History Is Happening on a Tuesday

On ordinary people, the stories we tell, and living without knowing the ending

What is the first truly significant event you remember? Think about that moment. Where were you? Who were you with? What details linger in your mind?

We all have one: that moment when we realized something incredibly important had taken place. Then, for the rest of our lives, we have this core memory of where we were when we heard, watched, or witnessed that moment. Often, it becomes a connection point with others of a similar age. For my mother, it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When was it for you? Was it the Apollo landing, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Columbine shooting, or 9/11? Was the first thing that came to mind something entirely different?

Mine was the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989. My family was at my cousin’s house to watch a baseball game, something we did regularly. My sister and I were in the guest room watching MTV. One of us was almost certainly wearing a flannel shirt pilfered from our father’s closet when Kurt Loder told us that history was happening.

Until that moment—although my memory has since helpfully added Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” to footage it could not possibly have accompanied—history did not feel like history. What began as a completely mundane day is forever etched into my psyche. We did not know this day was significant when we woke up that morning.

That’s one of the things I love most about history. Nearly everyone we study was doing exactly the same thing. The people we now describe as having “lived through the American Revolution” didn’t wake up every morning thinking, ah yes, just another historically significant day! They woke up worrying about the weather, the harvest, whether someone was sick, what they were going to eat, and whether the person they loved was coming home. They didn’t know how the story ended.

We do. History can become a collection of dates, events, and famous names. We know who won, which governments fell, which battles mattered, and who became famous. The people experiencing it, living it, didn’t. They were living in the present, just like we are today, and someday someone will look back at the time we’re living through in exactly the same way.

They may read our letters, or, heaven help the future historians, our text messages and memes. They may look at our photographs and find the things we saved, wondering why on earth we kept them. Perhaps someone will hold an object that one of us treasured and ask the same questions I find myself asking almost every day at the museum. Who owned this? Why did it matter to them? What was happening around them? What were they thinking? What did they think was going to happen next?

That’s the history I love, not simply what happened, but the people who were living while it happened.

I wasn’t always a fond student of history. Blame the education system I grew up under, but particularly United States history was recounted again and again in short bursts of GREAT MOMENTS: the battles, the generals, and the founders. It was one-dimensional and mythic. Most often, it lacked anything I could connect with on a personal level. I preferred social studies, where we were faced with ordinary people, their cultures, their beliefs, and their average lives.

When I reached college, a student mentor advised me to knock out my prerequisites since I was technically undecided. She offered one piece of advice. Do not, under any circumstances, take anything with that history professor. He was notoriously hard and allegedly quite evil. A lifelong contrarian, I signed up and quickly fell in love.

Yes, the professor was demanding, and yes, when he raised his eyebrow at you, it absolutely felt diabolical. However, as he stood at the lectern and began speaking, the room faded, and history came alive. As I scribbled frantically to catch every word, he rarely, if ever, looked at his notes and spun a story. Suddenly, history wasn’t an endless parade of names and dates and IMPORTANT PEOPLE. Instead, it was people thrown by accidents of birth, geography, work, choice, or sheer circumstance into what would later be viewed as consequential moments. He explained the motivations, the complications, the tangled alliances and perceived allegiances.

Were my blue books for his legendarily essay-heavy exams filled with red questions like “What was that King’s name?” and “And the date?” Yes. Yes, they absolutely were. However, he could not fault my explanation of the cause and effect. When I learned to view history as a story, much like my beloved novels, it was suddenly a mystery, a psychological thriller, and a deep exploration of human nature all rolled into one.

Storytelling is a deeply human pursuit. From what we know, we, as a species, have gathered around fires, around bedsides, and in small groups and told stories. It is how we explain to the next generation who we are and where we come from. We share cultural tidbits, spiritual beliefs, and moral lessons. In stories, we recount history, explore memories, and invent a world we fear or yearn for. Importantly, the stories we tell are not always just about big events and very significant people. Often, they instead feature ordinary people placed in a variety of circumstances. They connect us to people, real and imagined, who we may never meet.

History is the stories we tell each other about who we are and how we got where we are. And yes, it is often written by the victor, though I do not believe that is always malicious. The truth is each person who experienced that important moment held only one part of the larger puzzle. Some pieces may survive in letters, diaries, reports, or stories passed down. Some are lost, intentionally or through neglect. The full picture, however, does not survive, and so we rebuild it from the fragments and try to make sense of it, unintentionally imprinting it with our own experiences, our own beliefs, and our own personalities.

In some ways, history can resemble an enormous, centuries-long game of telephone, except that occasionally we recover one of the original messages. Historians may recover scraps and paint a more coherent picture that is close enough to the verifiable facts that we accept it, but the experience lives only in that moment as it was felt by all of those involved. That is why historical interpretation can change when new pieces are located, when fresh questions are asked.

There are moments that feel consequential as they take place that eventually warrant a paragraph or less in a textbook. Others seem benign at first, but in retrospect become significant. The same is true of the stories we tell one another, the ones your dad told you about his favorite uncle, the ones your grandmother repeated so many times you can practically recount them word for word, the ones you pass on to your children, and yes, the ones you tell yourself.

When I stand in a museum and look at the handwriting of someone in 1806 telling his nearest neighbor about what the minister told him last week, I am connected, if only for a sliver of time by the thinnest thread, to a real person. As I circle the obscenely tiny gown on the mannequin, I may think for a moment that I feel somewhat in touch with the woman who once wore it on her wedding day a century ago. Objects, like stories, are conduits to connection. They are touchstones to memory and stories.

On my office windowsill is a very large metal skeleton key. At some point, it must have been painted because now, interspersed with the rust, are flecks of black paint. It was my grandmother’s. You may imagine that it once opened a huge wooden door in a family farmhouse or a battered trunk that traveled across oceans. Perhaps you think it once was clutched in shaking hands and secured a treasure. Long after my passing, someone will locate it in a thrift store and realize it is from a Home Interiors’ catalog. It has no monetary value and was likely mass-produced out of old rebar and questionable taste. When my grandmother passed, it was the one thing I requested. It had hung in her hallway for as long as I could remember.

Like the truly vile beige, mustard yellow, orange, and brown mushroom canister set my mother trotted from house to house, it has very little financial value, but it is filled to the brim with stories. Seriously, when our mother passed away, my siblings and I stared up at those hideous things, and each agreed that we absolutely did not want them in our homes. We stood there anyway, told stories about all of the times we’d nearly broken one, the chip that was definitely not my fault, and how much we all loathed dusting the damned things. Ultimately, we donated them to haunt another family, but the memories and the tears, we kept. Maybe decades from now someone else’s children will gaze upon them with their own memories.

They never have to live in a museum to be a conduit to history. Family and personal history have a unique value that I cannot understate, because stories remind us who we were, who we have become, and the journey along the way.

My grandchildren will likely never know the horror of the mushroom trend, but they will know about my mother. They will know their history… so long as we remember to tell it.