This site is dedicated to the people who have made our world possible forefathers and foremothers. The people we are today is due in no small measure to those who preceded us. Daily they built their history just as today we build ours. This site is intended as a place for us to reflect on their lives and on what their societies provided to ours. It is intended to provide source material for class projects.
Professor Joseph Henry (1797-1878) was the first Secretary (director) of the Smithsonian Institution. He and his colleagues recognized the importance of preserving the artifacts of the American people. Our country, indeed our world would truly be a poorer, less fascinating place without their foresight. We must continue Henry's important efforts. Of course, most of us will not work at the Smithsonian but we can all gather our personal and community history. We can all try to understand the people who prededed us...the people who brought us here.
It is somewhat glib to say that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Or to say that you can't judge the past by the present. The former implies that repeating history can never be a good thing (oh no...we can't have Christmas this year...we just had one!), while the latter transforms history into a mere list of facts that is void of the human emotions that drive us all. William Sumner (1840-1910), considered to be Americans's first sociologist, espoused that our societal lives, that is to say, our customs and interactions, are created in response to the need to fulfill our instinctual behaviors. Following this reasoning I would define the study of History as the recording and understanding of the individual's, and by extension the society's dynamic activities and mores that are created to satisfy individual needs. History provides the current structure of our every day lives.
The scope of this website must be limited in terms of time-frame and subject. The universe is perhaps 13 billion years old. Written or recorded world history extends back 6000 years to the 4th millennium BC. And the written record of North American is barely 500 years, but even that limited range is still much too large for consideration here. The time-frame of this site will be limited to approximately 100 years between 1850 and 1950. The subjects will be the American Civil War and American music. True, both topics are wide ranging; that is what will provie us a rich supply of source material. The pages presented here will focus on the people, famous and not, who worked as individuals and societies to create their worlds.
The current day is only the smallest fraction of historical-time. It is the tiniest tip of the spear, but in that fraction of time it is for use to press forward, and to illuminate, to the best of our talents, the history that brought us to this moment. How will you interpret that thistory? How will your history be intrepreted?