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The fact that they were regarded as no different than a cow in a field in a nation that claimed to be for liberty is arguably a huge deal that deserves plenty of attention no?
Nobody here is saying it shouldn’t be a part of an American history course. The point is there’s not a lot of world changing achievements coming from African American history.
And the cow in a field reference I would also use to describe Russian serfs or Irish peasants or basically anyone whose existence was much more than subsistence farming. In history you study kings not peasants.
If you get your idea of history from Medieval sagas, perhaps. In history as practiced by actual historians, social organization, mass migrations, cultural and political shifts, adoption of technology, and other such things that necessarily involve large collections of people are fundamental. Even if we know few specific individuals from a social group, it definitely does not mean the group as a whole cannot have played an important role in history. Can you name a single Sumerian scribe? And yet we owe them one of the most important inventions in the history of our species. As the poem goes, kings deliver little if they don't have servants, soldiers, and quite a lot of peasants doing the actual work for them.
By the way, even actual horses are, in fact, extremely important objects of study in history, having played a fundamental role in many important events (cases in point: the Indo-European expansion, the Germanic migrations into Roman Europe, the Medieval agricultural revolution, the Eurasian steppe empires, the European conquest of the Americas).
This isn't the own you may think it is. Democrat voting history professors outnumber republican voting history professors 17.5 to 1. That leftists prefer to study the masses more than the elites, the quantity over the quality, is in line with their ideology.
In some other time the correct faith or race, or lack thereof, was used to explain success or failure. Today, unreconstructed marxists claim it is class.
Given that this is by a man who accepted an award difficult to top in how ironic its name is, Stalin Peace Prize, I find it difficult to accept his praise of the Labourer over the Leader as Stalinism examplified cult of personality to extent comparable with any monarchy.
But more on point, masses without a plan are a mob equally incapable of greatness. Only if a man steps forward and harnesses their power can a project grander than building a single family house come into fruition. This project can be good (defeating nazi Germany) or bad (occupying eastern Europe).
Great men, good and bad, don't pop into existence from thin air like the players in a world full of NPCs. They arise from the masses and their character is shaped by the same forces that move the masses, just refracted in a different way. Yes, most of them actually arose from the hereditary elite classes, but even the hereditary elites are rarely completely disconnected from the masses. That kind of disconnect is usually remarked on as unwise and fragile.
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This attitude is why Henry Ford said "history is bunk". Here is his famous quip in full context, that is usually omitted to show him as brute primitive.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-quotes
Studying heroic slaughters of kings and nobility and treating 99.9999% people who ever lived as cattle of the field was indeed what history Henry Ford was taught when he was young, and he was right to call it bunk.
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That seems a rather parochial view. In history of agriculture you would want to cover peasants for example. In the history of Ireland how the farmers were treated during tenancy was a driver to anti-English sentiment.
Likewise land enclosure in the UK has a huge impact on reducing the rural population and had massive impacts on politics, and the development of urban centers driven by the migration of peasants which had a downstream impact on the industrial revolution itself.
Inn some history you eant to study kings, in others how the peasants of the day lived is much more useful, interesting and indeed applicable to the average person today.
When i learned histories of WW1 and 2 we spent time on politicians but we also spent time on common soldiers experiences and on the impacts to the average person in the Blitz. In the history of the Industrial revolution we learned how inventions like the seed drill affected farming yields and traditions. Sure we spent time on Jethro Tull the inventor but also how those changes affected farm workers and agrculturalists.
The idea that in history you study kings not peasants is simply factually incorrect.
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