Looking at the Complete Powerless to the Powerless

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Throughout history most of the world’s documented accounts have been interoperated by the powerful elites. History is the story of mankind; therefore like most stories, history has two perspectives. After the end of the Second World War, historians began looking to other ways of analyzing history. With the rise of the hippie movement, Vietnam War, women’s rights movement, civil rights movement, and the cold war historians started questioning how, why, and what caused society to get like this. The consensus movement was started as historians first observed the primary sources of the outsiders of society. This ultimately led to authors like Dan Richter, Woody Holton, and Walter Johnson who all look to the opposite point of view through historical events. In order to teach history correctly, we as future historians must teach a two sided interpretation of both the powerful and the powerless. Ultimately by understanding the loser’s suffrage in society that is proposed in Dan Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country,” and Walter Johnson’s Soul By Soul; as well as the outsider point of view as described in Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution; and Tyler Anbinder’s and Vincent DiGirolamo’s articles contributed to the film “Gangs of New York, we can understand how their beliefs, culture, and lives were affected by the powerful. This essay is not a novel of the history of the outsiders themselves, but a critique on how history should be studied by looking at the author’s way of using primary sources and the outsiders’ perspective on society. IN THE ESSAY I WILL BE LOOKING AT THE COMPLETE POWERLESS TO THE POWERLESS Dan Richter, a historian out of the University of Pennsylvania has followed the consensus mov... ... middle of paper ... ...storians must learn what these authors all teach by their consensus novels, that teaching history through a sided story is the only way to determine all perspectives of history. We must understand that the voices of the outsiders matter just as much as the powerful. Richter and Johnson shed light on how difficult live can be as the low-class through the suffrage of Indians and slaves. Ambinder and Holton show that the outsiders still had the ability to change their destiny. Both of these details are misplaced in history text books because history is taught on a factual basis. We teach history in facts that the white powerful leaders wrote for us, therefore the losers are left out. History is a two sided story, which means we must teach both sides of the losers and the winners. This is the only way to understand the lives of the world’s lost voices of the outsiders.

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