Annals of History
You know how you assign random meanings and values to things? For instance, I’m willing to pay $14 for two pints of Coopers at a bar, but balk at the same price for an entire six pack. You get certain things in your head via context, and it’s hard to ascribe new meanings.
This is about history.
I’m reading Afflicted Powers by the collective RETORT. One of their arguments, briefly, is that the US had to put on the ’shock and awe’ campaign in Iraq (and the entire war, really) as a way of reclaiming US power over the creation of spectacle, which had been lost in 9/11.
At the point I’m at now, they’re arguing that the War on Terror is really just the next in a series of wars and other military interventions that have really defined the US since 1812, the only difference being that we have now moved into a state of perpetual war.
I swear the point is coming.
In this chapter they’re doing a quick rehash of various American conflicts - such as Jackson going after Florida, the Louisiana Purchase, the Platt Amendment, stationing of troops in Nicaragua, and so on. I don’t know why I had it in my head that Monroe was before Jackson, but it seems decidedly odd in my brain that the Trail of Tears was before the Monroe Doctrine. And Woodrow Wilson seems way more of a ‘modern’ president - in my mind I don’t view him as that far away from the present - but he’s only ten years away from the Roosevelt Corollary. Teddy Roosevelt seems distinctly in the past past.
In studying history you so often learn the timeline of a certain set of events. For instance, my understanding of American intervention in Latin America - which is a lot of the chapter’s focus and a lot of what I studied in college - seems in many ways completely separate from my understanding of American involvement in WWI, the Depression, and WWII. Many of these events happened simultaneously, but it’s hard to look at everything at once. So instead my brain has kind of created a number of separate histories, usually running parallel to each other and occasionally intersecting.
I’m not sure how much sense this makes, but it just seemed so odd to me that Jackson was before Monroe. More strikingly, the birth of the Monroe Doctrine is pretty much in Jackson attacking the Spanish in Florida. Because in my head, his presidency is sort of lifted out - he was the bad guy who stole people’s land and shouldn’t, in my opinion, be on the $20 bill.
I guess that’s the narrative problem of history - you inevitably leave out so many mitigating factors, small and large. It’s tough to account for the things people do and the reasons they do them.
We’ve clearly reached the inane part of the semester again.
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