The American Historical Association has a webinar series called “History Behind the Headlines.” Checking the NPR homepage today has made it irresistible to me to do a bit of the same with this installment. It’ll give me a useful opportunity to say something about the old saw that “history repeats itself.” (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Not really.)
The big headline has an almost too-obvious connection to the past, in a way that can easily trigger profound despair: the outbreak of conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant organization Hamas. I think all of us have at least some tendency to just throw up our hands and say something to the effect of “this will never end” when we hear about the latest installment in this century-old seemingly-intractable tragedy. (I just used that word correctly; “tragedy” means something more specific than “really bad thing.”) In that sense, historical context contributes directly to a sense of fatalism and hopelessness. It can do that. This is the first opportunity in today’s headlines to gain something by pointing out that history does not, in fact, repeat itself. It repeats elements of itself, but no two situations are exactly alike when separated by time. Circumstances change. The people are different. The relevant technologies are different. The elements that are different are just as important, and just as influential on the outcome, as those that show strong continuity. I wish I could segue from that directly into a confident prediction of how this will turn out; if I could, I’d be working for a think tank and writing op-eds for the Washington Post. What I can say is, understanding the present specific circumstances—those things that are different from those at any point in the past—will be as important as a solid understanding of the historical context in working toward something better than what’s going on right now.
And yet, the history matters. A lot. Which is why every piece I’ve seen on this story begins with historical context.
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission, which regulates interstate commerce in the U.S.) is suing Amazon for monopoly, alleging, among other things, that it has ruthlessly punished competitors and even put them out of business (which is what unregulated capitalism will always do, of course). The expert consulted for the NPR piece points out a relevant comparison to the U.S. railroads of the late 19th century—which is where the term “railroad baron” comes from. In both situations, you have a private industry controlling a critical infrastructure upon which other large swaths of the economy, and the livelihoods of lots of people, depend. When that industry engages in the natural monopolistic practices of unregulated capitalism, everybody suffers but them. The historical parallel is valid. At the same time, though, it’s seriously limited; now—and largely in response to the Gilded Age—we have antitrust laws, the very ones under which the Government is suing Amazon. Here, history can serve as a useful reminder of why we have them, just as it can serve as a useful reminder of why we have vaccines.
And then we have the headline that resonates with me most deeply, largely because it comes out of where I was raised and where my families lived for generations—the Southern U.S. “Billboards supporting women seeking abortions are popping up along I-55 heading north.” Interstate 55 runs north out of Arkansas. You get on it to go from northeast Arkansas, where my wife is from, to Memphis, where I’m from. So, needless to say, I’ve gotten tickets on it in my day. But the people in this headline are going the other way—they’re mostly headed up to Illinois—which, if you’re not from the U.S., is where Chicago is. The photo accompanying the headline is of a young black woman looking resolutely at the horizon.
There was no I-55 in 1900; the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. But migration out of the South, away from repression and intergenerational poverty and toward something and somewhere that at least promised something better, if it didn’t actually deliver, was so widespread in the opening period of the twentieth century that it became known to history as the Great Migration. This is not the same country it was in 1900, and yet here we are, with people heading north, out of the Deep South, to escape the consequences of poverty, ignorance, and fundamentalist religion (which go tightly hand-in-hand)—in which the region is still mired, over a century later. And, here again is a highway—literally, in this case—offering hope and change to people desperate for it, just as there was, in some capacity, in 1850 with the “Underground Railroad” and in 1900 with the Great Migration north and west. Regardless of the particulars, people experiencing repression will find a path of escape, and other people will help them.
Again, historical context is necessary to understand this headline. Again, though, it is not sufficient; understanding the specifics of the current situation is just as important. The abortion shitshow in the United States wasn’t there in 1850 or 1900. That’s our problem. There is no legal chattel slavery in the South now as there was in 1850, so no need for a secret and highly-dangerous network of communication and conduct from South to North. The apartheid system we call “Jim Crow” was dismantled, so there is no Great Migration fleeing that—and there’s no longer a large enough black population in the South to mount anything on that scale—because most of them never went back.
The continuity is enough, though, to draw the parallels.
In other news, NASA is sending a mission to a metallic asteroid. I highly recommend, as a tonic to these other sorts of headlines, learning a little about the history of spacecraft. When Mick Jagger was born, there were no rockets capable of escaping Earth’s gravity while carrying a payload. The first ones were weapons of mass destruction. Now, we’re sending robotic probes to flying asteroids. So far, so fast. We’re really shitty, but we’re also quite remarkable. Both our past and our present can attest to that.