History as sentimental education: a preface to Holy Ground and the destruction of the Kingdom of Kongo

The mantra about repeating the history individual hasn't learned is true riot solitary for delinquent high school learners and pundits quoting Santayana. on the contrary it has become by with equal reason much the dominant rationale for the historical impulse that we risk neglecting other reasons history repays study: Indeed, the sum of two units vast injunctions of the discipline--toward memory and against repetition--are more at not divisible by 2s than we typically recognize. All history is, ultimately, local, specific to a time and place and culture--and in that faculty of perception unique. The more one remembers the details of a story, the les clear its moral is. History is not a bin of aphorisms; historians are not Aesop-manques.

Among the other reasons to close attention history, a better understanding of the not absent is the most seemingly straightforward. We are at a certain place along the path; knowing by what means we got here can shake unbind the impression that our generally received arrangements are destined, natural, and fixed. That the near came into being as a result: of the choices and desires of the men and women who preced us implies the contingency of the near and suggests the malleability of the subsequent time Nothing is bound to be the way it is; that this or that happened is not the same as saying that it could not have happened otherwise.

The following sum of two units articles--one an original piece of writing, the other, a reprint from a leave outed classic--are guerrilla raids on a pair of the more remote provinces of history. They describe, in revolve a forced march of Cherokee from Florida to Oklahoma leadershiped early in the 19th hundred and a sequence of alphabetic characters between a Portuguese and an African king dating from the 15th The incidents in themselves are minor, small craft in an ocean of incident Yet they illuminate the larger tides that capsized continents, and in their wealth of detail, remind us that history is lived through individuals, however much or little they are the authors of their fates.

The rise of slavery, the ne to justify its self-evident cruelties, the rapidity with which these legitimations became accepted, the consequence of this trade upon African societies; these are the larger issues around which Lopes' depiction of the correspondence between a medieval Portuguese and Kongolese king rotate Similarly, Jahoda's account is about nothing les than the expropriation and extermination of a people--or rather, of many peoples--but it takes place around long-extinguished campfires in the north of Florida in the spring of 1813 It is in the lived details these stories provide that we embark not solely on a scholarly but upon what was once unapologetically called a sentimental education--an education in the sort of manifold and humane understanding that ought to inform our administration today.

COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Commission upon Civil Rights

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group