History is not merely written by the victors of empire, but more specifically by the writers and the educated of that specific empire. This one-sided narration lends itself to a biased history in which the voices of the conquerors frequently drown out the unheard voices of the conquered. The control of history through language is in essence a method by which conquerors skew historical fact in order to cast themselves in a more favorable light, creating an illusionary and deceptive version of history. Furthermore, this version of history is often the only account of events available to historians, perpetuating racial stereotypes and myths from the past into the present. A specific example in which this one-sided history is prevalent is in respect to the worldwide slavery of Black people that lasted for centuries. During the 1700-1800s, in many American cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, slaves and free blacks outnumbered whites. However, there exists relatively few black historical accounts in stark comparison to the plethora of documents provided by white slave owners. This disparity is attributed to the fact that much of the African American population remained uneducated and illiterate due to restrictions set by white men against the educating of slaves.
As C.G. Woodson explains in The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War, “slaves who had some conception of modern civilization and understood the language of their owners would be more valuable than rude men with whom one could not communicate… Yet [...] slaves could not be enlightened without developing in them a longing for liberty.” (Woodson Ⅰ) Therefore, many slaves were born illiterate, died illiterate, and the stories of their plight perished with them, leaving only the misconstrued testimony of their well-educated owners. However, as time progressed toward anti-slavery and slavery abolishment movements, more accounts from newly-freed slaves emerged and the true extent to which this population suffered became more and more explicit and less and less veiled by the perspective of their previous owners.
The work of these historians aims at filling the gap that represents the lack of African American voice during the period of slavery in the United States and ultimately functions by using objective writers of the present in order to rectify the history written by the writers of the past.
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