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No, We’re Not Tearing Down the Washington Monument—But Contextualizing It Might Be a Good Idea

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype about how the mayor of Washington D.C. supposedly wants to tear down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. That’s not even remotely true. Right-wing media outlets and conservative pundits have been blatantly distorting the truth and blowing things totally out of proportion.

Here’s what actually happened: Muriel E. Bowser, the mayor of Washington D.C., commissioned a research committee known as the District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions Working Group to come up with a list of federal monuments in the district that they think the government should “remove, relocate, or contextualize.”

The committee itself has no power to actually do anything to any of the monuments on its list. All it has the power to do is make recommendations. Furthermore, when it comes to structures like the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, it’s pretty clear that the committee isn’t advocating for the government to just tear them down; what they’re probably thinking of is something more along the lines of putting up a sign noting some of the less-than-savory aspects of Washington and Jefferson’s lives. That’s what “contextualize” means.

Unfortunately, Fox News and other conservative media outlets are so hellbent on portraying liberals as deranged, frothing-at-the-mouth communist radicals who want to destroy American culture that they’ve seized on this committee’s recommendations of contextualization and spun it into a wildly distorted narrative of “the evil liberals want to tear down all the monuments in D.C.!”

No, Ancient Greek Slaves Did Not Like Being Enslaved

It seems like it should be obvious that slaves in ancient Greece did not like being enslaved. Unfortunately, things that seem like they should be obvious are often things that many people don’t find obvious at all. There is a disturbingly widespread claim that slaves in ancient Greece were happy to be enslaved and that they preferred slavery over freedom.

This claim recently received attention among classicists due to a description for a lecture by an esteemed classics professor for The Great Courses Daily, which begins with the shocking assertion “Slavery was the ideal condition for some people in ancient Greece.”

The claim has been around for a very long time, however. It has been widely disseminated through books and other media and, despite the valiant efforts of some classicists to point out that ancient slavery was cruel and unjust, many people continue to regard it as benign or at worst a necessary evil.

Should We Be Tearing Down Statues of Socrates and Aristotle Because of Their Views on Slavery?

You may have heard that there are bunch of statues that have been taken down recently. I think that’s a good thing. Some other people disagree. On 12 June 2020, the British comedian John Cleese—who is known as a member of the comedy group Monty Python and as the co-writer and lead actor for the sitcom Fawlty Towers—issued this tweet:

Cleese followed this up with another tweet in which he said this:

There is a lot to unpack here. Cleese is obviously joking, but, through his misunderstanding of what protesters want and why, he has inadvertently raised some very serious questions that I think are worth addressing.

Why Tearing Down Confederate Monuments Is Not “Erasing History”

In case you haven’t already heard, the United States has a lot of monuments honoring the Confederate States of America, as well as the individuals most closely associated with it, such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), there are currently 780 monuments and statues across the United States honoring the Confederacy and people associated with it.

According to The Washington Post, about one in every twelve Confederate monuments is in a Union state, which is absolutely baffling when you consider that the Union actually won the war. My home state of Indiana, which was a Union state through and through, currently has several Confederate monuments. Even Massachusetts, one of the most vociferously pro-Union states, had a Confederate monument until just a few years ago.

Most people reading this are probably already well enough aware that there is a great deal of controversy over these monuments. Many people (myself included) believe these monuments should be taken down. Defenders of the monuments, however, insist that removing them is “erasing history.” In this article, I intend to show how this insistence is a form of false framing. Taking down Confederate monuments is objectively not “erasing history” at all, but rather simply refusing to glorify people who fought to defend the institution of slavery.

Did Abolitionism Exist in Ancient Greece and Rome?

The prevailing attitude towards slavery throughout the ancient Mediterranean world was essentially that being a slave was horrible and unpleasant, but that that was just the way things were and the way things always would be. As far as we can tell from the surviving sources, the idea that slavery even could be abolished does not seem to have occurred to most people.

There were apparently a few people in ancient Greece and Rome who thought that slavery was immoral, but these people seem to have been extremely rare, since they only appear briefly in the sources. Furthermore, we have absolutely no documentation of the existence of any large-scale, organized movement to abolish slavery in ancient Greece or Rome. Some people did criticize slavery extensively and there were probably people who wished slavery didn’t exist, but no one seems to have ever developed any realistic plans to abolish it.

Debunking the So-Called “Dark Ages”

There is no period in all of human history that gets quite so much bad press as the Middle Ages. Popularly known as the “Dark Ages,” most people imagine that this was the worst possible time to be alive—a thousand years of poverty, backwardness, stagnation, superstition, and obscurantism.

It is popularly believed that, during this era, obscurantist Christians deliberately rounded up classical texts to destroy them, people burned witches, no one ever bathed, everyone thought the world was flat, people were constantly slaughtering and torturing each other for no reason, all people were fanatically orthodox Catholics, scientific and technological advancement was virtually nonexistent, doctors knew less about medicine than doctors in all other eras, and everyone was always miserable.

There is very little truth to any of these notions, however. The real Middle Ages are very different from the barbarous caricature that most people are familiar with. Although some historians do use the term “Dark Ages,” they use this term to refer to a specific period in medieval western European history lasting a little over three hundred years from the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD until the rise of the Carolinian Empire in the late eighth century AD.

In this article, I will debunk some of the most popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Then, at the end, I will explain why I, like many historians, believe that the term “Dark Ages” should be retired altogether.

Astounding Facts about Chronology that Will Change How You Think of History

Everyone thinks they know history, but there are a lot of facts about history, specifically about the chronology of events, that may surprise you: from events that people think should have happened in different time periods that actually happened around the same time to events that people think happened in the same time period that really happened hundreds, if not thousands, of years apart. Here are just a few particularly mind-bending examples that will change how you think of history:

The Founding Fathers’ Views on Slavery

We have all heard that our country was founded on the idea that “all men are created equal.” That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Unfortunately, ideas are often quite different from actions. The vast majority of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America owned slaves and, for many of them, their public statements stood in stark contrast with their own private actions and beliefs. Nonetheless, their views on the issue of slavery were actually quite diverse and many of them changed their views on the subject over the courses of their lives. In this article, we will examine the unvarnished truth of some of the major Founding Fathers’ views on slavery.

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