History is Pop Culture

[Drake Glau]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJNVgCHLR-k

History is Pop Culture, the history we all know and love is just what the people who recorded history decided to record. Well, this could mean that the history we know is simply the most popular stories of the time. In the video he mentions a few examples such as Adrian Bissel, which I feel like no one knows about but should

Go go discussion

Why are we taught the "popular" history, and not what really happened?

Should we change and teach the "facts"? I mean, I don't want to learn false facts, or petty facts that are somehow shadowing the more important stuff.

Are these history recorders right in what they do? Recording history of someone who didn't do much and then the people doing all the big stuff don't get noticed...

[Minuet]

I'm surprised nobody replied to this yet! haha

I actually thought about that several times. Maybe everything we're taught is a lie, but how can we be sure? The first example that comes to mind is the Jahiliyyah era; nobody, and I mean nobody, recorded their history, so how did we know how were people then, and what their lifestyle was like? The one main source for all that was poems. Poetry was a popular trend back then, and the poets would speak of all these different aspects of their lives. For example, Khansa'a and her brothers' death in some war. Or Antar ibn Shaddad, and how his poems hinted at the bedouin life most people lived (moving from oasis to oasis, etc.). I feel like the only history that fully convinces me is history similar to that...you know, not what people who never even lived at that time write, but what we can infer from actual texts of that time. Then again, all of those texts could be texts that we're forced to see, with many other texts lying in the dark. One can never be too sure, but like I said, the only way I think anyone can ever be sure is just to infer from evidence at that time, and make sure of the source.