Mixed Up History
When I was in school, History never made any sense to me; we learned everything all out of order. For my brain to make sense of things I need a global view, then a sequential time line. I’m sure there is good reason why we learned about the Civil War, then WWII then, Ancient Civilizations, and then the American Revolution but I don’t know what it is. I decided I’d never teach my children history in such a crazy manner. I found an awesome home school curriculum called Green Leaf Press, and I supplied the supplemental books. We started with the Bible. Now just a foot note the Bible is not written in time sequential order either. When my children were preschool age we read through an Egermeier’s Bible which was a bible story book written in historical order. That really helped me understand the time line events of the bible. Green Leaf Press helped me learn history in order. Why does this matter? We have arranged our history much in the same way as my elementary school did by the use of social media. If we promote history, and arrange the facts just so, we can make people confused enough that they will never know what really happened.
So I learned history mixed up; I did one better for my children and taught them history in an orderly fashion. But then my daughter took U.S. History in College. What I found out was not the merry, happy, jovial history of our nation. The founding years of our nation were very different. My daughter took a college history class on line her last year of High School. Her Professor was from Scandinavia but living in Mexico City. What an odd way to teach an on line U.S. History class. My Daughter would ask me to proof read her papers, as her professor would ask very specific questions. As I read I became very agitated. I was taken to the movie 1776 in fifth grade, so I thought most of it was a happy affair with a little contention about slavery. It was quite the opposite. The newly established communities fought amongst themselves, many militias were formed, and the Political views of some of those wishing to establish our nation were somewhat like a cast system. Many advocated for the rich to be in power, instead of a republic, some wanted a dictatorship. What a mess.
What really bothered me was learning about the cult of domesticity. I’m sure you’ve all heard of it. When immigrants continued to come to America there weren’t enough jobs for people. At that time in history, women worked, just like men did. In the Cities women worked in factories under squalid conditions, many times jeopardizing their health and shortening their life spans. A social media campaign was started to suggest women should stay at home there by allowing their jobs to be taken by men. Now don’t get me wrong, if you offered me the choice of working in a factory where the lighting was so poor I’d go blind, or, to bake a cake, I’d start baking. The manipulation of social media to encourage women on being house wives sold the idea nationwide. Pretty soon it was accepted social behavior for women to stay at home. No one foresaw the problems that would cause. Women did not have the right to vote at that time. They had no advocacy in the public arena. There was no social security so when a woman’s husband died she had no income. If her deceased husband had unpaid debt, she was obliged to pay it. She would ultimately lose her home as women were not allowed to own property. And there was no life insurance. Somehow social stigma changed towards women as well and women were thought of as dumb, weak, and inferior. Eventually enough children growing up under tragic circumstances forced change for women so that women would have rights and be able to earn a living. That social engineering had some terrible consequences that were unforeseen.
The reason I bring this up is not to offend anyone but to point out that we certainly have a creative way of glossing over things. We humans seem to have a problem with wanting to socially engineer history so that everything is palatable. But history is not very palatable at all. When we learn about Noah, it won’t be cake and ice cream. There may be some hard truths that we would want to over look but we won’t understand our days and times if we believe everything in the past was all happy and jovial. When we think about Moses prophesying to the children of Israel, we forget the words he spoke were harsh words. He told the Hebrews that if they failed to adhere to God’s laws, they would be sent into slavery on ships. They would be scattered everywhere and have no home. Moses told them they would always be the most oppressed people in the world.
I’ll start exploring the bible times and mysteries and hopefully we’ll see many interesting things rather than thinking our biblical history reads like a fairy tale.
