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Historian Liz Covart explains that history isn't just about what happened but how we interpret it as well. "The past happened, but history is made," Liz says. "Every generation makes its own history. Each generation attempts to understand who they are and how their present-day world came to be."
For this generation of Americans, it might be the reconciling with its history of racism. "Many of us want to understand how American society still experiences racism and racial inequalities and inequities. The past holds answers for us," Covart suggests.
"Developing a better understanding of slavery, the way slavery informed racist ideas, and how Americans in the past valued enslaved bodies – both as a type of economic savings account and as less than human – goes a long way to helping us understand why so many people in the United States think and treat people of color negatively."
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Covart says that history almost always comes with a bias. "This history may not seem so obvious to many because each generation uses the history it creates to portray itself in a good light. There is a saying that a good history book will tell you just as much about the history the historian researched as it does about the time period [in which] the historian wrote it."
These sorts of biases are mostly unconscious. "While historians are trained to be as objective as possible when they research and write histories, they also can't help but be shaped by their present," Covart admits. "The present frames how they look at the past and the questions they ask about it."
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Other biases, however, come to historians consciously. "History is never neutral," Covart points out. "In addition to having our questions about the past informed by our present-day lives and circumstances, people also use the past for political purposes." She takes the American Revolution as an example and tells us how some historians presented a more united America than it was.
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"In the early United States, David Ramsay and Mercy Otis Warren were the first historians to write about the history and origins of the United States," Covart begins. "They told a story about how the 13 British American colonies on the North American East Coast banded together despite their regional, cultural, and economic differences to form a union capable of besting the best military in the world (the British Army) and securing the independence of the United States." They did, however, leave out a lot of "events and troublesome episodes."
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"Their aim in writing their histories was to unite a disparate group of 13 states into a national union with a shared past and culture," Covart explains. "They wrote their histories during what historians call the 'Critical Period,' the time after the United States achieved its independence but before it adopted the United States Constitution in 1789."
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"During this period, Americans experienced economic, social, and political turmoil. The mob actions that these historians had praised for uniting Americans and causing the American War for Independence looked different and more negative when they took place after independence as they did during the Shays' Rebellion," Covart continues.
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