I often rail about the lack of interest in history, which seems one of the defining characteristics of most modern humans. (The lack of interest, not the railing about it.)
But is it modern humans in general, or particularly an American thing? I suspect it’s both.
I started thinking about this this morning because I recently returned to reading a book I started to read last year, but didn’t finish. I’m now getting close to finishing How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James Kugel.
Anyway, toward the end Kugel’s writing about some puzzling things about the book of Isaiah, and wondering why it was written/edited that way, and then jumps back to raise the same points with regard to the Pentateuch. That takes him to talking about how so much of the Torah started as short, etiological (his favorite word) stories told orally from generation to generation, long before they were put together in early Hebrew.
And I paused to imagine American families doing that. I couldn’t.
Oh, there are exceptions. Alex Haley said Roots came from stories his family told about Kunta Kinte and subsequent generations. But it’s generally hard to find examples among descendants of people who came here willingly, on purpose.
I think there’s something in the makeup of a person who decides to take a hazardous journey across the ocean in a frail wooden ship, leaving all he or his ancestors ever knew, that causes him to want to forget all that went before. I don’t get it, but I know that’s a thing.
Such people passed that on in their DNA. The ancient Israelites passed on stories about ancestors, and even memories of the switch from foraging to agriculture 10,000 years earlier (hence the Adam and Eve story). Americans — I mean deliberate, voluntary Americans — seemed to pass on forgetfulness.
I’ve traced every line in my family — save one, that of my mother’s father’s mother’s father, who created a dead end when he died during the Siege of Petersburg — back to the old country. But I’ve never found a single story clearly answering my biggest question about them coming here: Why?
Why did they pull up stakes and come here? Oh, I know all the standard answers from the elementary school — freedom, especially of religion. And if you were a Pilgrim, that’s a good answer. I suspect most people came for economic and social opportunity — a chance to get out of the box in which their old, established societies placed them. They came for land and upward mobility, or so I gather. Of course, some did have an anarchic streak that had to do with not wanting to be told what to do, but I suspect that was a side benefit, and wasn’t quite the refined sense of liberty that Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison left us.
I do have a hint from one immigrant ancestor — John Barton Wathen (the R was added by my branch a century later) came over as an indentured servant in 1670. That’s seems a clear indication of A motive, if not necessarily TH motive. It seems to have worked out for him — after his servitude, he acquired and passed on a good bit of land.
But I’d still like to have a chat with him. I’m glad that I’m an American. But I still want to know why I’m an American.
And you know what? As much as I know about John Wathen, I still have no idea what his life back in England (or perhaps Wales) was like.
Which makes me like most Americans. But I wish I knew much more…
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WHY do I ask why my ancestors came over? Because it’s so hard for me to imagine doing it myself.
None of my ancestors came over after America started looking clearly like a good place to be. They all (that I know of — I still have that line with nothing before the Civil War) came before the American Revolution. Some came right when Jamestown was getting established.
What little was known about this continent wouldn’t have sounded all that great to me — unless my life was REALLY bad in the Old Country. So I’d like to know some specifics about how about bad it was.
I suppose my ancestors had more adventuresome, go-for-broke spirit than I do. But, it should say, they didn’t have as much of it as some. Near as I can tell, all my DIRECT ancestors stayed on the East Coast. They were satisfied with what they found here, and just stayed. Some of my cousins went out West, my DNA matches tell me, but my parents and grandparents and so forth. They stayed right here. Which makes sense to me.
Some were so filled with restlessness that they just couldn’t settle down and be satisfied. I like Hunter Thompson’s explanation of that in his book about the Hell’s Angels. This last generation of drifters just kept going until they ran into the Pacific Ocean and had no more room to roam. So some of them, stuck in Oakland, started the Hell’s Angels…
That ain’t me, babe. Knowing that, I wonder how any of the folks who provided my DNA decided to cross the restless ocean into the dark void, leaving all they knew behind…
I don’t know about uniquely, but it may be more prevalent. There’s the whole “New World” vs. “Old World” thing, with leaving the latter behind. There is the flight from political or religious persecution, severe economic distress, or legal reasons. There is the pressure to assimilate, to leave the “old country” (and its culture, and the past) behind in order to become a “real” American. And perhaps many of the people who made the leap didn’t really fit in where they were–if not actual outcasts–essentially those folks who were restless and found it difficult to stay in one place, which is certainly a trait attributed to Americans in general.
We American have an odd relationship with our history. Interested, but not retaining much from what we are taught (which we relate to how we were taught … “just a bunch of dates”, etc.) A tendency to miss patterns and connections, which can lead to it being isolated from the present and the “utilitarian” view that history really isn’t useful in either the present or the future. Not to mention the often-partisan streak in how that history is understood, which may be linked back to the civic virtue of “making good citizens”.
Looking at my own family, I know little. It was not something my grandparents (on either side) wanted or needed to talk about, and that filtered down to my parents. You just didn’t talk about it. I found out more using Ancestry and came up with a few things that my parents didn’t know.
Yeah, I’ve always thought it odd that people call history “just a bunch of dates.” I’ve taken as many history courses as I could over my educational career, and I don’t recall a single test question that would be right or wrong based on which date you chose.
That said, you do need to understand the order in which things happen, so you can understand causes and effects, and what else was going on in the world when certain things happened…