The Mystery of History

The Mystery of History

History, the stories of mankind presented in barely digestive bits and pieces. Names, dates, and other irrelevant facts for consumption by hungry students. That was the tried and true, but untested method used for teaching the subject during my formative years. Textbooks were full of facts, faces, and cute stories about our Founding Fathers, cherry trees, and stovepipe hats. An avid reader, I usually finished my textbook a month into the school year and spent the rest of the semester trying to stay awake, bored with discussing events which happened hundreds of years ago.

Growing up in the sixties, everyday life was more interesting than stories in a book. Race riots were taking place in our front yard, and we watched from the comfort of the front porch, with the front door open, in case we needed to get inside in a hurry. The Viet Nam War was broadcast in living color on the nightly news. How could “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492” compete with that? I dutifully memorized the historical facts necessary to get good grades because Mrs. Broomfield didn’t want no dumb children growing up in her house, but History seemed to be missing some vital ingredient.

It wasn’t until I returned to school as an Air Force veteran some ten years after graduating from high school that I found that missing link. It was me. History is not something found in books, but it is what we experience in life. His story might not be My story, or Your story, and it should be Our story. The class I was taking was US History and the assignment was to write an essay depicting the relationship between American colonists from England, and their friends and relatives back home. My mind was a blank after reading the material over and over. I decided to write a letter in the first person to a relative in England. I used historical facts but personalized them by expressing thoughts that a revolutionary colonist would use to convey what was going on in America. It was written to a cousin in London, who believed the New World had driven the colonists mad. It was my first encounter with the subject of Historiography, but as I was majoring in Business at the time, I failed to recognize it.

Years later I took the second part of US History, and the instructor gave the class the freedom to pick a topic from the syllabus and write a paper about it. I had just spent ten years working in the casino industry in Las Vegas, Nevada. I picked a topic that was familiar and very interesting, organized crime in America, and more specifically, its influence on “The Gambling Capital of the World”.

I started at the Circus- Circus in the slot department and ended my career, monitoring high rollers in the more glamorous parts of the Strip. I worked for Morris Shenker, who parlayed a career as Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer, into ownership of The Dunes Hotel using Teamsters Union money, under the backing of the Chicago and other Midwest Mob families. I knew Tony “The Ant”’ Spilottro and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal by sight and by reputation. None of those names or subjects related to them appeared in my report. My experiences in life were reflected in my choice of subject, and I had learned enough to know the consequences of speaking about certain things. Alas, I was still not a History Major and failed to see the significance in this.

By the time I entered the Eastern New Mexico University system in Roswell, I knew I wanted to Minor in History. At the time, I was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, with the goal of teaching at the high school level. The courses included New Mexico history and Western Civilization II. Although I enjoyed the classes, nothing stimulated any extraordinary interest and I felt myself drifting back to the memorization of names and dates. My Western Civilization instructor required students to keep a journal on the chapter readings and my entries were more of an outline of the material in the chapter, and not its effect on me or my reaction to it. My instructor, commenting on the precision of my note taking, correctly perceived that I must be a mathematician.

When I matriculated in Portales, I discovered a side of history that I had only seen glimpses of before. The professors encouraged us to look beyond the presentation of facts. It seemed as if the history of my high school years had been rewritten. Some of the heroes were not very heroic, and some of the villains were cast in a different light. Custer is no longer deified and Crazy Horse is not always denigrated. Wasn’t the white man’s intent to civilize and bring Christianity to savage Indians a noble cause, and of course slavery provided a home for child-like Africans. I noticed changes in how I watched television and movies. I began to look at current events, their historical significance, now and for future historians’ interpretation. Upper-level history classes teach the ways and means of researching historical events and finding evidence to support an opinion. I learned to recognize when others did not use acceptable methods to document their work and to discount such work as an historical source. I became aware of the differences between primary and secondary sources and how that difference reflects their worth in research projects. In short, I was becoming an historian.

I flipped my major from Math to History with three semesters of school left. My motive was purely financial, as I had exhausted all financial aid from the military and regular student aid and loans. I realized the path for a degree in History was more manageable than one in Math.

That was twenty years ago, and my life went into an entirely new direction than what I had envisioned. Upon graduation, I was offered a Math job at the same school I had worked at for ten years in Security. The other job was to start a new program at the local Job Corps center. It was to help young students aged 16-24, obtain entry-level employment in the Protective Services field. I had fully transitioned from being a crook to leading the fight against lawlessness. It would prove to be the best of times and the worst of times. I hope you come along for the ride.

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