History is about the study of authentic written communications, books and letters and artifacts. All that we have of the past is smoke and dross except for this. There is no thus such thing as black history for the simple reason that, with rare exceptions like Dumas, old-tymee black folk were not the ones to actually write or produce or save and authenticate the available evidence. It was all done by white Anglo american journalists writing slock copy and fiction that sold for pennies. The subjects left little first hand material because they were essentially incapable of writing or reading and they did not know how to take photographs or develop film or file land claims. So we have only second hand material that has been ‘edited’ by ‘white people’. This logically implies that the category ‘white people’, equals the category ‘civilized and technologically advanced people’. This was was true for a few hundred years, after the printing press (1300), but before telephone, (1890’s).
You can apply any definition of "civilized" that you like to people, but my definition of "civilized" people does not include chattel slavery. I do not find it "civilized" to force illiteracy on an entire group of people by making it illegal to educate them and teach them to read and write, as was done in the American South.
If you are trying to claim that the accounts of Bass Reeves are fictional rather than historical, I must point out that they are verified by multiple sources, including the dry and boring documents associated with court procedures. When we say he brought over 3000 criminals to justice, for example, we know this because his work was integral to the career of a very well-documented White man, Judge Isaac Parker, and because the accounts of the crimes these outlaws committed and how they were tracked down and arrested are part of their court records.
As a person with archaeological training, I must also point out that my definition of history is much broader than yours. For archaeologists, history is "a narrative of the past, constructed by review of available texts and verified whenever possible by cross-referencing more than one text, and/or by examination of any available physical evidence". In my field, you have to be able to construct narratives of past events without written sources quite often, through review of physical evidence alone if necessary. When physical evidence contradicts a written account, in fact, archaeologists tend to favor the physical evidence over the written source--people can lie just as easily in writing as they can to your face, but physical evidence does not lie. The whole field of forensic anthropology rests on this foundation.
There are a lot of tools available to reconstruct the lives and stories of Black people, even at times when they had not yet developed a written language or when they were actively being barred from access to one. If the people who surround them have written language, as in the case of Bass Reeves, you will have abundant primary written sources to use as data; if there are no contemporary written sources, you sometimes find that the first texts of a new written language will be transcriptions of oral history into a written form.
Anthropology and history both demonstrate many times over that oral histories of people without a written language can be both informative and accurate, the world over. And before we call people who hold their history through oral accounts "uncivilized", we must remember that three of the greatest classics in western literature--the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Torah--are ALL just transcriptions of such oral histories, accounts of past events that were held in trust by generations of people who memorized stories as a sacred trust. and used them to educate their own people on an ongoing basis. Connecting the events recounted in these oral history compendiums with physical evidence and historical documents from other civilizations has been the work of many archaeologists.
History is about the study of authentic written communications, books and letters and artifacts. All that we have of the past is smoke and dross except for this. There is no thus such thing as black history for the simple reason that, with rare exceptions like Dumas, old-tymee black folk were not the ones to actually write or produce or save and authenticate the available evidence. It was all done by white Anglo american journalists writing slock copy and fiction that sold for pennies. The subjects left little first hand material because they were essentially incapable of writing or reading and they did not know how to take photographs or develop film or file land claims. So we have only second hand material that has been ‘edited’ by ‘white people’. This logically implies that the category ‘white people’, equals the category ‘civilized and technologically advanced people’. This was was true for a few hundred years, after the printing press (1300), but before telephone, (1890’s).
You can apply any definition of "civilized" that you like to people, but my definition of "civilized" people does not include chattel slavery. I do not find it "civilized" to force illiteracy on an entire group of people by making it illegal to educate them and teach them to read and write, as was done in the American South.
If you are trying to claim that the accounts of Bass Reeves are fictional rather than historical, I must point out that they are verified by multiple sources, including the dry and boring documents associated with court procedures. When we say he brought over 3000 criminals to justice, for example, we know this because his work was integral to the career of a very well-documented White man, Judge Isaac Parker, and because the accounts of the crimes these outlaws committed and how they were tracked down and arrested are part of their court records.
As a person with archaeological training, I must also point out that my definition of history is much broader than yours. For archaeologists, history is "a narrative of the past, constructed by review of available texts and verified whenever possible by cross-referencing more than one text, and/or by examination of any available physical evidence". In my field, you have to be able to construct narratives of past events without written sources quite often, through review of physical evidence alone if necessary. When physical evidence contradicts a written account, in fact, archaeologists tend to favor the physical evidence over the written source--people can lie just as easily in writing as they can to your face, but physical evidence does not lie. The whole field of forensic anthropology rests on this foundation.
There are a lot of tools available to reconstruct the lives and stories of Black people, even at times when they had not yet developed a written language or when they were actively being barred from access to one. If the people who surround them have written language, as in the case of Bass Reeves, you will have abundant primary written sources to use as data; if there are no contemporary written sources, you sometimes find that the first texts of a new written language will be transcriptions of oral history into a written form.
Anthropology and history both demonstrate many times over that oral histories of people without a written language can be both informative and accurate, the world over. And before we call people who hold their history through oral accounts "uncivilized", we must remember that three of the greatest classics in western literature--the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Torah--are ALL just transcriptions of such oral histories, accounts of past events that were held in trust by generations of people who memorized stories as a sacred trust. and used them to educate their own people on an ongoing basis. Connecting the events recounted in these oral history compendiums with physical evidence and historical documents from other civilizations has been the work of many archaeologists.