History is tricky business . In thinking about the past , we bookmark certain years or events to separate what came before from what came after to bring a semblance of order to an otherwise disorderly human experience . And to a degree , this makes sense . The enormity of time and the impossibility of knowing everything everywhere all at once forces us to take smaller , more digestible cognitive bites . It ’ s hard enough see the narrative throughlines of history without unpacking the vagaries of ideology , the indifference of political economy , the fog of war , or the cruel absurdity of genocide .

Phillip Meyer ’ s “ The Son ”

History is tricky business . In thinking about the past , we bookmark certain years or events to separate what came before from what came after to bring a semblance of order to an otherwise disorderly human experience . And to a degree , this makes sense . The enormity of time and the impossibility of knowing everything everywhere all at once forces us to take smaller , more digestible cognitive bites . It ’ s hard enough see the narrative throughlines of history without unpacking the vagaries of ideology , the indifference of political economy , the fog of war , or the cruel absurdity of genocide .

And so it happens that when we ’ re young , we ’ re taught that in 1492 , Christopher Columbus discovered America , only to be told later that not only was he not the first European to touch down in the Western Hemisphere , but that that feat had already been accomplished thousands of years earlier by land-faring Asians passing over the Bering Strait , who existed for untold numbers of generations in ignorance of the political machinations of kingdoms an ocean away that would eventually lead to their demise . It ’ s a lot for a four-year-old to take in .

12 Cenizo Spring 2024

The Roman Empire offers perhaps a less facile example . In the initial telling , the empire fell when barbarians laid waste to Rome in the late 400s . But that , too , is