FROM THE EDITOR: Erasing Facts Doesn't Alter Reality ...
... it simply fools us into believing that life is cleaner and more-straightforward than it actually is. And it undermines what makes us, as Americans, exceptional.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Email Martin
“Just give me the facts.”
In more than two decades of working in journalism, that’s a sentiment I have heard repeatedly from people critical of the profession and the news that gets produced.
But as a journalist who was first trained as a historian, I’ve always been acutely aware of the reality that “facts” are, at best, simply the barest underpinnings of any story. Because the fact is that we have either lost, or never captured, the vast majority of facts that make up the human story.
Consequently, the facts that we do know are more bone chips than skeletons, more broken branches on an unknown trail than well-worn highways that are mapped and known.
History — and journalism — are about gathering those fragments, piecing them together, and adding flesh. It’s an imperfect art, but done well it stands as a work of uncontested beauty.
Few places in our region are doing a better job of gathering the breadcrumbs of lost facts and telling a fuller story of our past than the Naming Project at Montpelier.
The goal is to restore to the historical record the names and as much of the biography of the 300 enslaved people at the Madison’s plantation — Montpelier — as is possible.
Among the people recovered to date are Ailsey Payne. What the project has uncovered of her life fits in four short paragraphs and requires only four footnotes. Yet from that we know that Payne was significant. She provides critical details to our understanding of the Lafayette visit, she was the Madison family cook, and she eventually gained her freedom and died in the 1890s.
A small patchwork against the backdrop of a man who left volumes of writings. But as thousands of these snippets are collected and shaped against the broader sweep of history we think we know, we often discover nuance, and entire narratives, never known.
Projects like this have dominated historical research over the past half-century, as historians and journalists have broadened the scope of people we study and the way they shape the telling of the American narrative.
This has led to a complete rethinking of the enslaved and their role in the American story. And it hasn’t come without controversy, as was evidenced by the 1619 Project.
But this approach doesn’t just force us to consider lost history. It also forces us to contend with the dominant history that we think we know.
One of the better examples of this has been the work of Edward Ayers, who created the Valley of the Shadows online project and fundamentally changed the way we approach, talk about, and understand the foundational elements of the Civil War.
Ayers used emerging computer technology to catalog all records in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania — two communities in the Great Valley separated by 200 miles that ended up on opposing sides of the Civil War
Why?
If we look for simple answers, we will be disappointed. Slavery. Economics. Race. Each of these is one part of the equation, but hardly the only one.
As Ayers wrote in What Caused the Civil War?:
There is no way to understand history except to study it, to question it, to challenge it. History does not fit on a bumper sticker. New evidence, new methods, and new perspectives necessarily change our understanding of history, and we should welcome revisionist history just as we welcome revisionist medicine and revisionist science. History that comes to us as nostalgia and fable does more harm than good. Honest history answers our questions only by asking something of us in return.
Return to the Past
Nostalgia and fable are precisely what Donald Trump wants to push us all toward.
Last month the Advance wrote about the movement to rewrite history as glorified fairytale as it is presented at America’s National Parks, and asked how it may affect the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, which includes Chatham Manor, Chancellorsville, and Spotsylvania Courthouse.
Today, we are getting a clearer answer to that question.
Last week, Muir Woods in Northern California became the first victim of this effort to blatantly whitewash and suppress the story of America’s past.
As reported by KQED in San Francisco:
In a statement to the New York Times, a spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Joshua Winchell, confirmed that last week Muir Woods staff had removed sticky notes that were added to existing signage in 2021. These notes were accompanied by a poster explaining the staff’s aim “to tell the full story” of Muir Woods — for example, by acknowledging the role of Native American stewardship in the redwoods’ history.
According to the March 27 Executive Order, the changes will remove things that “rewrite our Nation’s history” and “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
One wonders how acknowledging that Gifford Pinchot, who was key to preserving Muir Woods, had ties to the American Eugenics Society; or that John Muir, who the area is named for, used racist language detracts from the experience of those visiting the majestic sequoias buried deep within Mt. Tamalpais. How it paints America in a “negative light.”
More is coming.
According to a New York Times report:
At Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, the Trump administration is set to review, and possibly remove or alter, signs about how climate change is causing sea levels to rise.
At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the administration will soon decide whether to take down exhibits on the brutality of slavery.
And at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida, Trump officials are scrutinizing language about the imprisonment of Native Americans inside the Spanish stone fortress.
None of this is about protecting the Founders and the remarkable achievement that is the U.S. Constitution and the development of the U.S. as a dominant world power.
It’s about actively suppressing the full historical story. In short — actively rejecting the “facts” of the American story.
It’s about refusing to realize that progress is never clear, pure, perfect, or straight.
And it’s ultimately about refusing to accept that the country, and those of us who are the inheritors of its past, fits into an enormously complex narrative.
Capturing All the Facts
At a time when there are ongoing debates about teaching the liberal arts, and especially history, we are seeing in real time why it matters.
Learning to do history is to learn to craft stories of meaning in a responsible way with the facts that we have, while being humble enough — and smart enough — to acknowledge the facts we don’t have.
This practice extends far beyond the study of history, of course. It applies to data, to science, and most importantly — to journalism.
So the next time you hear “Just give me the facts,” remember what is happening right now.
The complexity and messiness of history is a reality, and heavy-handed efforts to shut down any fact that someone finds uncomfortable, doesn’t change that reality.
Anything less than working to capture all the facts is not history — it’s propaganda.
And it undercuts what has made America exceptional in its willingness to at least attempt to deal with all history. Not just what we want to believe.
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Excellent article!!! Thank you!!!