History is storytelling. All the stories have heroes and villains and rousing good plot lines. Those who reduce it to dates and data points do a disservice. They scare off the audience and spoil the fun. 

History is like playing with children’s blocks: one account rests on another. Every historian is deeply indebted to the ones who came before: authors, scholars, and plain folk who contemporaneously recorded their lives and times in diaries, journals, and pictures — in pencil, ink, pastels, and oils. 

They say history is told by the victors; sounds right but it is all wrong when it is told to the exclusion of, or the dehumanization of, the losers. It does happen but it does no service to anyone. 

How long did we tell American history by moving from great man to great man to the exclusion of women? We told about the Whites to the exclusion of the Blacks, the settlers to the exclusion of the Indians. Told a story jumping from war to war to the exclusion of the accomplishments in peacetime. Let’s not do that. 

Now that we are wiser, we have Black history month and Indigenous People’s Day. It enriches us to tell all the stories because we all made this country what it is. It will not enrich us if we start to tell the story of the Blacks without the Whites or the women without the men. Let’s not do that either. All the stories have heroes and villains and rousing good plot lines. Even the bad guys and gals did a couple of good things; even the good ones made mistakes. Let’s tell all the stories….