Americans must stop judging history by modern standards and realize that what they criticize still exists, British historian Jeremy Black said at an event hosted by the Center for Military History and Grand Strategy on April 10.
“Neither the British nor the Americans saw their global influence as resting essentially on control over territory,” Black said.
Black is the author of more than 100 books and specializes in 18th-century British and American political and military history.
Black said American imperialism appeared different to people from other nations at the time as well.
“Now, you could argue if you were a Native American or a subject of the British Crown living in Canada, you would have seen America as a very imperial power and, functionally, you would probably have been right,” Black said.
Sophomore Ava-Marie Papillon said Black’s lecture explained why people today should avoid chronological snobbery, or thinking the past is automatically inferior.
“Even though we think that human values and nature are being constantly improved, human nature itself has not changed, only the historical context,” Papillon said.
Black said people view all aspects of imperialism as evil without considering the motivations of the period.
“The ideology and understanding of American power, in that context, was one in which what you were going to do as you expanded was not to create colonies of the existing states,” Black said. “But what you were actually going to do is create new states. And that was a very important principle of the United States, that it was going to spread the model of the individual states as self-governing bodies.”
Americans have no respect for their own past because they judge it by modern standards as a result of their belief that people are better now, according to Black.
“We trash our past,” Black said. “In trashing the past it is obviously easiest to associate it with values that, today, are regarded as abhorred. The idea of ruling other people is regarded as abhorred. Well, it may well be so today, but that doesn’t mean that it necessarily was in the past.”
Freshman Grace Canlas said judging the past will not accomplish anything and Black’s lecture emphasized how people fail to see the reality of history today.
“War and conflict are part of our world and we can’t expect to engage in the world in an idealistic manner and ignore those realities,” Canlas said. “There is a necessity to study military history in order to be prepared for conflict.”
Black said Americans should look at history in a different light to properly understand it.
“One of the important aspects of history is the idea of history as a trust between the generations, not that the people of today or tomorrow are expected to believe that we are necessarily great people,” Black said. “But they should try and understand why people did things, rather than automatically rejecting them.”
