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

The mantra about repeating the history one hasn't learned is true riot only for delinquent high school students and pundits quoting Santayana. But it has become by so much the dominant rationale for the historical impulse that we risk neglecting other reasons history repays study: Indeed, the two vast injunctions of the discipline--toward memory and against repetition--are more at odds than we typically recognize. All history is, ultimately, local, specific to a time and place and culture--and in that sense unique. The more one remembers the details of a story, the less clear its moral is. History is not a bin of aphorisms; historians are not Aesop-manques.

Among the other reasons to study history, a better understanding of the present is the most seemingly straightforward. We are at a certain place along the path; knowing how we got here can shake loose the impression that our current arrangements are destined, natural, and fixed. That the present came into being as a result: of the choices and desires of the men and women who preceded us implies the contingency of the present and suggests the malleability of the future. 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 two articles--one an original piece of writing, the other, a reprint from a neglected classic--are guerrilla raids on a couple of the more remote provinces of history. They describe, in turn, a forced march of Cherokee from Florida to Oklahoma conducted early in the 19th century and a sequence of letters between a Portuguese and an African king dating from the 15th. The incidents in themselves are minor, small craft in an ocean of event. Yet they illuminate the larger tides that capsized continents, and in their wealth of detail, remind us that history is lived by individuals, however much or little they are the authors of their fates.

The rise of slavery, the need to justify its self-evident cruelties, the rapidity with which these legitimations became accepted, the effect 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 revolve. Similarly, Jahoda's account is about nothing less 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 merely on a scholarly but on what was once unapologetically called a sentimental education--an education in the sort of complex and humane understanding that ought to inform our conduct today.

COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group