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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 1 · pp. 14–16
This chapter explains what history is, why people study it, and how to think about it well. It then begins the story of the Americas by looking at the Native peoples who lived there long before Europeans arrived. Along the way it shows how historians ask questions and why the way we tell the past keeps changing.
The basic facts of the past stay fixed. What changes is the weight we give them and the context we put around them. For this reason, history works like a conversation between the past and the present (p. 14).
New questions from the present send historians back to the evidence to stress different things. Older textbooks often focused on elites, the people in power. Newer work also listens to poor and disadvantaged people from every generation, so it can show how ordinary Americans lived. Historians also look at transnational forces, meaning movements of people, goods and ideas across borders, because we live in a global society and need to understand its roots (p. 14).
Studying history builds useful skills: careful reading, creative thinking and clear communication (p. 14). It also frees us from our own narrow experience. Historian Peter Stearns calls the past a "laboratory of human experience." One person can only see a small slice of life. History lets a student see how many societies in many eras lived, made choices and reacted to events (p. 14).
Misconception: history gives simple lessons. A familiar saying claims that people who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is too neat. The lessons of the past are complicated and depend on context, so no one can learn a short rule and then avoid every mistake. What history does give is a broader perspective on the world (p. 14).
Misconception: all opinions about the past are equally good. History is open to debate, but that does not make every view valid. Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective. It needs method, rigor and perspective, and it must rest on evidence. Two historians can reasonably disagree about what a source means. An argument that ignores the documented record is simply wrong (p. 14).
Better questions give deeper insight. Compare these questions:
Questions about causes (why) and perspectives (how) force us to weigh evidence, and so they reveal far more about an era than questions about dates alone. Good questions do not always have easy answers (p. 14).
American history is too large for one simple theme. An inclusive approach keeps politics and power in view while adding four things: transnational perspectives, diverse voices, stories of resistance, and the making of culture (p. 14).
This approach looks for America in many places: crowded slave cabins, busy markets, packed tenements, and grand marble halls. It also looks in maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars and boardrooms (pp. 14–15). Poet Walt Whitman's image of a "barbaric yawp" stands for this idea. He described a voice that is wild and cannot be translated into one neat message. American history is made up of many individual voices that together form both a chorus and a cacophony (p. 14). The approach tells the story of all of them, not only the powerful few, and it avoids narrow boundaries that limit the story (p. 15).
"New World" is a European point of view. Millions of Indigenous people lived in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans came and called the land the "New World." It was new only to the Europeans. The label ignores a long human history of living, building and changing these continents (p. 16).
Native peoples were very diverse. Before contact, Native peoples:
Kinship ties linked communities across distance and time. Trade networks carried goods such as salt, pottery, shell jewelry and even bison meat from place to place (p. 16). Because of this variety, historians avoid talking about "Native Americans" as if they were one group.
Evidence of the past. Some of what we know comes from massive piles of discarded material, such as shells, which show how people lived. Other communities were careful to leave no trace, so the record has gaps (p. 16).
Cahokia as an example. In the twelfth century, Cahokia was one of the most advanced and influential settlements in the world. It lay by the Mississippi River in the area of present-day St. Louis. At that time its population was greater than London's (p. 16). This fact challenges the false idea that Native America was empty or simple. Large, complex cities existed in North America long before Europeans arrived.
Europeans' confusion. Many Europeans used the Bible to explain the world. It said nothing about North America or its peoples, so they were confused that these lands and people existed at all (p. 16). They had to explain something unexpected, and this shaped how they understood the people they met. This links back to the earlier question about how Native Americans and Europeans each interpreted the other's arrival.
