Poll of the Day > Why do people tell me history is being erased?

(+) Yeah! (+)

My roommate (in his 60s) was lamenting that the 'white mandan people' and the 'kenzingtone stone' aren't taught history.

Well, then I read some history and it's all easily disputable! See, it's still part of our history, you just have to find a book lmao

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Probably because there aren't any white mandan people statues

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The past has indeed already been written.

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History is being lost from lack of teaching not erased, they don't teach a fuckton of interesting things from history regardless of culture, you have to look them up yourselves
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I actually can't find anything about "white mandan people" all I can find is a Mandan tribe from the great plains, so I'm guessing it's some obscure conspiracy theory on the level of the runestone you mention.

Schools already teach a lot of useless information, why the fuck would they teach conspiracy theories?

ReturnOfFa posted...

the 'kenzingtone stone' isn't taught history.

Probably because the Kenzingtone Stone isn't "history", it's pseudohistorical bullshit.
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Because the past is constantly being erased and rewritten. It's called "history." Colbert's notion of "wikiality" applies to some extent.

ReturnOfFa posted...

My roommate (in his 60s) was lamenting that the 'white mandan people' and the 'kenzingtone stone' aren't taught history.

Not sure what either thing is. I could google the second, but I couldn't find the first.

ReturnOfFa posted...

Well, then I read some history and it's all easily disputable! See, it's still part of our history, you just have to find a book lmao

Not for nothing, and likely not relevant to your friend's examples, but the disputation of materials is part of the overall trend towards re-writing history. History itself is highly malleable because there's always room for interpretation and facts can (and often are) arranged to promote certain narratives. Even within many of the younger PotD's lifetimes, it's likely that the popular interpretation of things they learned in school has changed today.

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A wiki for conspiracy theories would be interesting. Wonder how much money the founder could get.
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Zeus posted...

Because the past is constantly being erased and rewritten. It's called "history."

It's telling that some of the earliest written history we have access to is basically just people from thousands of years ago complaining that other people from thousands of years ago were getting the details wrong, and the "rebuttal" survived but not the original, so we don't even really know what the "original" version of the story was in the first place.

Or how we know for a fact that it was common practice in places like Egypt to try and deliberately blot out all mention of people you didn't like in the hopes of destroying their place in the afterlife.

Or that, for most of human existence, written history has really only been a record of the deeds and activities of the very top of the social hierarchy, because no one gave enough of a shit about peasants or slaves to actually write about them. So most written descriptions of culture, philosophy, politics, and other belief systems is almost always presented from the top down.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Or that, for most of human existence, written history has really only been a record of the deeds and activities of the very top of the social hierarchy, because no one gave enough of a s*** about peasants or slaves to actually write about them. So most written descriptions of culture, philosophy, politics, and other belief systems is almost always presented from the top down.

Everyone hated Nero. All he did was feed poor people and give them entertainment, he's clearly the worst emperor.

Of history is being modified. It's a great way to establish control.

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shadowsword87 posted...

Everyone hated Nero. All he did was feed poor people and give them entertainment, he's clearly the worst emperor.

Exactly. A lot of what the average person knows about Nero (which is almost entirely negative) was propaganda written by people who came after him and had a vested interest in demonizing him. Which is how a lot of our perceptions of historical figures are shaped. "Fake News" has pretty much been a thing for five thousand years or so.

Like you mentioned, Nero was actually pretty popular with the lower classes the entire time he reigned. Most of the attacks on him (both real and ideological) came from nobles who he overtaxed and suppressed politically. And there's evidence that suggests at least a few of things he was accused of later were complete fabrications (while other things may have been misinterpreted or deliberately exaggerated). The most famous thing most people "know" about him (the whole fiddling while Rome burned thing) is outright bullshit, and was deliberately invented as manipulative character assassination.

Again, though, history is written by nobles, about nobles, and mostly by the survivors, so we only get half his reputation and completely misunderstand the context of his life. Especially when most contemporary works written at the time no longer exist, and we're basing most of our assumptions on the one or two books that managed to survive.

(It's not even like this is exclusive to the distant past - there are multiple things that the average person will believe about Edgar Allen Poe that more or less exclusively come from an obituary written for him by another writer who absolutely hated him, who explicitly lied to make him look bad. And how many Americans are absolutely convinced that George Washington chopped down cherry trees and that Taft was so fat he got stuck in his bathtub? How many know literally nothing about Alexander Hamilton other than what the musical told them?)


Though as for worst Emperor... it kind of depends on how you define worst, even if we accepted everything about Nero was true (which it wasn't). Is an Emperor who was mostly a PR nightmare but didn't really harm or disrupt the Empire while he ruled a worse Emperor than one who was far more amiable but completely inept, presiding over the slow disintegration of lands that had been held for hundreds of years? Is someone who might have murdered his mother worse than someone accused of raping his sisters, murdering entire crowds solely because he was bored, and who tried to make his horse a senator (itself a deliberately misrepresented situation)? If Nero was the absolute worst Emperor ever, why is he NOT one of the ones who were actively murdered by their own personal guard for being ridiculously terrible?

What about emperors like Marcus Aurelius, who was apparently a good man with good intentions, but who theoretically destroyed a hundred years of relative stability and peace (and potentially contributed to the ultimate downfall of the empire) because of nepotism?

How should we count powerless emperors - like the ones who died during the Year of the Five Emperors (or the later year with six of them!), or the ones who were essentially nothing more than figureheads propping up a barbarian warlord?

And are we only counting the western Emperors specifically? Because the Byzantines would be the first to tell you to go fuck yourself if you tried to claim that their Emperors weren't Roman - and their Empire (and Emperors) lasted about a thousand years after Rome itself fell (which, keep in mind, means that the "Eastern Empire" as a separate entity actually lasted about three times longer as an Empire than Rome itself ever managed). And there were some seriously fucked up Byzantine Emperors (there's a reason why the word "byzantine" has literally become a term meaning "excessively complicated and manipulative").
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History has never been told truthfully period so that's nothing new and we know that because the history of how America came to be gets whitewashed to glorify people.

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