History is about dead people

We learn from moral lessons in the past. Why do we teach linear history?

Nobody likes genocide. In high school, teachers focus on the Holocaust and Native American exterminations as sources. These lessons are paired with readings in English classes and discussions are about the root principle of why these events were evil. The principles behind the Holocaust are measurably evil, but how about its process.(1)  Likewise, Zinn’s works are crucial to understanding Native American history, but it doesn’t cover cultural exchanges and teh political aspects of genocide through isolation.(2) Direct lessons from the lives and patterns of other cultures should be directly learnable without politics or contrarian input. History is a dark place, but its lessons are necessary.

Great man history is fairly common, but useless.

Theodore Roosevelt was an ingenuitive man and a political genius. His life is interesting, and there are certainly things that people can learn about process and executive power from studying his life. Most people will not become president, a community organizer, or the head of a fortune five hundred company. The lives of regular people are more relatable and academically absent from the curriculum of anyone bellow a college education. Lives or immigrants, low-wage workers, and common peoples contain more relatable conditions and persons.

History’s patterns aren’t directly Hegelian or Fukuyamian

Anyone who studies history will say that history has noticeable patterns. The reasons for why patterns occur is one of the founding reasons for historical schools. In practice, primary source based history is neither in favor of conflict based or cyclical based models. Direct stimuli does not necessitate new conflict, and conflict is present in passive societies. History is the study of people’s lives and their reactions to it. It is better to teach history as a discipline of people rather than events. A change to a system that favors method, more similar to how we teach english/writing classes, is probably a good place to start.

Histories lessons are apolitical.

History is the study of death, rape, slavery, and overcoming base human realities. These are not optional realities, but part of the fabric that founded modernity. Hobbes is right in one fashion, that we need structure in order to maintain a peaceful society. Part of that structure is to understand where violence comes from, and how to stop it.

1. Primo Levy is a good place to start if you want to understand the lives of people within concentration camps. “Witness to the Holocaust” by Michael Berenbaum is a good place start for an overview on the happenings from the German side of the Holocaust.
2. Zinn covers the removal and extermination of Native Americans from an anti-consensus perspective. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by William McNeill covers some of the topic in terms of populations at war with each other, in a Turnerian sense. Other scholars focus on the topic from the view of biological and political extortion. Native American historians a very fair on the topic. “The Comanche Empire” by Pekka Hamalainen is a good place to start. It is a pretty deep rabbit hole.
3. Most people consider the Nazis to be the bad guys during WWII. The Native Americans as a society and peoples are dead. Stalin ruled with an iron fist and killed his own people without hesitation. The Rape of Nanking was not consensual.