History Unit

            At first it seemed to me that the thinking behind History would be simple; you gather facts analyze them, and reach a conclusion about something. However, after reading “A Wrestler with the Angel” history became a lot more complex. Through the analogy of the survival of the fittest, Boorstin explains why certain historical documents are available to us and why that is relevant. Primary sources always seem important but the primary sources available to us might not have been the most important ones at the time.

            In BSS we are learning about the Portuguese colonization in Brazil and we have several documents that talk about the European perspectives. Some saying that the indigenous people were innocent, others calling them monsters – several different perspectives. It seems like these different points of view would lead to a reliable conclusion about the reactions from the first encounter between the natives and the Europeans. However, there isn’t a document narrating the perspective of the natives. They only had spoken language so having a document with their perspective would be impossible, but what does that mean? It shows that the idea we might have of those encounters is completely one-sided. An example of that can be found in “A Wrestler with the Angel” when the use of telephone is mentioned. Just like we don’t have the records of the telephone calls between President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, we don’t have records of reactions from the natives. That doesn’t mean that the telephone calls or natives’ opinions were unimportant, it means we can’t reach concrete conclusions about them because they aren’t available to us.

            Survival of the Victorious Point of View: The Success Bias also applies to this example, since we know about the success of the Portuguese in forcefully converting the natives but we don’t know about the failures they could have had in that process. In BSS we use the term ethnocentrism when talking about the Portuguese, but because we have no access to the natives’ perspectives, we can’t talk about their ethnocentrism. We have a distorted vision that the natives must have definitely been welcome, but some of their reactions might have been to their analysis of the Portuguese by their own cultural standards.

            I think this can also relate to our language unit; more specifically to the idea that people who speak different languages may live in different worlds. In this case we would be speaking “writing language” while the natives would speak “spoken language.” How can we really understand them if we have no access to their type of language, and how would they transmit their ideas if they don’t know how to access our language? In either case it puts them and us in 2 different worlds. We can’t ignore the fact that some of their stories might be passed down to their descendants and thus could be heard by us but if we use Boorstin’s idea again, even those stories that were passed on could end up being the less important ones. They would also be the stories of those who survived, which could be quite different than the stories of those who died.

            Taking this as an example, and taking into consideration what I know about history, it is hard to reach a conclusion on how reliable our perspective of past events is.