Ask people why we teach history, and some people will likely give you the answer, “So that we don’t repeat the past.”  Although this innocuous answer doesn’t do justice to the discipline of history and the scope of the Social Studies, I think most would agree with it to some extent.

So what happens when we forget history, and are we moving in a direction where much of the lesser known stories of history will are being forgotten?

The Internet: The Source of Information

Tell a student to research a topic, and his first destination will not be a card catalog.  It will be the internet.  Chances are, it will be Google.

Of course, the internet and computers can still tie into libraries.  Most (all?) libraries now use electronic card catalogs, and Google has gone to great lengths to digitize and store the collections of some libraries.

Still, the library seems to have diminished in its role as the repository for research and information.  For many people, the library is only useful insofar as it is connected to the internet.

For some things, that’s ok.  The internet can be a great source of information.  Wikipedia, with all its faults, can be a great starting point for preliminary research.  Blogs and newspaper archives can provide information about recent events.

But what if some things don’t make it to the Internet?

Making the Move from Print to Bit

People tend to write about the things they enjoy, the things their passionate about.  If an event is seen as important by a lot of people, you can safely bet that a lot of people have written something about it online.  Some of this will be inane garbage, and some will be useful information.

But it will be recorded online.

The other day, I had an interesting thought about how you can measure how popular or important certain historical events or persons are viewed - check how well they’re represented on the Internet.  If people find the event important, they’ll migrate information from the old print resources to the internet; if not, it’ll stagnate away in the print archives of a research library somewhere.

For example, searching Google for “Declaration of Independence”  brings up just under 4 million hits and you can find 1,630 relevant movies on YouTube.  American Civil War returns 13 million Google hits and its the topic of about 3,000 YouTube movies.

I guess you could say they’re both pretty popular.

What About Some Less… Pivotal Events?

I recently introduced my students to the topic of the Kent State University shootings in 1970.  I hate the way the 1960’s and 1970’s are elided in the curriculum, so I try to reference them as often as possible and make the students familiar with some of the more momentous events of those decades.

In this case, I connected it to the American Revolution by drawing a comparison with the Boston Massacre.

Naturally, I did a little research for extra information and resources I could use in class.  “Kent State” Shooting in Google returns a little over 3 million hits and there are about 2,000 YouTube videos about Kent State.  Many of these are photo montages put to the song “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young - two of which I played in class.

That’s a pretty impressive online resume.  The Kent State shootings certainly have a place in the American story, and as information has migrated to the Internet people have not let it go by the wayside.

I then looked for some information on a related topic - the Jackson State shootings.  Ten days after the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State, Mississippi State Police killed two students at a historically black college - Jackson State.  This was big news at the time, and Nixon mentioned it specifically (along with Kent State) when he announced the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest.

Yet today it’s all but forgotten.  My students have certainly never heard of it.  I knew nothing of it until I came across it in my research about Kent State last year.

This year, I wanted to look further into the events at Jackson State.  Yet there’s very little information available on the Internet.  “Jackson State” Shooting returns 41,500 Google hits.  Then try “Jackson State” Shooting -Basketball to weed out the sports stories and you’re left with less than 15,000 hits.  YouTube?  There was one video related to Jackson state.

That’s a heckuva discrepancy between Kent State and Jackson State.  If you like numbers, there is 1/20th of one percent as many pages/videos about Jackson State as there are about Kent State.

Are We Forgetting…?

I’d say so.  At the time, Jackson State was a big splash.  It may not have been as big as Kent State, but it certainly grabbed the attention of the nation and the President briefly.  Yet today the information has been migrated to the Internet much more slowly.

Here’s another example.  We’ve all heard about the Holocast.  Who could miss 11 million people being murdered?  It only returns about 23 million hits on Google.

What about the mass enslavement and genocide of people in the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium?  Brings back about 40 to 50,000 hits (Congo Genocide brings back many more, but a lot of those seem to be about the current possibility of a genocide there).

Despite being an international scandal at the time and the recent publicity it received by the book King Leopold’s Ghost, it isn’t a topic of discussion today.  [Note: Great book, btw]

Want an even more obscure example?  Try the genocide of the Herrero people in Africa by Germany.  It wasn’t as scandalous as Leopold’s escapades, but it was devastatingly successful.  90% successful.  Today it resides in old newspaper clippings and academic works.  The all powerful Google returns a paltry 5,000 results about the Herrero genocide.

What Do We Do?

Spread the word.

If it really is important that we don’t “forget” what happened, then this is a great motivating factor.  Pivotal events in human history are slipping by the wayside, eclipsed by 24-hour news cycles and the few historical events that still have a mystique about them.

This realization has inspired my latest project.  I’m going to leave it up to my kids exactly what we do, but their task is to spread the word about Jackson State.  Research, write, and publish.

Look for that number of Google hits to rise, and hopefully the YouTube hits, too.