Social Media Posts Are Primary Historical Sources and Nobody Is Saving Them

 In the summer of 2020 millions of people around the world posted on social media about what they were experiencing during a global pandemic, a major wave of protests over racial justice, and a contentious election season.

Those posts were raw, real, firsthand accounts of what it felt like to be alive during one of the most significant periods in recent American history. They captured things that no journalist or historian could capture. The confusion and fear of the early pandemic. The anger and hope of the protest movement. The way ordinary people experienced and understood what was happening around them.

Most of those posts are already gone or inaccessible.

Why Social Media Is a Historical Source

When historians study a period of history they rely on primary sources. Documents written by people who were actually there. Letters. Diaries. Newspaper accounts. Official records.

Social media posts are exactly that. They are firsthand accounts written in real time by people experiencing events directly. They capture the language people actually used. The emotions they actually felt. The way they understood events before the official narrative got written.

For future historians trying to understand the early twenty first century, social media is one of the richest primary sources available. The problem is that most of it is not being preserved in a usable form.

Why Most of It Will Disappear

Social media companies control their platforms and can change the rules at any time. Accounts get deleted. Platforms go out of business. Posts get removed for violating terms of service that change without notice. Companies decide to limit the archiving of old content.

Twitter, now X, has made repeated changes to its platform that have affected access to historical posts. TikTok videos disappear when accounts are deleted. Facebook has changed its privacy settings in ways that make older public content inaccessible. Instagram has purged accounts for inactivity.

The Library of Congress attempted to archive all public Twitter posts from 2006 through 2017. The project proved so massive and technically complex that they eventually had to scale it back significantly.

The early days of social media are already partially lost. And we are adding more content every day while losing access to what came before.

What You Can Do

Save your own important posts. Screenshot them. Copy the text somewhere you control. Do not assume the platform will keep them.

If you post things worth preserving, post them in multiple places. A blog post is more permanent than a social media post. Text on archive.org is more permanent than text on a platform you do not control.

For posts you want to preserve because they document something important, use the Wayback Machine's save page feature at web.archive.org/save to create an archived copy of any public URL.

Support the Internet Archive. They are doing the work of trying to capture and preserve the web including social media content at a scale that no individual can match.

And keep writing. Keep posting. Keep documenting what you see and feel and experience. The fact that platforms are fragile does not mean the content is not worth creating. It just means you need to be thoughtful about where you put it and how you save it.

The historical record of this era is being written right now. Some of it will survive. Make sure your part of it does.

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

You Should Be Photographing Old Cemeteries Before They Disappear Forever

 There is a cemetery in Aiken County South Carolina that has headstones dating back to before the Civil War. Some of them are so weathered you can barely read the names. A few of them have already become unreadable. And nobody has been out there in years to document what is left.

That cemetery is not unusual. There are thousands like it across this country.

What Is in Those Cemeteries

Old cemeteries are one of the richest sources of historical information that exists for ordinary people.

A headstone tells you a name. A birth date. A death date. Sometimes a relationship. Sometimes an occupation or a cause of death or a brief description of who the person was. All of that is historical information that exists nowhere else for many of the people buried there.

Family cemeteries on old farmland often contain multiple generations of a single family. Church cemeteries contain the history of entire communities going back as far as the congregation existed. Municipal cemeteries contain the records of everyone who died in a place over generations, including people who left no other documentation behind.

Why They Are Disappearing

Many old cemeteries are on private land that has changed hands multiple times. The current owner may not even know the cemetery is there. Or they may know and not care about maintaining it. Or they may be planning to sell the land for development.

Wooden grave markers rot away in a few decades. Stone markers crack and weather until the inscriptions become unreadable. Without someone to maintain the vegetation around them, headstones get covered by brush and eventually buried.

In some cases cemeteries have literally been paved over. Highways and parking lots and developments built without anyone bothering to check what was there before.

What You Can Do

Go out to old cemeteries in your area and photograph every headstone you can read. You do not need special equipment. Your phone camera is sufficient.

Upload your photographs to Find A Grave at findagrave.com or BillionGraves at billiongraves.com. Both of these sites are free and allow volunteers to add photographs and transcriptions of headstone information. What you upload becomes part of a permanent searchable database that genealogists and historians around the world can access.

If you find a cemetery that is overgrown, contact your local county historical society. Many areas have volunteer cemetery restoration groups who will come out and help clean up and document a neglected site.

If you find evidence of a cemetery that has been destroyed or built over, document what you know and report it to your state historic preservation office. Many states have laws protecting burial sites even when they are on private land.

Those names deserve to be in the record. All it takes is someone willing to go out there and write them down.

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

The Difference Between What the News Reports and What Actually Happened

 In 1968 sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee went on strike. They were mostly Black men doing dangerous dirty work for poverty wages with no benefits and no protections. Two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck and the city had done nothing.

The strike lasted 65 days. It was one of the most significant labor actions of the civil rights era. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the strikers and was assassinated there.

The news coverage at the time focused heavily on the violence and disruption of the protests. On the National Guard presence. On the property damage. Much less on the actual conditions the workers were striking against or the economic system that had produced those conditions.

The news told one story. History tells a fuller one.

Why News Coverage Is Not the Same as History

News is written in real time with incomplete information. Reporters are working fast, often without full context, trying to describe something that is still unfolding. What they produce is a first draft of history. A useful one. But a draft.

News coverage is shaped by what editors decide is interesting to their audience. Conflict is interesting. Drama is interesting. The slow grinding reality of poverty or injustice or institutional failure is less interesting to cover day by day, even when it is more important.

News coverage is also shaped by access. Reporters cover what they can get to and who will talk to them. Official sources have press offices and spokespeople who know how to get their version of events into the record. Ordinary people and poor communities do not have those resources.

The result is a record that is skewed toward official perspectives, dramatic moments and conflict, and away from context, root causes and the experiences of ordinary people.

How to Read the News as a Historical Document

When you read news coverage of a current event, ask what is not being covered. What is the background to this story that the article does not explain. Who are the people most affected by this and are they being quoted. What would this story look like if it were told from a different perspective.

Save primary sources when you can. Photographs. Documents. Firsthand accounts from people directly involved. These are the materials that historians will rely on when they try to understand this moment fifty years from now.

Write your own account of things you witness. You are a primary source. Your perspective on what is happening around you is exactly what future historians will wish they had more of.

The news gives you the first draft. You can help write a better one.

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

Poor Neighborhoods Never Make the History Books Even When Big Things Happen There

 In 1921 a thriving Black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma was destroyed by a mob. Buildings burned. People killed. A prosperous community that had been called Black Wall Street was reduced to rubble over two days.

For decades this event barely appeared in any history book. It was not widely taught in schools. Many people in Tulsa grew up not knowing it had happened. It took until 1996 for an official state commission to formally investigate the massacre and until 2021 for it to receive widespread national attention.

An entire community was destroyed. And history looked away for a hundred years.

This is not just one story.

Why Poor Neighborhoods Get Ignored

Wealthy neighborhoods and wealthy institutions generate records. They have lawyers and accountants and archivists and PR people. They have the resources to document themselves and the connections to get their stories into the papers and the history books.

Poor neighborhoods do not have those resources. Their stories depend on someone outside the community deciding to document them, or on community members doing the work themselves with no institutional support.

When something happens in a poor neighborhood, a protest, a disaster, a crime wave, a community effort, the coverage tends to focus on the event itself. Not on the history of the community. Not on the people who live there. Not on what came before or what the place means to the people who call it home.

And when the event is over the cameras leave and the neighborhood goes back to being invisible to the people who write official history.

What That Means for the Record

It means that the history of poverty in America is almost invisible in official accounts. We have detailed histories of the decisions made in Washington about economic policy. We have almost no documented record of what it was actually like to live through those policies in the communities they affected.

It means that community organizations, mutual aid networks, local leaders and everyday acts of survival and resistance that happen in poor neighborhoods every single day are going unrecorded.

It means that the people doing the most important work of keeping communities together under the hardest conditions are doing that work without anyone writing it down.

What You Can Do

If you live in or grew up in a community that does not have a written history, you can start one. A blog. A Facebook page. A collection of photographs with captions. A series of interviews with longtime residents. It does not have to be formal or polished. It just has to exist somewhere.

If you know people who have lived through things worth documenting, ask them to tell you about it. Record it. Write it down.

If you see community organizations doing important work in your area, document what they do. Put names to the people involved. Describe what the work actually looks like day to day.

The Tulsa massacre survived in memory because community members refused to forget it even when the official record ignored it. That is the power ordinary people have. The power to refuse to let things disappear.

Use it.

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

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.

Women in History Had Their Names Replaced by Their Husbands and We Are Still Fixing That

 Go back far enough in most historical records and women disappear.

Not because they were not there. They were there. They were running households, raising children, working farms, starting businesses, making decisions that shaped their communities.

But the records called them Mrs. John Smith. Or wife of. Or relict of. Their own first names sometimes do not appear anywhere. Their maiden names are even harder to find. They exist in the record only in relation to the men they were connected to.

For centuries that was just how record keeping worked. Women were not considered full legal persons in most systems. They could not own property in their own names in many places. They could not vote. They could not sign contracts. The legal system treated them as extensions of their husbands and the records reflected that.

The Result Is Massive Gaps in the Historical Record

Try tracing a female ancestor back more than a few generations. You will run into a wall fast.

You find her in a census listed only as a wife with an age listed in a range. You find her in a marriage record with her maiden name, the last time that name will appear. Then she disappears into a series of documents that refer to her only by her husband's name.

If her husband died before her she becomes a widow and sometimes her own name reappears. But often she just shows up in records as "widow of."

Generations of women. Living full lives. Leaving almost no individual trace.

How Researchers Are Recovering These Stories

Genealogists have developed specific techniques for tracing women through historical records. Church records often have more detail than civil records. Probate records sometimes list women with their own names when property was involved. Letters and diaries, when they survive, are often the only places where women appear as themselves rather than as someone's wife or mother.

Organizations like the Organization of American Historians and university women's history programs have been working for decades to recover and publish the histories of women who were written out of the official record.

Projects that digitize letters, diaries and personal documents written by women are among the most important preservation projects happening right now.

What You Can Do

If you have letters, diaries or personal documents written by women in your family, preserve them. Scan them. Transcribe them. Upload them somewhere permanent.

When you do genealogy research, record the maiden names of every woman you find. Make sure those names are in your family tree. Do not let them disappear again.

If you know stories about women in your family or community that were never written down, write them down now. A woman's full name. What she did. What she was like. What she built or survived or created.

Half of history walked around for centuries without their names properly recorded. It is not too late to start fixing that.

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