EVIL HISTORY IS TOO PAINFUL FOR STUDENT READING?

Evil history includes a list of everything you wish you’d never heard of.

It’s the story of man’s injustice to his fellow man, and woman, and non-binary person.

If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve heard some evil history; add a few more years and you’ve lived some of it, and the aftermath.

Everyone has a list of events they could do without. Feel free to add some of these.

My list of ‘What The Hell Is This’ started in the grade school library and histories of WWII.

Since history is traditionally written by the winners, it was good reading.

“America Saved The World,’ but from what? German death camps, Japan in Nanking and Manila. It took an evil turn real fast.

Was it fair? Believable? Balanced history? The cloud of evil covered it all.

Evil History Of The World

I walked around Paris and listened to a guide explain the big problem of the French Revolution.

With all of the heads chopped, the ground beneath the guillotine became so blood soaked that it started sinking and had to be moved to more stable ground.

We stood on the same mushy ground it was moved from and some got a sinking feeling. Was it true, or ‘guide history?’

2

I walked around Warwick Castle, the one called the most intact castle from the English middle-ages.

Art on the walls, rooms full of decorative furnishings, and a basement full of death.

There was the flat-steel cage hanging from the ceiling where the guide said the hardest, most battle-tested men, would breakdown to tears when the door shut.

The future they looked forward to was occupying the cage until they died and dripped through the cage.

Not far away was a small cubicle with a metal grate in the middle of the floor. This was the Oubliette, a hole in the ground where people were stuffed in and locked down.

That evil history took a little shine off the the pretty castle.

3

The Spanish city of Ronda boasted an office of the Spanish Inquisition. It was near a canyon, a deep, narrow, canyon.

I asked a few questions. Turns out if you failed the inquisition, one of the penalties was taking a flier off the cliffs to the bottom of the canyon.

Way down there. It felt like evil history.

American History Too Evil?

I started reading history early and haven’t stopped. This blog carries sixty-nine pages of history posts.

I hold a BS in American history with an emphasis on Oregon history and a minor in Latin American history. It was all job-related.

As the Museum Collection Manager for the Oregon Historical Society, I saw historical artifacts every day. They included a nice quilt, a box of human skulls and bones, and a tall, vertical, box containing a human skeleton.

Something happened to those people.

The skulls were discolored and showed evidence of violent death; the skeleton was bright white bones connected by wire. Together, these artifacts told a story I still wonder about.

That’s what learning history is about: What Happened?

Critical Race Theory Getting Criticism

What’s this all about?

“Critical race theory is a practice. It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor who teaches at UCLA and Columbia University.

Are kids ready to learn about American history that is different than their parents’ understanding?

I didn’t ask questions after reading about WWII at a young age. Instead, I kept reading, looking for something more gruesome than the organized, industrialized, death-cult of Germany at the time.

One massacre after another didn’t require too many questions, because I already knew the answer: people are too capable of creating evil history no matter the time and place.

Was it hard fitting evil into a growing idea of history? No, because the more you look, the deeper you read, the more common it was.

All I would say today is teach history, teach critical race theory, with the idea that we’ve learned how to face problems from the recent past, the distant past, the ancient past, with the notion that we can do better than that, better than the people back then.

When someone from our Common Era, CE, complains, you’ll understand them better after reading more history.

The sad part is you’ll also know where they stand on evil history.