Let's ensure Alaska history is accurate

A significant example of this phenomenon is the way the American Revolution was first remembered in American culture. We take for granted today, and we teach in our public schools and universities, that the Revolution was carried out mostly by groups of common people who took the law into their own hands; they were revolutionaries. They rioted against the Stamp Act in 1765, protesting "taxation without representation." They rioted again in 1770 in what became the Boston Massacre, when British troops fired on them as they protested arbitrary enforcement of customs duties. After that tragedy, they held mass funerals memorializing the victims of what they viewed as vicious use of force by callous English soldiery.

Most particularly, we recount the organized destruction of a shipload of tea in Boston Harbor on a December night in 1773, the Boston Tea Party, to protest more taxation without representation. That incident, encouraged by a few of the leading merchants, who remained hidden during the affair, led the king and Parliament to impose harsh measures designed to quell the colonial rebellion once and for all. These led in turn to two continental congresses, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Declaration of Independence, and to war.

This sequence of events is stock in trade in any history of the Revolution today.

But in the first two generations after 1776, that's not how it was remembered at all. Public remembrances of the stamp tax rebellion and the tea action were systematically suppressed by the ruling elite. In fact, the latter was not called the Boston Tea Party until the 1830s. The Boston Massacre was better recalled, but with emphasis placed on the defense of the British soldiers at their trial by elite colonial lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy. Another previous shooting of a young colonial boy is barely remembered even now. Instead, in the years immediately following the Revolution, celebrations focused on Washington and his generals.

Historians have long distinguished between private memory, what an individual remembers about an event he or she has experienced or observed, and public memory, what a society remembers collectively. A great deal of private memory gets lost because not recorded, and much that isn't lost is faulty, because of the frailty of memory itself. Much of public memory comes from official records, most often generated by those in power. Power has always sought to control, and benefit from, the content of public memory. Those called historians have the obligation to investigate and analyze the motives, circumstances and content of what passes as memory, both public and private, and to construct from every source possible as complete, and objective, an understanding of the past within their power. That is their job. Their very first responsibility is to search out and name their own motives and biases.

The stamp tax revolt, the Boston Massacre and the tea party were remembered as they were because the power elite in Boston and the colonies feared mob action, and they suppressed expressions of private memories of events that manifested and celebrated spontaneous rebellion. Only as American culture became more democratized, in the 1830s, did a fuller memory, and understanding, of the Revolution emerge, one that recognized the power of the political and economic elite, and critical role of the common working men and women who took the law into their own hands, and when the two cooperated and when they didn't. That fuller reconstruction continues even today.

There are lessons in all this for Alaska. At 50 years past statehood, much private memory is moving beyond recall. Published memoirs of the statehood era, and all Alaska history, need firm, courageous analysis. Public records and published histories need the same. Young as we are, we ought not to take for granted that we yet know very well what happened, why, who was responsible, and what it may mean.

Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.