A Brief Reminder

Many years ago, when my children were all still little, I was astonished to hear that Congress (in its infinite wisdom) had abolished Lincoln's Birthday (12 Feb) and Washington's (22 Feb) and combined them into one day called "President's Day." Even as this was being done, I was studying History at Ricks and then U of I in Moscow. I went back to Moscow for an extra year after four years of teaching.

An extra holiday was added in January, to commemorate Dr. King's birthday. I didn't mind that in the least. He was a magnificent public speaker, and that's about all the accomplishment a person needs to make to impress me.

I was bothered, though, by the government's public service announcements on both radio and TV which claimed that Congress had given us more holidays to spend with our families touring the nation and getting to know it and its history better.

Practically no one has done that, of course. Instead, the three day week-end has been invented. People don't think for a minute what the holiday is about. All they care is that it falls on a Monday and is comfortably contiguous with a weekend. Virtually no one who has graduated high school since the end of the eighties could tell you which great man was born on which day - including Dr. King.

Now, I started teaching in the mid eighties and it took them nearly 20 years of get rid of me. I might not have forced anybody to memorize the fact that Mr. Lincoln was ushered into this chilly world on 12 February 1809, but I didn't let anyone get out of my classroom alive without knowing the agony it was to BE Mr. Lincoln. I would read the bulk of Dr. King's "Dream" speech to my kids and demonstrate every gesture and vocal emphasis with which he gave it. After all, I'd SEEN it. I'd heard it when it was first spoken. I didn't know whether I liked him, but I did love the way he spoke.

I did the same thing with both the 1765 and the 1775 speeches by Patrick Henry. I quoted General Washington a lot and described in as much detail as I possibly could what he did for us, beginning as a British Colonial Major in the last of the four Colonial wars. I told them many stories about many great people, not so they'd do well on exams (that was just a pleasant side-effect) but because I wanted them all to love these people as I had come to do. I told them about Maj. Patrick Ferguson who was moved upon (I didn't SAY "by the Holy Ghost" but everyone knew what I meant) to lower the barrel of his famous breech-loading rifle when he had a perfect and easy shot at the tired General sitting his horse at the battle's edge.

This nation no longer remembers who did what, why they did it, or how their sacrifices and efforts blessed us. And most Americans simply don't care. I maintain that a nation which has stopped remembering its own History will soon cease to be unless saved by a Godly hand.

Alternative Endings

Most true stories have only one ending.

In recent years it has been possible to buy movies with a selection of endings. If the story doesn't turn out your way in one playing, simply make a switch and see it end in another way.



I've been wondering about that. Is it good for us? Most conveniences which have been invented down through the ages have been either obviously good or at least adaptable to good uses. Many such things were invented for military purposes and then applied to manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, mining, or some other positive thing. Not to imply that military purposes are always evil. Far from it! In many cases, one side in a war is demonstrably more righteous than another. And the Lord has explained that he uses the wicked to punish the wicked on occasion. Thus, the vicious Assyrians are used to fulfill the prophetic warnings to the northern ten tribes of Israel, carrying them away into slavery and scattering them to the various parts of the world, beginning in 722 BC.



But Assyria's own day of reckoning was coming. No nation which is in the habit of impaling tens of thousands of the citizens of captured cities can long escape the wrath of our God.



Then there were the Chaldean Babylonians. In about 585 BC they fulfilled more prophetic warnings by killing or capturing the remaining tribes, chiefly Judah (or the Jews) and carrying the few who lived through the invasion away into slavery in Babylon. But the Chaldeans, too, had to face their day of judgment. The Persians conquered them and released the Jews to go home and rebuild their city and their temple. Of course, the temple they built was nice, but it never quite lived up to the standards of the magnificent temple of Solomon, son of David.



So the Persians had been tools in the hands of God to save his people after they had been humbled. He promised that he would not forsake them forever, and He told the truth. But the Persians, too, became proud and aggressive. They spent 20 years trying to reduce the Greek city-states to Persian control. But at Marathon, Thermopylae (where King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans held them back for days!), and at Salamis the Hellenes proved themselves capable of uniting temporarily for the salvation of all Greeks. Their war chest was kept on the Island of Delos. So their military alliance was called The Delian League. But after the Persian wars, one city-state, Athens, tried to dominate all the money and some of the other city-states. And so they fell into the Pelepponesian wars in which the cities of Attica (the upper part of Greece) fought with the cities of the Pelepponesus (the ear-lobe-like part of Greece which hangs down in the south.)



Athens happened to be going through its short "Golden Age." That's when they became as democratic as they ever would. Athens had become the inspiration of the known world. It had the greatest architecture, the finest teachers, the best playwrights, and the most democratic government of any city-state then in existence. But they were defeated by the city states from the Pelepponesus, led by Sparta. This led one of Socrates' students, a fellow named Plato, to lose his faith in democracy. If it was such a good form of government, he reasoned, then how had Athens and its allies been defeated in the Pelepponesian War by mere monarchies and oligarchies?



In the midst of this humility, Athens had to become wary of a threat from the north, Philip II of Macedonia. For years he spread his growing empire by taking first one and then another city. One great Athenian gave a series of speeches warning that Philip was coming and that, if they didn't get ready for him, even the great Athens would be not only defeated as it had been in the Pelepponesian War, but occupied and would lose its sovereignty. This series of warning speeches became known as "The Philippics." And to this day any such speech of warning about a military threat is called that. Winston Churchill gave many "Philippics" about Hitler, but most members of the British Parliament didn't believe him.



After Philip's assassination, his son Alexander, about 20 years old, took over the empire his father had built and multiplied its size many times over. He conquered all the known world, clear over to the Indus River from which India gets its name. Hence his historical name, Alexander the Great. He died young. His generals fought over and divided his empire. One of them ruled over an area that included Jerusalem. The Macabee family, led by the great Judas Macabeus, led a rebellion against Greek occupation and influence. But Greek influence under Alexander had been so forcefully stamped on the world that a simplified form of the Greek language (Koine Greek) was spoken through thousands of miles of the ancient world, resulting in improved trade among all the cities and kingdoms of the ancient world. That's why scholars and attorneys and respected men of business, like Saul of Tarsus, spoke not only Aramaic in the land of Israel but also Greek. No one could be considered truly educated who didn't speak and read Greek.



No one admired and looked up to the Greeks more than the people from the little cow town of Rome over on the Italian peninsula. They wanted to be like the Greeks. They wanted to have their own little pet Greeks living as slaves in their homes and teaching their little Romans to speak Greek and know the plays and epic poems of Greece. Such slaves were called Pedagogues, the same name that private tutors in Greece had always been called. The science or art of teaching is still today called pedagogy. Of course, the best way to get everything you want from the culture you admire is to conquer it and steal it. So that's what Rome did. Even the Spartans were unable to stand up to them.



As Rome made an effort to conquer ever-outward, largely because of their fear of invasion from without, a fear that was based primarily on their horrible experience in the Second Punic War in which Hannibal Barca stomped around Italy for 15 years and couldn't be slowed down, let alone stopped, it eventually took lands that had been taken by great conquerors before. They took parts of Persia and Parthia, although those were always having to be reconquered. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had defeated Spartacus in the slave rebellion about 7 decades before Christ's birth in the land near Jerusalem, was surrounded one day in Persia, cut off from his men, and then cut off from his head. This was then boiled clean and scooped out so that it could be presented to the Persian leader. A legend says that he ladled molten gold into the skull of Crassus, saying, "There Crassus, you Roman bastard, you always wanted our Persian gold. Now you have your fill of it." Did this really happen? I don't know. I know Crassus died there. The rest of it makes a great story, but I have my doubts about parts of it.



Saul of Tarsus not only spoke Aramaic and his native Jewish tongue and Koine Greek, he also spoke Latin and had gained Roman citizenship to go with it. This gave him the protection of Roman law wherever he went. Thus, whenever he was arrested for preaching the Christian Gospel (after his conversion and his taking of the name Paul the Apostle) his Roman citizenship often got him out of tough situations. At least for a few years.



And who destroyed the Romans? Well, they largely destroyed themselves by abandoning their moral, political, and educational traditions, but their actual invaders were various Germanic tribes with names like Lombards, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, and lots of others. They moved across the Rhine River and took up residence in areas that had for many years been controlled by Roman Legions. The Franks settled the area that today is called France. The Belgae settled Belgium. The Lombards settled that portion of Northern Italy which today is still called Lombardia (Lombardy in English.)



Four of the Germanic tribes moved across the channel and too Britannia away from the Romans who had controlled it for going on 4 centuries. One of the Romanized Celtic kings who tried to stop them was named Artorius. From him we get the stories of King Arthur. But the Germanic tribes just kept on coming, even for generations. Britannia was eventually possessed by the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Frisians. They didn't necessarily bring all of their people with them. Saxe still exists in Germany. There is an area of Holland where they still speak Frise, a language very much like English. But Britannia became known for the first of these four invading tribes, the Angles. It became Angle-land. Or England, today. Later came the Norse or Vikings for about 200 years of annual summer raids in which they killed Anglo-Saxon men, stole gold and food, and took Anglo-Saxon daughters off to Scandinavia with them to help them keep up the Viking population. Eventually, the Northmen settled in England, at least some of them.



Then came the French-speaking Vikings (Normans) in the year 1066 who conquered the Anglo-Saxons and made them second class citizens in what had been their own homeland for centuries.The Normans added 10,000 French words to English. By the time another 500 years had passed, you couldn't have understood the original Anglish or Saxonish languages if your life depended on it. Because by now, modern English had been created. By now, people like William Shakespeare were learning to make it into beautiful poetry and great drama.



This isn't really the direction I intended to go tonight. I intended to talk about some TV shows I've seen lately and how I could have wished for them to end. Maybe I'll do that soon anyway. I just got rolling on the History and it kept on rolling out of me. If there's anything here related to the title I started out with, it is that History, unlike movies, usually has one ending. You can interpret it in different ways, but those who are conquered or enslaved or killed or promoted or enthroned tend to stay that way. There are no alternative endings.

Cicero Endorses History

Tomb of Andrew & Rachel Jackson

The Hermitage, Tennessee, summer 1990

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."

Cicero, Roman Senator

I always had this on the wall of my classroom, over by the door. Surely everyone saw it a couple of times at least during the course of a school year. It's true, you know. Children, especially little children, are so limited in their awareness of things outside their own bodies and their own experience, that they actually think that other people exist only when they are awake. That trait is cute in a baby. But we expect folks to grow out of that. When people in their mid to late teens still see others and the efforts of others as existing for their own entertainment, those children are lost as useful members of society.

How will new citizens become informed about the past which built our present? Less and less money is set aside from school district budgets for the so-called "core classes," so called because they are recognized as being basic to a person's function in society. History and other Social Studies are often thought of as disposable or as of secondary importance. This bothered me for the two decades I spent trying to instill an appreciation for History into the hearts and minds of people who were leaving childhood and about to be held responsible for the status of the nation. I had some success. A few kids over the years reported back to me that they sill loved History. A few more actually went so far as to go into History themselves, giving me the credit for their choice. Pretty thrilling flattery.

But for every one like that in our society, there are dozens who can't tell you the difference between the Revolution and the Civil War. The can't tell you what the Civil War was about. They can't name any major battles in any of our major wars.

I think I've spotted a key difference between them and my generation. Fewer of them read. Kids from my generation are likely to run across historical facts which repeat things they've learned, because they read lots of different things. Many kids today don't read. I can guarantee you that many of today's kids CANNOT read. Someone has said, "Those who don't read have no advantage over those who can't." How literally true!

Have you ever seen Jay Leno do his little segment called "Jay Walking?" He asks people on the street basic question about current events and about history or the constitution. They often betray an embarrassing lack not only of knowledge but of interest in these things. Once he even did the segment on the USC campus. Only a relative few of the students stopped could name who is on the one dollar bill or the five or the ten. They confuse one war with another, Austria with Australia, and the names of states with the names of cities. It's actually pretty upsetting for a patriot to watch this sort of thing, even though it's presented as humor.

They don't know who the vice president is. They sometimes provide the names of famous entertainers when asked for the names of important pubic officials. I don't know what will cause America's youth to become a proud nation of readers and informed citizens. Indeed, so many people today seem to be embarrassed to have much knowledge. They' don't want to offend the crowd which seems so bent on becoming the least informed generation to date.

There were many generations which came and went in this country which were populated by persons for whom demonstrating knowledge was as important as showing off physical prowess. My father-in-law has worked with his hands all his life. But he prides himself on his knowledge of political and military history, both during his 79 years and before them.

We need once again to take pride in doing that which is good. We need to be willing to be the one who stands out from a crowd by not believing what the crowd chooses to believe and by speaking up for that which is morally right. We need to be willing to sacrifice friendship and popularity for a clean conscience. History is replete with such people. If you read it, they'll demonstrate to you how hard it is to stand up for that which is right. Sometimes they lived to be cheered by the same people who once shunned and persecuted them. Sometimes the were not vindicated in their righteous attitude until many ears after their deaths.

The great Frederick Douglass, former slave, abolitionist, political organizer, and powerful public speaker, had a leonine head and fiercely piercing eyes. This is what he said on the subject of choosing the right without regard to what others think:

"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence."

We are taught to seek wisdom out of the best books. Biographies and Histories can often be among the very best. I know.