The Internet Is Both the Best and Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Historical Preservation

 When the internet first became widely available in the 1990s a lot of people thought it would solve the problem of historical preservation forever.

Everything would be digital. Digital things could be copied perfectly and endlessly. Nothing would ever need to be lost again.

That turned out to be wrong in a complicated and important way.

What the Internet Got Right

The internet did make it possible to preserve and share historical information at a scale that was never possible before. Archives that used to be accessible only to people who could physically travel to them are now searchable online. Documents that existed in one copy in one library can now be read by anyone in the world. Photographs that would have decayed in someone's attic can be scanned and preserved digitally.

The Internet Archive at archive.org has been crawling and saving copies of websites since 1996. Their Wayback Machine contains over 800 billion saved web pages. Genealogical databases contain records that would have taken months to access through physical archives are now searchable in minutes. Oral history projects have been able to share recordings with audiences that physical archives could never reach.

These are real and significant achievements. The internet has genuinely made historical preservation more possible for more people than ever before.

What the Internet Got Wrong

Digital files require infrastructure to survive. They need servers. They need electricity. They need organizations willing to maintain them. They need file formats that stay readable as technology changes. And all of those things cost money and require ongoing effort.

When a website shuts down its content can disappear overnight. When a company goes out of business the digital content it hosted can vanish. When a social media platform changes its policies old content gets deleted. When someone stops paying for hosting years of content can disappear in an instant.

This has already happened repeatedly. GeoCities, which hosted millions of personal web pages throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, shut down in 2009. Most of those pages were lost. Myspace lost years of music uploads due to a server migration error. Platforms have deleted millions of photographs and posts when terms of service changed. The early internet is already partially gone.

The assumption that digital means permanent is wrong. Digital means potentially permanent if someone is actively maintaining and preserving the file. Without that active effort digital content is actually more fragile than paper in some ways.

What to Do About It

Do not rely on a single platform to preserve anything important to you. If it matters, save it in multiple places.

Use services designed specifically for long term preservation. Archive.org is specifically built to preserve content permanently. Libraries and archives are specifically built to preserve content permanently. Consumer platforms like Instagram and TikTok are not.

Save copies locally as well as in the cloud. An external hard drive that you control is not dependent on a company staying in business or a server staying online.

Support organizations that are working on digital preservation. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations and is preserving more of human knowledge than almost any other institution on earth.

The internet is a remarkable tool for preservation. It is not a magic solution. It requires the same ongoing human effort that preservation has always required. Just with better tools.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

How Textbooks Decide What Gets Taught and What Gets Left Out of History Class

 Most people assume that what they learned in history class was the real history. The accurate version. The complete picture of what actually happened.

It was not.

What you learned in school was a selection. A curated set of events and people and stories that someone decided were worth including. And the people who made those decisions were not neutral.

How Textbooks Actually Get Made

In most states a committee reviews and approves textbooks for use in public schools. Those committees are made up of people appointed by elected officials. Which means the people deciding what gets taught in school are indirectly chosen through a political process.

Texas and California are the two biggest textbook markets in the country. Because textbook publishers want to sell their books in those states they design their books to get approved by those states' review committees. What gets approved in Texas and California ends up shaping what gets taught across much of the country.

Texas in particular has had ongoing battles over what goes into history textbooks. How slavery gets described. Whether evolution gets presented as fact. How the Civil War gets framed. Whether certain historical figures get included or excluded. These are not just academic debates. They directly determine what millions of students learn about their own history.

What Gets Left Out

Labor history is one of the biggest gaps in most American history textbooks. The fights workers had to have to win things like the 8 hour work day, the weekend, workplace safety laws and child labor protections are barely mentioned in most curricula. Most students graduate with no idea what ordinary working people had to go through to win rights that we now take for granted.

The full history of what happened to Native American communities after European contact is almost always compressed, softened or skipped. The specific policies of forced removal, forced assimilation and cultural destruction are not described in detail in most standard textbooks.

The history of how racism was built into American laws and institutions, not just practiced by bad individuals, is still contested in many states' curricula. Some states actively restrict how these topics can be taught.

What to Do About It

Read outside of what you were taught. There are excellent books written for general audiences that cover the parts of American history that did not make it into school textbooks. Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States is one. Isabel Wilkerson's Caste is another. Nikole Hannah Jones's The 1619 Project is another.

Talk to older people in your community about what they remember. Lived experience fills in gaps that textbooks leave.

Teach your kids to ask questions about history. Who wrote this account. Whose perspective is missing. What happened to the people who are not mentioned in this story.

The history you were taught was a starting point. Not the whole picture.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Victors Always Rewrite History and Here Is How to Spot It Happening Right Now

 After World War Two ended the Nazis were on trial at Nuremberg. Some of them tried to argue they were just following orders. That argument did not work and should not have.

But here is something worth thinking about. If Germany had won that war those trials would not have happened. And the history books written in a world where Germany won would have told a very different story about what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

That is not a comfortable thought. But it is an important one.

History is not just what happened. History is what people with the power to record and preserve information decided to write down and keep. And the people with that power have always had reasons to shape the story in ways that served their interests.

How This Has Worked Throughout History

When European colonizers wrote the history of their conquests they described it as exploration and civilization. The perspective of the people being conquered was not included in those accounts. Their version of events did not make it into the history books that got taught in schools for centuries.

When the Confederacy lost the Civil War former Confederate leaders spent decades building what historians call the Lost Cause narrative. They reshaped the story of the war from being about slavery to being about states rights and Southern honor. They built statues and named schools after Confederate generals. They got textbooks in Southern states changed to reflect their version of events. That rewriting influenced what generations of American schoolchildren were taught about their own history.

When corporations face accountability for environmental damage or worker deaths they hire lawyers and communications teams to shape the historical narrative around those events. The official record reflects what was proven in court and what got into the news. It does not always reflect what actually happened.

How to Spot It When It Is Happening Now

Look for who is missing from the story. Every time you read a historical account or a news story ask yourself whose perspective is not represented. Who was affected by these events but is not quoted. Whose experience of what happened is not being described.

Look for what is being emphasized and what is being minimized. When a story is told there are always choices about what to include and what to leave out. Those choices reveal what the teller wants you to take away from the story.

Look for who benefits from this version of events. If a particular telling of history makes one group look good and another group look bad it is worth asking who had the power to write that version down and what they had to gain from it.

Look for the emotions it is designed to produce. History written to make you angry at one group or proud of another without giving you the full picture is usually history that has been shaped for a purpose.

None of this means that all history is fake or that you cannot trust any account. It means that every account of history is told from a perspective and that perspective shapes what gets included. Knowing that makes you a better reader of history not a worse one.

The most honest thing you can do with history is read multiple accounts. Seek out perspectives that were left out. And stay curious about what might be missing from the version you were given first.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.