What is history? If you grew up when I did, history was likely taught as a series of boring sets of dates and names. Very American- and European-centric, and exceedingly white male dominated. Of necessity for time, history taught in grade school and high school was condensed to a subset of that.

Even allowing for that condensing of events, history generally came across as series of “great men doing great things”. This U.S. president did this thing, this rich guy did this thing, this general defeated that general in a battle. Some of that is self-promotion, some of that is “history is written by the victors”, and some is information lost over time, but much of it is simply an accepted but distorted view of things.

The reality of history is far more intricate, and far more interesting. A president may have signed a bill into law or started a war or given a speech, but it was countless unnamed people who made that thing happn. A rich person did things of note, but much of the actual work was probably done

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