...To current events.
A couple of things I came across recently have made me question whether people living in the US have a fundamentally different way of thinking about what constitutes recent history, and what might be called ancient history, or just things that occurred 'a long time ago'.
The first was an article written by a young woman that I read on Medium about certain themes in 'ancient' literature. What the article was actually about was medieval and renaissance literature, which the writer appears to think of as periods of 'ancient' history. The second was the idea I've seen in a few threads here on CF that the period of slavery in the US happened so long ago that it no longer has any relevance.
This last idea is worth discussing, I think. As a European, I tend to see history as stretching back in one unbroken line (which is indeed what it does) to the very earliest times we know anything about. Everything that ever happened in any significant way had an effect on everything that came after it. To me, that seems obvious - am I wrong? I have spent most of my adult life living in the UK, in England specifically. The dual influences of the classical world and the Germanic/Nordic world are obvious and widespread in English society, thinking, language - pretty much everything. It is not difficult to see how major events in history have shaped the way the English see themselves and how English society functions, 1066 (and all that), the great plague, the subsequent peasants revolt and so on and so on. All of these historic influences come together to inform the perceptions and prejudices of the average person in the street. Again, this seems obvious.
Slavery was common in the US during what was in England the Victorian era - of course slavery was effectively exported to the US from England and other European countries, via colonialism, so this isn't about apportioning blame in any sense, just about things that happened - but wasn't part of most people's lives actually in England at that time. But that same period was tremendously influential on English society and how English people see themselves in all kinds of ways that are absolutely still relevant to how that society functions now. A society and its history are ineluctably bound to each other, what society is now in any country is what previous actions and events have made it. Again, this seems blatantly obvious.
It does to me, anyway, but it does seem that maybe this way of thinking isn't so common or regarded as obvious in the US - ? Is that true? To me, the Victorian period was really not all that long ago, in historical terms. Slavery in the US ended, as I understand it, in the late 1800s, there were laws in place that defined black people in some parts of the US as unequal citizens up until the 1960s, and quantifiable social prejudice continued into the 1970s. None of this is ancient history, but the view that none of this has any relevance today, with regard to the current situation as much as the wider picture of race relations in the US, seems to be quite common.
That's my impression in any case, and it is just an impression, so I'd be interested in hearing what people living in the US think about it. The US is after all a very young country and so a different understanding of history, and different conceptions of what constitutes ancient history, are explainable.
