious about studying history was in AP US History class my junior year of high school when we covered the Sand Creek Massacre. 

My teacher divided the class into groups and assigned each a different primary source describing the 1864 events at Sand Creek from which each group prepared a report of the occurrences. The accounts varied, and debates broke out across the classroom over casualty reports. Colonel John Chivington reported 500-600 men killed, Cheyenne interpreter John Smith claimed 100 families had been murdered, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer counted 350 women and children among the dead, and Cheyanne defector George Bent’s reports varied by interview.

“I killed them all… not just the men, but the women and children too. —Anakin Skywalker”

John Chivington

This was a frustrating exercise for me as I had always experienced history in facts and enjoyed the permanence of the subject. I wanted my notes to read simply, “Sand Creek Massacre: 500 dead”, but the history behind the event was much more complicated than a k/d ratio. 

As frustrating as it was, the realization that history goes beyond absolutes also made history a lot more interesting. History is no longer a boring field in which everything that has happened is recorded and there is not much left to do but wait for another year of events to occur that can be added to the textbook. History involves creativity, research, and storytelling. It is not just a list of facts and vocab terms; true history must be learned through research and experimentation. 

If I were a vocab term, I would be hard pressed to fit my 18 years of life into a one sentence definition, yet people and events far more complex than me continue to be taught as such. It is necessary to analyze controversial points in history to impress the idea that history goes beyond the succinct, conflict-free paragraphs of a textbook. Current events today are seen as extremely complex, and it must not be forgotten that events were just as messy all throughout history.

When history is taught in schools, it is often done so without the discussion aspect of my APUSH class. This does not prepare students for facing controversy in the real world. Textbooks can come with their own ‘flavor’ of history. As Paul Boyer describes, Americans are divided on their opinions of the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (just as they are divided on the pronunciation of ‘Hiroshima’) often depending on their education. Some see a necessary action to end WWII, where others observe an unnecessarily violent measure taken in aggressive response to the Pearl Harbor attack. Discussion between stalwarts in both camps would most likely yield the truth which undoubtedly lies somewhere in the middle. An historian’s addition to the discussion may lend factors such as growing tensions with the USSR. Unfortunately, conversations like those in my APUSH class on Sand Creek, which encourage creative thinking and unbiased discussion, do not happen universally. 

Students are done a disservice when history is presented as though it is set in stone (unless the topic is petroglyphs). This method of teaching prevents students from developing an interest in history as they never see beyond the dusty, biased textbooks of their classrooms.