I found it very fascinating and did not realize that many historians viewed the time before Europeans arrived here as Prehistory. I strongly believe in that this is also a very false statement. I agree with what we were saying in class that while it was not written down in books much of the things from the "prehistory" are still around today. I find it funny that we are taught so much of these ideas and beliefs as young children in our history classes, when like Tai said some of the information in our textbooks is not exactly all true.
I really feel that there is kind of like a conspiracy and they only want us to believe what they feel is true and that is why they teach us the limited amount of information as young children. As we continue our education most of us find that information was presented to us falsely and that there are many different theories and ideas about how the New America was discovered and what led us to be the country we are today. That's why I think that as we continue to progress it is very important for us to broaden the horizons of our children so that they may make their own minds up about how this world was founded instead of conforming them to one idea.
5 comments:
I agree that education for younger children should be improved and expanded to include not just the better pieces of United States history, but also the unpleasant aspects. It seems like children today and in the past have been fed a romanticized version on how the colonizers found the New World and their affect on it.
I believe that Europeans used the term "pre-history" out of 1. arrogance and 2. their belief in the fact that if something was not physically recorded, then it was not fact. As we now know Native Americans mainly had oral history which is still very much legitimate, but they also had written history in petroglyphs and medicine wheels. It is too bad that European colonists did not recognize these aspects as history because it could have led to a better outcome.
Monica, you bring up an excellent point about education. When people think of themselves as "American," how much of that is based on either fractured or "mythic" representations of the past? And what does this mean in the present?
I totally agree with what you are saying. We teach only one version of history and disregard all other versions that dont correlate. In a previous class I read an article called when Timbuktu was the Paris of Islam, and the whole thing was about how the rennaissance happened in Islam first, but we don't study that because it is a not western culture
The natives were not like the Romans, slavishly recording everything that occured, so that was difficult to the Europeans to fathom, this lack of historical record. Oral culture, however, is certainly not inferior--just reading contemporary works by authors like Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday are enough to illuminate readers about this beautiful tradtion.
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