What Is History? What We Lose With Erasure
Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: What Is History? What We Lose With Erasure & Gain With Dissemination
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy 101, or facts we should know about human history but likely weren’t taught.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is under XX words, an estimated X-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
Historically, governments and people who took power by force often engaged in erasure — or the deliberate destruction of one’s cultural creations in an effort to diminish their status, and the ability for them to be remembered.
We can look at examples of not long ago, such as the book burnings that took place in Germany just months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. PBS American Experience describes events that took place on a single day: “On May 10, 1933, university students in 34 university towns across Germany burned over 25,000 books. The works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud went up in flames alongside blacklisted American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller, while students gave the Nazi salute.”
Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is not unique to Nazi Germany. There is a long, storied history of book burnings and the destruction of cultural, artistic creations.
Nor is it a relic of the past. Currently, some governments — locally and globally — are engaging in efforts of erasure. In the United States, for example, 37 states have adopted measures that restrict or limit the teaching of racism, “from chattel slavery to Jim Crow.” Such topics span centuries of U.S. history.
Sometimes erasure is also at the hands of individuals and organized communities. PEN America, for example, recorded more than 10,000 book bans in the 2023-24 school year alone. (This index documents the book bans, and provides a definition for what constitutes a “ban.”)
What happens when books are banned or burned? What happens when the teaching of history is restricted? When a society’s creations and contributions are intentionally shredded, erased, destroyed?
What Is History? Why Does It Matter?
History is more than reciting facts. It’s a conscious act of remembering — of keeping many stories alive, through preservation, curation, dissemination.
Across time and place, there are countless people and institutions that have worked to preserve and archive history, through the collection of written works, oral histories, photographs, and other objects.
Some of these people we can name, like Arturo Schomburg, who “amassed a personal collection of 10,000 items related to Black history and the African diaspora.” This collection was transferred to the New York Public Library system, eventually becoming the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. It now holds more than 11 million items, catapulting it as one the premier institutions devoted to preserving, researching and exhibiting materials related to the African diaspora and people of African descent.
Each of those items, 11 million plus, tell a story that may otherwise be lost.
History matters, and our efforts to preserve history matters — it can promote awareness, inspire human connection, empathy, and critical thinking.
Restricting history limits our knowledge, and our ability to understand one another and make connections not only with historical communities, but with who we are today. Erasure feeds stereotypes, which can negatively impact how we connect to other people and ultimately with how we connect to ourselves.
But we can’t take for granted that the histories we currently know and understand are etched in stone, unshaken. We also cannot take libraries and institutions for granted. In fact, this week, the entire staff of the U.S. federal agency that funds libraries was just put on leave, signaling not only the loss of jobs, but the potential for an unquantifiable loss of knowledge.
If libraries across an entire country become underfunded, or defunded, what could the impact be for larger society? For our future generations?
Historical (and current-day) erasure creates a vacuum. And in that vacuum, single stories or lies may be told and proliferate. And if spoken enough by people in power, especially in a deepfake environment — in the absence of guardrails and public education — falsehoods may begin to feel like “truth.”
After the deletion of art, writing, oral histories, and other cultural productions, a society cannot speak for itself. And when others pen someone else’s story, they can more easily birth stereotypes and narratives of dehumanization.
An example of the impact of erasure is the representation of the Maya, who are often referred to, in a historical context, through single stories — as “mysterious,” “ruthless,” and in some modern contexts as “disappeared,” though a more accurate portrayal would recognize the Maya are still here. Though the Maya arguably created one of the most technologically, scientifically sophisticated societies throughout World History, much of it is “unknown,” due to colonial violence and erasure.
Highlighting the Maya Codices
The first time I learned about the Maya Codex, I was a grown adult. I knew there were temples, or what many call “ruins,” in Central America, and that there was a form of hieroglyphs, or a writing system similar and different to what was developed in Egypt. But it was never explicitly taught to me, across my Grades K-12 experience, that the Maya created books.
Constructed out of layers of inner bark from fig trees, coated in plaster, and pieced together so they opened like accordions, only four of these meticulously crafted books, or Codices, have survived after some Spanish colonizers intentionally burned them. And only one Codex resides in Mexico, or close to where historical Maya society thrived.
One of these books, the Códice Maya De México, crafted sometime in the 11th to 12 Century, traced and predicted the complex movements of planet Venus.
Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, describes this “sacred book” in this video: “Given how few Mesoamerican books made prior to the Spanish invasions exist, whether due to environmental issues like rain and humidity or even the targeted destruction by Spanish friars and conquistadors in the wake of the invasions in the early 16th century, it is truly amazing to be in front of this Maya book today.” When speaking about why the existence of this Codex matters, she states,“Books were important repositories of knowledge.”
What kind of knowledge is lost when a society's histories and cultural productions are destroyed?
For one, we may lose literal knowledge. We know that the Maya had and continue to have one of the most accurate and complex calendar systems the world has ever seen, that they were incredibly skilled astronomers. What other technological innovations emerged through their intellect and collaboration? Ideas we may never know.
Crafted around 900 years ago, the Códice Maya De México, is one of the oldest surviving books of the Americas. Given this fact, it would make sense that every student in the Americas, and beyond, learns about this Codex at least once in their Grades K-12 experience.
Dr. Andrew Turner describes the impressive knowledge recorded in this specific Codex: “Venus was extremely important in Mesoamerica because it was considered a dangerous planet. Venus is always close to the sun. It either rises before the sun does at dawn, when it's the Morning Star, or it follows the sun into the Earth as it sinks into the western horizon when Venus is the Evening Star. Venus has 4 phases and it’s got an extremely difficult pattern to observe and predict. So ancient Maya astronomers were careful observers of this phenomenon and they were among the only ancient cultures that actually recognized Venus as the Morning Star and Venus as the Evening Star as being the same planetary body. So this book follows the cycle of Venus and its 584-day cycle, over a course of 104 years. So each page predicts when one of the four phases of Venus is going to start.”
Not only does the Codex reveal “brilliant insight into what amazing astronomers” the Maya were and are, it provides a humanizing quality — something tangible; documentation, testimony — to counteract the single stories that otherwise dominate the narrative when people speak of the Maya through limited lenses and stereotypes.
Historical preservation and dissemination provides a way to expand our human story, not restrict it.
What We Gain With Dissemination
Through preservation, we can keep culture, story, and connection alive. With the dissemination of knowledge, stories, facts, and what we may call “history,” we can enhance the connection we have with others, and the one we develop with ourselves.
More stories encourage us to see something familiar in the face of a stranger.
And that kind of lens may be the one we need for now and for the future, where our survival may very well be tied to how well we work together as a multiracial coalition, as we combat global events, from political instability to climate change.
What will the future know of us? What parts will be erased? What will be preserved? How will we each do our part?
Join Us for a Professional Development Workshop This Summer!
If you, and your colleagues, are looking for professional development opportunities this summer, Michael Matthews, of Authentic Education, and Monique Vogelsang of Humanizing History™ are co-leading a hands-on PD experience for classroom teachers and other school leaders.
“Inclusive Curriculum Design — Backwards Planning for Equity and Belonging."
Join us for an in-person, 3-day intensive to expand your thinking around best practices for including underrepresented voices, untold stories, and broader perspectives into your curriculum design — resulting in more inclusive and culturally expansive units.
Visit this link to learn more and sign up.
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