Edward Gibbon, who wrote “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” seemed to have a particularly sour outlook on his profession. He said that “history is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” Maybe if you’re writing about the Sack of Rome, that is how you see the world.
Crimes, follies and the misfortunes of mankind are certainly part of history, but there seems no room in Gibbon’s definition for any kind of achievement or celebration of things in our past.
Here’s a more functional definition of history: Which parts of it have we chosen to remember? One way that we in Virginia answer that question is cast in aluminum — the more than 2,900 historical markers erected across Virginia.
For a long time, those markers told only part of our story — the white part. In recent years, Virginia has been on a marker binge to rectify that. In the last five years, 63% of all new markers approved by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources have dealt with Black historical figures. In 2019, the department published its “Guidebook to Virginia’s African American Historical Markers,” which dealt with 309 Black history markers across the state. Since then, Virginia has approved 142 more to bring the total to 451.