What History Means To Me

2001 Winning Essay, Middle School

History is like a trail of tracks humanity has been leaving behind in the continuous corridor of its evolution. It follows us and steps on our heels. Somebody may be looking at the tracks and saying: humans have passed here. It is a footprint of our identity. It proves that we are real. Sometimes, history is kind to us; sometimes, it may take a position of criticism, or even be sarcastic. One of its greatest gifts is the opportunity to look back, down the path that we left behind, to learn, and to draw conclusions for the future.

My schoolbooks represent history as a timeline, a straight highway, where events move; sometimes slower and sometimes faster. During some periods, it gets wider and the events begin to race one another in parallel lanes. Then, it begins to bottleneck and events back up, each pushing, trying to take its place in history. The events behind, impatient to occur, rush those in front, accusing them of being old news, mounting on top, and rolling over them. At some points, the traffic becomes very calm and history transitions slowly and smoothly from one milestone to the next.

When I look back, I do not see a straight-line highway with markers and signs of important milestones. Rather I see a corridor that makes constant turns and goes from one plane to another gradually building a rising spiral. I see a helix, a DNA of our society that keeps rigorous records of everything that had already happened and encoded blueprints of everything that may await us in the future. I respect that we are not at liberty to pool a single record-gene out of the sequence without having an impact on our development. When somebody tries, we get very ill with absolutism, totalitarianism, fanaticism, and other deadly diseases.

When the helix's next tour positions right above the previous one, we all get a feeling that we have already been there and done that. I have heard people stereotyping that history can replicate itself. I would not call it a replication. It happens simply because the forces holding history together and uninterrupted are so fundamental, so primal, so strong. It is like a run of a clock's arms around the dial. They make the same motion over and over again. However, it also signifies that time goes on. It's like all of us, following the run of the clock's arms during our own short individual histories, engaging in our routine activities: having lunch at noon, waiting for Santa every Christmas Eve, or watching our children and grandchildren grow. There is a comfort of predictability in every repeating tradition. We are all connected in history and through history; we are an integral part of it. Every twist and turn of history's helix spins our own lives.

When I imagine traveling back down the spiral corridor, I also see a museum of magnificent artifacts. I see showcases of ancient Roman coins and cabinets of delicate Sévres china neatly situated along the walkway. I see paintings of great Flemish artists, and scrolls of indecipherable hieroglyphs hanging on the walls. There is a Civil War cannon in that corner, and here is an old photograph of people in striped prison robes with six-pointed stars on them behind barbed wire. History has a lot of glitter, but there are also shadows. We may not like the shadows, but they are a part of our record.

If we are wise, we turn our inquisitive sight into the past and learn from it. The knowledge of where we were and how we got from there to now will allow us to take history farther from the shadows and into the bright light. When I try to look forward in the light, I see every flag on earth. I hear every national anthem playing. The power of our history gives us assurance that there is hope and a future for me and all those yet to come.

by K. Stonik
Sponsoring Teacher: Mr. Evans
Indiana
March 2001