Throughout high school and my first year of college, my friends, classmates, and parents scrutinized me for my love of history. Many of classmates say they could not care less about the history and that knowing the date of the Battle of Hastings will never help them in life. Although my parents say that they will support me in everything I do, they are still skeptical about the usefulness of my major. While I will agree that people will not need to know when the Battle of Hastings happened for most professions, history still has an important place in the world. Historians have to gather, analyze, and interpret primary sources to narrate how a past event occurred. As a result, your history textbooks and how you view the world around yourself is affected. So do not dismiss a history major because we can occupy a very influential role in our society.
History is important because the way we speak of past events changes every 30-50 years. Historians discover new primary sources, laws change, and mindsets change. These changes bring new interpretations of the past and retell significant historical events. For example, when people think of Denmark Vesey, they think of a man who violently resisted the systematic oppression of his time. What if new evidence came out that indicated he did no such thing?Denmark Vesey did not plan a slave rebellion, and a professor from John Hopkins University named Michael Johnson brought new evidence to the table in 1999. Historians supported the revolt theory relied on the official court report from his trial in Charleston, SC. However, this piece of evidence was manipulated to say that Vesey boldly testified but was still found guilty. Johnson disproved the Denmark Vesey rebellion by analyzing the court transcript from Vesey’s trial, which revealed that Vesey was not present at his trial and that the court conducted the trial in secret. The discovery of new evidence changes the way in which a past event happened. It disproves the accepted theory and alters the lens in which we view history.
The Vesey example is one of many examples where the introduction of new evidence can completely change how we write about and perceive the past. This matters. Before you denounce history as useless, historians determined what went into in history textbooks and imparted to future generations. Johnson’s discovery shifts the lens from a resistance lens to a legal murder lens. From a white-washed lens to an African American lens. History and the job of the historian are not useless: they can mold the past based on their interpretation and philosophy of history, which in turn affects how we make decisions in the future.
