America’s “Vacation from History”

Originally appeared at the Real Clear History on July 20, 2024.

Upon returning to Denver’s airport after a recent trip to Greece, Turkey, and Italy, I wondered why my city (and my nation) felt so devoid of historical reminders. Granted, my mind was on historical overload after two weeks of touring ancient Macedonia, Athens, Ephesus, Crete, and Rome. There are statues and historical reminders of Western civilization everywhere. But at the Denver airport, I was just confronted with native American chants being played in an endless loop on loudspeakers. With all due respect to indigenous tribes, Mesa Verde, and Dinosaur Ridge, something was lacking. There was nothing like the pillars of the Roman forum, no Colosseum, no Milvian bridge, no Acropolis, no library of Ephesus. I felt cut off from our cultural history.

It’s sometimes said that Americans have had a “vacation from history.” That phrase refers to the perception that, compared to other nations, the United States has been somewhat insulated from the convulsion of world events. Our geographic isolation has meant we have experienced relative stability. We’ve been far removed from major theaters of war, historic battles and the upheavals of history that Europe and the Middle East have experienced. Of course, September 11th, 2001, was a stark reminder that we are not immune from global conflict. In this century, we are more interconnected than ever.

On our trip we visited the village in northern Greece where my wife’s grandparents were from. It is called Naoussa. It is located on the slopes of the Vermio Mountains north of Thessaloniki. In that area are lush forests, beautiful orchards and sprawling vineyards, but one can also see historic places such as the site of the school where Aristotle taught the young Alexander the Great, as well as the famous Macedonian palace and tomb of Alexander’s father Philip II. 

That region has seen the march of countless armies on the plains below the mountains. Persian and Roman armies marched through there. So did the Byzantines. In the 1300s when the Ottomans crossed into the territories, Christians left the plains to seek refuge in the mountains. That is how their village was founded. For 490 years, Naoussa was under an oppressive Ottoman rule. After the Ottomans, it experienced the Balkan Wars, the Greek War for Independence and later the ominous arrival of the Nazis.

My wife’s grandmother was a little girl when the Ottomans still ruled. They destroyed all the churches. She remembered going out in the fields at night to learn the Greek language and receive Orthodox Christian instruction.

Naoussa is the only city in Greece called “the heroic city” because some of the mothers of the village refused to submit to Ottoman demands. When the Ottomans invaded, they would abduct young Greek boys and force them to serve in their army as a kind of human tax. Parents who did not hand them over were slaughtered. That happened to 500 of them in the village center in the 1800s. The village was called “heroic” because of the forty mothers who would not surrender to the Ottomans for fear of being raped. To escape this fate, they defiantly jumped off a cliff to their death. A statue and an icon of the forty women commemorate the spot. The Turkish occupation lasted until 1912, when Naoussa was liberated. My wife’s grandfather left the village shortly after and came to America.

Not all historical markers in Greece or Rome are this sobering. But they all remind the tourist that something significant happened there. They stir the historical imagination, causing onlookers to pause and remember.

The United States and Colorado do not have such a detailed or deep recorded history. Besides that, too many Americans are prone to dismiss the importance of history. We suffer from an epidemic of historical ignorance.

Some of this is the result of our founding — where colonialists wanted to break from the old world and create “a new order of the ages.” Some of it has to do with the nature of liberalism, sometimes called “the great anti-tradition,” or the nature of progressivism, which is prone to emphasize the future and progress. Some of it is the result of history being de-emphasized in public schools. And some of it has to do with our media, which serves up “snackable” entertainment more than historical content. Consequently, the closest many of us get to history is the instant replay while watching an NFL game!

It’s unfortunate that we do not have more historical reminders than we do. It is doubly unfortunate that many of the ones we do have in America have been recently defaced or removed in the name of political correctness. Such markers, whether memorializing tragedy or glory, still play an important role. They remind us of who we are, who we’ve been, what we can be, and how others have endured hard times.

C. S. Lewis said that the unhistorical are usually, without thinking about it, enslaved to a fairly recent past. More to the point, and long before him, the Roman statesman Cicero said, “not to know what happened before you were born, that is to be always a boy, to be forever a child.”

Categories: America, CCU, Culture, Global History and Events, History | Comments

2 Comments

  • Charlotte Timmerman says:

    Don, you are very correct in your understanding of historical markers. It is true that we have torn down or defaced monuments in this country and the lack of respect for what God has done in and with the remarkable nation is appalling. However I am somewhat conflicted about erecting monuments to honor men, even men of valor. That seems to me to put focus on the person, no matter what they have accomplished or how “great” they were and we tend to elevate them and not the God who worked through them. Our nation is a baby compared to other nations of the world, so it stands to reason, we wouldn’t have the historical sites that they have. We do still have many markers and historical sites to learn or remember history from. Even though we and others have ruins, statues, other reminders of what happened where, in history, unfortunately man never seems to learn from history, even if they thoroughly understand it. God is Eternal, always in control and never needs markers to remind us of Him, He lives in His children always working and revealing and reminding us of who He is truly!
    D

  • Steven Newell says:

    Is not history the levin… of time?

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