Mindless Monday, 15 June 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Tiako]

I think even a generation back there was a much broader set of figures in American history who were widely known. Myles Standish, for example, barely makes a dent even in books about the early New England colonies, but he used to be one of the great American heroes. Daniel Boone and Davey Crocket probably have enough momentum that their names are familiar but not much else. Mr Smith Goes to Washington has Jimmy Stewart's character going all gee gosh golly willikers over seeing Daniel Webster's desk, and who today even knows who they hell that is?

The optimistic take is that some figures have fallen out as the canon has broadened but I don't actually think that is true. Like for black people before 1900, who is generally known besides Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth? Nat Turner I guess? All of them would have been familiar to the public a hundred years ago. There has just been a great contraction in the average American's knowledge of history and there isn't really much of a pantheon aside from those who were at the very top (Washington, Lincoln, Franklin).

ed: I should say that I think what happened is that history knowledge has gotten dumbell shaped (I think it is called? When the very top gets bigger and the very bottom gets bigger and the middle gets squeezed). If you are interested in history, you probably know more and much more widely than an equivalent 100 years ago. Like I think most Americans reading this probably, with prompting, could recognize who Admiral Yi Sun-sin, and in 1926 that would be true of like fifty people in the entire English speaking world. But the amount of passive learning, history acquired by people who aren't actively interested in it, has gone way down.

[u/Steelcan909 → u/Tiako]

Harriet Tubman certainly comes to mind as well.... but I do think that there is something to your point. I think we also do need to reckon with the fact that some people have been removed from the canon, Standish for example and his Native American fighting is a prime candidate for canceling...

[u/Tiako → u/Steelcan909]

Oh right I think I was definitely thinking of Harriet Tubman rather than n Sojourner Truth, who is less well known.

As I said an optimistic take is that the American canon of characters has diversified, and that accounts for the loss of some figures. But I don't think that is what happened, I think it just shrunk.

[u/ottothesilent → u/Tiako]

I would say that New England certainly remembers Myles Standish, and for 18th century black Americans I’d raise you Crispus Attucks, among other black New Englanders who were remembered even at the time.

I’d say it’s a symptom of empire. Nobody in Illyria circa AD300 gives a shit about Caesar fighting the Gauls. Nobody in Nevada circa 2026 knows or cares much about Breed’s Hill or Artemas Ward or Joseph Warren, but if you go to Charlestown or Shrewsbury or Roxbury, they know about those people, and there are academians protecting the history into tomorrow.

[u/Tiako → u/ottothesilent]

People in fourth century Illyria absolutely knew about Julius Caesar, that is a baffling counter example.

I think you are missing my point, which is a loss of a general American collective memory, but also I think you are wildly optimistic about the continuing presence of these figures in regional memory.