There is a famous saying that history is written by the winners. Like most famous sayings it is not entirely accurate — but it points at something real.
For most of recorded history, the people who decided what got written down, preserved, and passed on were the people who held power. Governments. Churches. Wealthy families. Military commanders. These institutions preserved the records that made them look good, justified their authority, and told the story of history from their perspective.
Everything else — the experiences of the poor, the enslaved, the colonized, the ordinary working people who made up the vast majority of every society that has ever existed — was mostly left out. Not because it was not important. Because the people who controlled the record did not think it mattered.
We are still living with the consequences of that choice. And for the first time in history, we have the tools to actually do something about it.
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What Official History Left Out
When you were taught American history in school, what did you learn about?
Presidents and their decisions. Wars and their generals. Constitutional amendments and Supreme Court cases. The Founding Fathers and their ideas. Major corporations and their innovations.
What did you not learn about?
What it was like to be an average person living through any of those events. What working people ate, wore, and worried about. How enslaved people experienced their daily lives and maintained their humanity under conditions designed to destroy it. What immigrant families went through when they arrived in America. What Native American communities experienced from the inside, in their own words, rather than through the lens of the people who dispossessed them.
The history you were taught was real — it happened. But it was incomplete in ways that distorted your understanding of the past. The full picture includes millions of people, millions of stories, and millions of perspectives that the official record mostly ignored.
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The People Who Have Been Trying to Fix This
Historians have been working for decades to expand the historical record and recover the voices that were left out.
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, published in 1980, was one of the most influential attempts to tell American history from the perspective of ordinary people rather than the powerful. Whether you agree with all of his interpretations or not, the fundamental project — centering the experience of workers, women, enslaved people, and marginalized communities — was an important corrective to a record that had excluded them.
Oral history projects like StoryCorps have been collecting and archiving the recorded voices of ordinary Americans since 2003. Those recordings are deposited in the Library of Congress. Future historians will be able to hear the actual voices of working-class Americans from the early twenty-first century in a way that was not possible for any previous era.
Community archives — maintained by local historical societies, libraries, and grassroots organizations — have been collecting photographs, documents, and personal testimonies that never would have made it into official archives. The Chicago History Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, the Chicano Research Collection at Arizona State University — these institutions exist specifically to preserve histories that official institutions overlooked.
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What You Can Do Right Now
You do not have to be a professional historian to contribute to fixing the historical record. Here are specific things any person can do.
Write your own history. Your experiences, your community, your family's story — these are part of the historical record whether anyone treats them that way or not. Write them down. Publish them. Put them somewhere permanent. The more ordinary people document their own lives, the less the official record can claim to represent the full picture.
Record the stories of people in your community. Every older person you know is a living archive of history that will be lost when they die. Interview them. Record the conversations. Upload them to Archive.org or submit them to StoryCorps at storycorps.org. A twenty-minute recorded conversation can become a historical document that lasts centuries.
Fill in gaps in public records. Wikipedia is a living document that anyone can contribute to. If there are gaps in the history of your community, your neighborhood, your family's experience, or any group of people you know about — you can add that information. The more people contribute from diverse perspectives, the more complete and accurate the collective record becomes.
Challenge narratives that leave people out. When you encounter historical accounts — in books, documentaries, news stories, social media — that focus only on powerful figures and ignore the people affected by their decisions, say so. Ask about the people who are missing from the story. Push for the full picture.
Preserve what exists in your own family and community. Old photographs, letters, documents, and recordings are the raw material of history. Scan them. Upload them. Label them with names and dates. Share them with local archives or with online databases like Ancestry or FamilySearch. Every document rescued from a shoebox and digitized is a piece of the record saved.
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The Record Is Still Being Written
Here is the most important thing to understand about history: it is not finished. The record is still being built, right now, by the choices ordinary people make about what to document, preserve, and share.
The bias toward recording the powerful and forgetting everyone else is not inevitable. It was a product of who had access to the tools of preservation in previous eras. Those tools are now available to everyone.
Your phone is a recording studio, a camera, a publishing house, and an archive. The internet gives you the ability to reach anyone in the world and to deposit documents in archives that will preserve them permanently. The barriers that kept ordinary people out of the historical record for thousands of years are, for the first time in history, gone.
The question is whether we use these tools to correct the record — or whether we let the same old story keep telling itself.
I think we owe it to everyone who was left out to try.
