How I Found History

 

AN ARTIFACT AND A BOOK

Two events really got me into history and thinking historically.  The first happened on a camping trip in the desert when I was ten.  The other occurred the following year when I read—believe it or not—a book.

The desert of Southern California is not a barren wasteland of sand dunes and scorpions.  Anyone who spends a day or two in the spring or fall exploring a deep wash that runs far into a mountainside would find plant and animal life everywhere.  And other treasures are to be found in old mining camps, long lost settlements and valuable minerals of all sorts.

I was born and raised there and can attest to the natural, although sometimes hidden, beauty it possesses.  Boys with father’s who take them out exploring and camping in the wilderness, like mine did, are very lucky indeed.  There are so many lessons to be learned when away from the micro-civilization of home.

(Blah!  Blah!  Blah!  Get on with it, Robert.)

On one camping trip my dad and I went for a hike into a long canyon that appeared to have been mined at one time.  A rusted old bulldozer still sat there with various metal frames and digging apparatuses strewn around.  We searched around for anything interesting when I spotted what looked like a small brass tube.  Picking it up and dusting it off, I held in my hand a large shell casing.  It was a lot bigger than the .22 shells we shot at tin cans when out on these trips. 

I examined the whole thing and checked the stamped information at its base.  It read, “G.M.S. 20mm M2 1944.”  WOW!  1944 meant World War Two!  Needless to say I was one excited kid.

My dad looked at it saying, “Must be left from the Desert Warfare School during World War Two.”  In my hand was a real piece of history.

Think About It Has anything you held or an object you examined made you think about history?  What about it was historical?  Did you want to find out more about it?

 

With that discovery, I graduated from a simplistic and vague awareness of history to actually wanting to investigate and know more about it.  Of course, it’s easy for a ten year old to get jazzed by finding something dealing with war.  But for others it might be an old photograph of their great grandmother, a 1958 Edsel Corsair once owned by your great uncle, or an antique milk churn used on the family farm a hundred years ago.  In practically all of us, objects and family heirlooms spark our historical inner being, or desire to be a student of history.  Unlike the words on a page it is something we can touch and feel.

Almost every kid vomits at the thought of the dreaded book report!

In sixth grade Mr. Spaatz (one of the great elementary teachers of all time) required us to do a book report on something historical.  Remember this is pre-internet, Google search times, so you had to actually read a book that you more than likely checked out from the library.  So off we went to visit Margaret White Elementary’s diminutive archive of knowledge.  I headed straight to the section on World War Two.  My Dad was a former Marine and I had an interest in the Pacific side of the war so I focused on that.  I scanned book after book until I came across Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, a war correspondent. 

I picked the book because the battle for Guadalcanal was the first offensive by the United States to liberate territory being held by Japan.  What I didn’t expect was the rawness of detail and descriptions of the battle.  While the visions of Vietnam and the 20mm shell were transformed and glorified in my mind, like a mist hiding the reality of war, this nook laid bare the truth.  Tregaskis described the bloody “Bonsai!” attacks at night.  And the piles of dead Japanese soldiers five to six feet high that emerged with the rise of the morning sun. 

Historical realities can be shocking and as fanciful as the most creative, mind-blowing fiction ever written.

History written well should flow like a great novel.  While Guadalcanal Diary is filled with lots of data and follows the battle chronologically from start to finish, it describe the human side—the pain and suffering and great heroism.  Maybe that’s because it was written by a journalist and not an academic historian (no insult to the academicians intended).   The book spoke to me, and I have been a World War Two junkie ever since.

Think About It Have you ever read something that “spoke to you?”  What about it was special?  How was it written?  Has a historical work ever spoke to you?  Why or why not?

 

For others it might not be a war or battle, but it might be the history of music, art, secret societies, cows, the Hopi tribe, or whatever that speaks to them.

“Listen.  Do you hear it?  It’s the past.  I have one, you have one, your neighbor has one.  Listen to it and enjoy.  What is it saying to you?”