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The history we thought we knew

Every November, in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, my school staged an annual exercise in historical research, creative costuming, and childhood terror.

We called it Great American Week.

I loved the research. I loved writing the speeches. But eventually somebody expected me to dress up as a historical figure and recite the whole dang speech from memory.

There were prizes for the best costumes and speeches. Because apparently making children dress like eighteenth-century Americans and recite speeches wasn't sufficiently terrifying. We needed winners and losers, too.

The girls had a fairly predictable assortment of historical celebrities. Betsy Ross. Abigail Adams. Dolley Madison. A handful of others.

I have absolutely no idea whom I portrayed over all those years.

I remember getting physically sick at the prospect of memorizing the speech and then reciting in front of the whole class — from memory.

I don't mind speaking in front of people. Give me notes or a script and good luck getting me to sit down.

But memorization? My mind goes blank. I lose my place. The words simply disappear.

It's a lifelong talent. To this day, I don't know all my multiplication tables. Sixes and eights remain mysterious territory. Fortunately, pencils and fingers were invented.

I hated half of Great American Week.

But I never stopped loving history.

Beyond the textbook

There's only so much American history a teacher can cover in a school year. Centuries of wars, migrations, political arguments, inventions, economic upheaval, social movements, and human lives must be packed into a relatively small number of pages.

We learned about events that changed the country without necessarily having time to examine all the people involved, what led to those events, or what followed.

And sometimes the familiar stories left out people who deserved to be remembered.

Take Dolley Madison, one of those perennial Great American Week characters.

Many of us learned that she saved George Washington's portrait as the British approached Washington in 1814. What I don't recall learning was who took it down. Paul Jennings, an enslaved teenager working in the White House at the time, later wrote that John Susé, the doorkeeper, and Magraw, the president's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon.

Same event. A fuller cast of characters.

That doesn't mean everything we learned was wrong or that we were intentionally misled.

Although I can't help but wonder how I've lived barely two hours from Tulsa since 1989 and only recently learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, white mobs attacked Tulsa's prosperous Black Greenwood neighborhood, known as Black Wall Street, killing residents and burning homes, businesses, and churches.

I can get angry about what I never knew, and wonder why I didn't know it. There's good reason to ask those questions.

But I've found it easier, emotionally, to keep exploring. To follow the stories I didn't know existed, or return to the ones I thought I understood and discover how much I'd missed.

The books I keep coming back to

I've spent years reading Robert Caro's four enormous volumes about Lyndon Johnson.

Years. Literally.

I finished them, and every so often I return to a chapter or section when something reminds me of an event, a political battle, or a person Caro described.

I've also read accounts of Johnson by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Robert Dallek.

They're looking at the same complicated man, often examining the same events, but they don't always interpret him the same way.

I don't need every historical figure sorted into the good-guy or bad-guy column. I'd rather understand how someone could accomplish something extraordinary and still make decisions with terrible consequences.

Or how an event celebrated as a triumph by some could be experienced very differently by others.

And the books themselves change for me as I revisit them. Of course, the words haven't changed. I have.

Something I barely noticed years ago can make my brain go, uhhhh. New rabbit hole here. Let's chase the story! I have different experiences, different concerns, and sometimes entirely different questions.

I rarely feel obligated to start at page one and march through every chapter of a history book. Sometimes I want one essay, one chapter, or another look at an argument I remember.

This summer I started reading Jill Lepore's These Truths, her sweeping history of the United States.

I'll read a few pages of These Truths, encounter a detail or question I can't leave alone, and go looking for more.

I rarely emerge with an answer.

Sometimes I emerge with six more questions and another book on my reading list.

Meanwhile, back in 2026

We're 7 days past the midterm elections.

We all have opinions and predictions about what's next. After a tumultuous ten years — pandemic, the end of one war and the start of another, and more natural disasters than I can count — I'm not sure I can be shocked by a headline anymore.

Turn on 24-hour news and you can find somebody ready to explain the consequences of every development, shaped to match their brand's narrative. Where did the concept of either, or, and we don't know curl up and die?

Cable news has discovered that the end of civilization is excellent programming, provided civilization agrees to end just after the commercial break.

I don't have any appetite for spending my days in a state of manufactured urgency.

There are enough genuinely frightening things in ordinary life. Illness. Death. Money worries. The price of insurance. The next massive weather system unlike any we've ever seen before. The uncertainty of what comes next.

I don't need somebody telling me to be terrified every fifteen minutes.

But I do want to understand what's happening.

That's one reason I keep returning to history.

When somebody announces that we're living through an unprecedented political crisis, I want to know whether that's true.

What happened the last time a president faced a hostile Congress? Presidents and Congress have been at odds plenty of times before. Midterms are gonna midterm.

How have earlier generations responded to economic uncertainty? I can ask my own mother what life was like in Depression-era rural Northeast Arkansas, with no electricity, no running water, and cotton to hoe on another man's land.

And what happened to the people who had little say in what happened to them? This part is no fun, but it's a necessary one.

A history book can't tell me what's going to happen next any more than a loud talking head getting paid way too much money for a hot take every hour.

The people who lived through earlier upheavals didn't know how their stories would turn out, either. But their experiences can help me examine the claims being made about mine.

I'm curious: Has a history book, biography, or historical novel ever changed how you understood an event—or helped you look at something happening today a little differently?

Hit reply and tell me what you read. I'd love to know.

Reading history doesn't necessarily make the present less frightening. It helps me decide what deserves my fear, my attention, or my action.

Sometimes historical perspective reveals that today's supposed unprecedented catastrophe has plenty of precedents.

Sometimes it reveals that something genuinely dangerous is happening.

And sometimes it exposes how a decision made generations ago is still shaping who can afford a home, obtain healthcare, vote, or build a secure life.

That's not escaping the news. That's refusing to let the news dictate the entire meaning of what's happening.

— Tracy “Not Dressing as Betsy Ross for Thanksgiving” Winchell

P.S. Hey, this is my lifelong friend Vic. Have a look at his work!

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