Confession time: I am a history geek.
I blame my parents. My dad, David, devours books on history, and not just one area. We have fiction and nonfiction books on military history, espionage, diplomacy, biography, overviews of events and micro-sized examinations of one particular item of interest.
Books about Eisenhower, Mao Zedong, Khrushchev, Washington, Dunkirk, Moscow…
My mother loves books about Israel and Ireland, as well as American history, and prefers historical novels.
Between the two of them, I’ve read Tom Clancy, Bodie Thoene, Bret Baier, Tom Brokaw… and that’s in addition to my own interests and reading: David McCullough, Jeff Shaara, Alison Weir.
So my college degrees reflect interest in both writing and learning and history.
And this year is an exciting year for someone like me… the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I wasn’t even a year old the last time we had something like this happen!
Many people thought we’d never get here… especially when our country has seemed like it was about to tear itself apart at the seams more than once.
Yet here we are.
Therefore, GANT News has decided to present a series of articles about the history of US… the U.S. and US as a People… a radical experiment which has lasted two and a half centuries.
As a nation, we are not old. Take a few moments sometime and do a Wikipedia or Google search about the ages of European or Asian countries. They mark time in multiples of 100, changing borders and sometimes names but continuing on.
But our history is not only made up of roughly 270 years (counting the colonial agitations prior to 1776), but ties into the history of those countries our founders came from, and before.
If someone were to ask me when the road to the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution began, I would probably hesitate for a long moment — because it began a long, long time ago.
I could truthfully point out incidents in the lives of our ancient ancestors who lived before Greece was an empire, which for all intents and purposes eventually had an effect on the thoughts of men and women thousands of years later, who were thinking of difficult ideas of what it means to be free.
I won’t do that to you.
I will begin about 800 years ago (briefly, I promise!) and try to quickly cover some important events prior to colonization and, eventually, revolution.
Thus, I must lay some ground rules for all of us.
As I said earlier, I simply cannot cover everything. You might have an event that, in your heart, is not only important but fun and interesting and I might not even glance at it. I’m sorry, I love it too. But please, please! Write it down and share it with someone!
Also, I can’t go into some things as much as I would like or as much as they deserve. I want to talk about the details of the Battle of Bunker Hill, but I can’t.
And I will get some things wrong. Even with all of the internet at my fingertips, I will misstep or forget. I will do my best.
It is also important to understand what history IS and what it IS NOT.
I once was involved in a conversation that at the time seemed bizarre to me. A young woman, college age, was arguing with her coworker at a convenience store about the Vietnam War. Her position was that the war shouldn’t have happened because the government of the United States should have known what would happen.
Her coworker and I tried to explain that history doesn’t work that way. She didn’t get it.
Historian David McCullough has made similar points. “There’s no such thing as a foreseeable future,” he said.
“You can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don’t know how it’s going to come out. They weren’t just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can’t understand them if you don’t understand how they perceived reality.”
It’s the story of us—the good, the bad and the incredibly ugly.
So, let’s go on a trip, back in time, and look at some of the things people did, not knowing what the result would be, only knowing that they had to make choices and hope that the results would be worth the hardship.
