On Peasants and Kings: What’s Worth Keeping?

This week, scientists announced that a 15th century skeleton which spent its intervening years cramped in a grave under a parking lot is none other than King Richard III. With this revelation, dignity can be re-imbued in the human remains.  A finer fate awaits the bones of King Richard III than if they’d been just a sleeping peasant in an unmarked grave.

Henry David Thoreau, a contemporary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, famously wrote “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” but it’s in death, not life, that we render most men so. What society chooses to remember, high school students resurrect in index cards as epitaphs. What we forget, we cremate.

Garrett Casey’s ‘Bowdoin History: Barely Remembered’, published in last week’s Orient, raises some interesting points about the task of carrying a history. I recently had the pleasure of attending a poetry reading at the Curtis Memorial Library, organized as part of Longfellow Days. The poetry reading is just one of a month-long schedule of events. As students, pressed for time and stamped with a four year expiration date, we should be grateful that groups such as the Brunswick Downtown Association take ownership of the task of preserving Longfellow’s legacy. The college may offer its facilities, but a dedicated committee of local residents carries off the annual affair with enthusiasm and personal sacrifice.

Which isn’t to say that Bowdoin has shirked its history: after all, I chose the school for my own romantic notions of its past—enabled by a well-rehearsed campus tour script. Yes, Bowdoin history persists, but it was never in danger of not persisting.

When I consider my own family’s history, the question becomes not what I am willing to preserve, but—rather—what I am capable of preserving. So much relies on oral lore: A Jew who designed stained glass windows for the churches of Budapest, an Italian uncle who made his San Francisco fortune in “shipping.” Precious little is concrete: a Scottish marriage certificate, a New York Times obituary—but society says this is something.

The act of carrying history is as politicized as history itself. If a family has money, they might carry their history in their money. If that money breeds influence, they carry their history in the documentation of others. If they are literary, they carry it in their own documentation. If they own land, they carry their history in their land.

You could say that–at the very least–all families carry their history in their name, but a name is not the most atomized unit of history for America’s unwilling migrants. After all, Longfellow Days corresponds with African American History Month. One is a history sheltered by libraries, the other a reified history—a triumph.

Certain gender theorists have pointed to women as the perceived sites of cultural history, which adds an imperative to the “purity” of their womb. Politicians that legislate the womb seem to be of the mindset that their future is in there. A collective space existing within an individual? Not in my state of nature.

I cringed this week when North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) implied that gender studies doesn’t help people get jobs. I cringed when Naomi Schaefer Riley called a set of black studies dissertation topics “so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.” And if Tom Klingenstein wants to get his knickers in a twist over the lack of general American History courses at Bowdoin, I will personally mail him a copy of my AP US History test scores to use as a coaster for whatever expensive Kool-Aid he’s drinking.

The study of history shouldn’t be a fight for relevance: we know what our predecessors thought was relevant by what they preserved. If we are to lament the level of attention paid to our school’s documented history, let’s also recognize that undocumented histories are the hardest to celebrate. In the place of preserved voices, we study their absence in courses about identity that draw us closer to otherwise anonymous or marginalized experiences.

I consider courses that help me sort through my identity a part of my history, because what lives in me is not the visceral cushion of the next generation but the sum of history as a metaphysical, and inclusive, imagination.

I am a tenement house. I’m a dirt floor on an island I may never see. I am the scattered ashes of my past, present, and future.