History?

So last week in AP Lit the class had a very interesting discussion on religion and history. It wasn't until then I really began to think about history and how it affects people today. At first, I thought that history was all about facts and not opinions, but I didn't realize that is has a lot to do with opinion. Depending on who is the person recording the history there are always several points of views to certain subjects and events. As for the religion part, I don't believe that there should be any additions of religion (christianity) to history. Not all citizens of the United States are Christian so how can it be possible that "America's founding principles are biblical." Futhermore, if the reasons for adding a more Christian view to history was to better history for the learners, why are key individuals of history being voted to be deleted from history alltogether? (ie) Anne Hutchinson. Also, if the religious views of Christianity is so important to the events from the past,why aren't the religous views of other religions just as important in making history what it is today?

Anyway, back to the dialogue in class, during the conversation we had as a class I realized that a lot of what we were talking about had to deal with the recent book our class has read, 1984. In this novel, the history mattered a lot to The Party. The Party was determined to change history according to how it would benefit the group. They believed "who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past." Therefore, as long as they were able to manipulate history in a way that the citizens of Oceanic would believe in' then they would have controls of the citizens themselves. The image to above, actually is a good example of how important power is to the Party. It is a good resemblance of the quote said above about how control is almost key to Big Brother and The Party. It shows how as long as The Party was able to control what their citizens were thinking about and believing in, they were able to control them.

I guess in the end, all I can say is that whether it was twenty years ago or twenty years into the future, the information recorded as history is very important to those who are learning it. If history was to be written in a biased opinion or through certain religious influences, it will dramatically affect those who are learning it. The students will grow up to have a narrow-minded view of life and they would probably be very easily influenced into believing in something that contradicts what they have learned since childhood. Anyway, I guess I'm done blogging for now so until next time my sixth period classmates.