notions of African American history during their schools’ annual perfunctory and token Black History Month activities.
Nonetheless, history—as memory, compelling and often unimaginable “facts” and details, the tales of influential people, artifacts that are housed in museums, and a record of consequential past events—does indeed fascinate many Americans across ethnic and generational lines. History is appealing in part because we all have our own personal histories that have profoundly influenced who we are and will become. Millions of Americans have used services offered by Ancestry.com LLC, and other genealogy companies and television shows like PBS’s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Genealogy Roadshow; NBC-TV’s and The Learning Channel’s Who Do You Think You Are? are popular. From family customs to national holidays to ethnic observances, historical traditions and rituals shape Americans’ everyday lives.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all think historically on a routine basis. More than eighty years ago, historian Carl L. Becker argued just this, stressing that “every normal person” knows “some history”—“the memory of things said and done”—and practices rudimentary forms of historical research “at every waking moment” in order to resolve quotidian impediments and navigate their daily work life and existence. Without “historical knowledge,” this former president of the American Historical Association maintained, peoples’ “to-day would be aimless” and “to-morrow without significance.” Ultimately, for Becker, “it is impossible to divorce history from life”; history “is so intimately associated with what we are doing and with what we hope to do.” Becker also suggested that everyday Americans received heaps of historical information from their own personal experiences and from countless sources and outlets prior to “imaginatively” refashioning and interpreting these details and “facts” to create some sense of order and truth.2 If Becker’s “Mr. Everyman,” as he contended, had trouble pinpointing the “mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation,” then it would surely be impossible for Americans living in the information-overloaded twenty-first century to fully discern or explain how they know what they think they know about the past.
But one thing is a reasonably safe bet. In the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century, many Americans’ perceptions of US history, including African American history, have not necessarily been shaped by professional historians but instead have been strikingly impacted by popular culture, journalists, political pundits and politicians, Hollywood films, and, of course, information from the easily accessible Internet.
Close to 20,000 doctorates in history have been doled by major research universities throughout the nation since the dawning of the twenty-first century. In 2014, as many as 1,043 PhDs in history were awarded in the United States, an all-time record at the time.3 Notwithstanding the efforts of public historians, historians who have joined the ranks of public intellectuals, and the authors of historical narratives that have made the New York Times Best Sellers list, very few professional historians have released books or created institutions that have profoundly, directly, and speedily molded the public’s opinions about US history.
Simply put, in this digital age, when social media, the Internet, and other forms of “new media” predominate, Americans, especially younger “digital natives,” do not necessarily need to directly rely on the interpretations offered by professional historians when seeking to make sense of something from the past.
According to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “average” American spends very little time reading each week.4 In the current digital era, as historian and archivist Abby Smith Rumsey has convincingly argued in When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, we now have “more knowledge than we know what to do with,” “information travels at the speed of electrons,” and an infinite numbers of “facts” that we can accumulate “sometimes get in the way of thoughtful concentration and problem solving.” As Rumsey stresses, it is therefore important that we develop a digital literacy with an effective digital filtering system that will allow us to be able to, among other things, “read with appropriate skepticism” and discern which sources are reliable and trustworthy.5 Similarly, in their recently published book on leadership in the United States following 9/11, Martin Dempsey and Ori Brafman highlight the challenges of living in what they call “the era of the digital echo,” a time during which “facts” are no longer debated. On the other hand, they suggest that “competing narratives” prevail and that it is difficult to determine “what’s real and accurate.” In this era, “information passes from individual to individual more quickly, but in the process often becomes distorted.”6 Developing digital historical literacy for African American history during the “era of the digital echo” can be an especially challenging undertaking, particularly for those with little or no contact with African American people or culture.7
Although many blacks’ views of African American history in general are informed by many of the same forces that shape whites’ perspectives of their history, generally speaking African Americans have inevitably cultivated intimate relationships with black history. During each major phase or period of the black historical experience, young African Americans have drawn great inspiration from the black past that is characterized by perseverance, resistance, and survival in the midst of mind-boggling oppression. Black history is a vital part of contemporary black culture. African Americans’ sense of history is shaped most by black institutions and traditions, such as the church, historically black colleges and universities, local and national organizations, and perhaps most significantly, the family. Since the era of emancipation, family reunions have played an important role in African American life and culture. History, specifically oral history, is the bedrock of these rituals. Epitomizing “living history” and functioning as direct links between the past and the present, elder generations share their past experiences and personal histories with younger generations. Younger African Americans are routinely reminded by their elders of the struggles that they, their parents, and their ancestors endured.
Some of today’s millennial and postmillennial black activists have explicitly situated themselves within a history of black struggle. Founded in the summer of 2013, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has actively sampled from past black freedom struggles. Though its founders have stressed how they are distinctly different from mainstream civil rights era black leaders, one of BLM’s goals is to “(re)build the Black liberation movement.” In doing so, those affiliated with BLM have marched, engaged in nonviolent direct action, and even organized a “Freedom Ride” to Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014. They have been inspired by who they view as being radical civil rights era leaders. For instance, the “Who We Are” section of their website pays tribute to civil rights strategist Diane Nash. Perhaps most important, in fostering a decentralized structure, BLM is modeled after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 2015, in the midst of a resurgence in black student activism, students at the University of Missouri-Columbia founded an organization called Concerned Student 1950, named in honor of the year that the first African American student was admitted to the university. Such examples of new millennial black historical revivalism are not uncommon.
Historiography—simply put, historical scholarship or the writings of historians on historical subject matter—significantly influences how historians interpret the past. While historians must analyze a range of primary sources when deciphering and making sense of former times and the thoughts and actions of personalities from days of old, they are also expected to engage with the interpretations of their colleagues—other historians. At the end of the day, professional historians strive to generate original and innovative renditions of what transpired in the past. The same of course goes for experts in African American history, a subspecialty and distinct field of US history that has expanded at an exponential rate since it gained attention in the mainstream US historical profession during sometime between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Influenced by Generation Xer and millennial black historians (what I broadly call “hip-hop generation historians”),
