Say the name Ted Bundy. Almost everyone knows it. There are books, films, documentaries, podcasts, and entire university courses dedicated to studying him. His face has been on magazine covers. Actors have played him in Hollywood productions. He is, by almost every measure of cultural memory, famous.
Now name one of his victims.
Most people cannot do it.
That is not a small problem. That is a fundamental failure of how we record and transmit history — and it has been happening for as long as human beings have been keeping records.
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This Is Not New
Look back through history and you will see the same pattern repeated over and over.
We know the names of every Roman emperor who ordered mass executions. We barely know the names of anyone who was executed.
We know the name of every general who ordered a massacre. The people massacred are usually recorded only as a number.
We know the names of the men who ran the Nazi death camps. Six million Jewish victims, along with millions of others, are often reduced in popular memory to a single statistic.
We know the names of the plantation owners. The enslaved people who built their wealth are mostly unnamed in the historical record.
We know the names of the people who committed atrocities. We have forgotten, almost entirely, the individual human beings those atrocities were committed against.
This is not an accident. It reflects a deeply embedded idea about whose story is worth telling — and that idea is wrong.
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Why We Remember the Wrong People
There are several reasons this happens and understanding them is the first step toward changing it.
Perpetrators generate records. Criminals are arrested, tried, and documented. Their crimes are investigated and reported. Their names appear in court documents, newspaper headlines, and official records. The system that processes them creates a paper trail that historians can follow.
Victims often leave almost nothing behind. A crime victim's life before the crime — their personality, their hopes, their daily existence, the people who loved them — rarely generates official documentation. Unless someone in their family or community actively preserves their story, it disappears.
Drama drives attention. The psychology of violence, the mind of a killer, the details of a crime — these things are considered compelling in a way that a victim's ordinary life is not. Media and entertainment have built entire industries around the perpetrator's story. The victim's story is considered less dramatic, less interesting, less marketable.
Power shapes the record. Throughout history, the people who controlled the writing of history were usually the same people who benefited from violence and oppression. They had no incentive to humanize the people their systems harmed. So they didn't.
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What This Does to History
When we remember perpetrators and forget victims we create a distorted record that has real consequences.
It sends a message — unintentional but powerful — that the people who were killed or harmed did not matter as much as the person who harmed them. That their lives were less significant. That they were defined by what happened to them rather than by who they were.
It deprives us of the full picture. Understanding a crime, an atrocity, or a historical injustice requires understanding its full human cost — not just what was done, but who it was done to. When we erase the victims from the record, we lose our ability to truly comprehend what was lost.
It makes it easier for history to repeat itself. Atrocities become more thinkable when their victims are abstractions. When we know that real, specific, individual human beings — people with names and families and favorite songs and small daily routines — were destroyed, the moral weight of what happened becomes impossible to ignore.
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The People Who Deserve to Be Named
Here is a small attempt to correct the record for just a few of the people history has forgotten.
Dahmer's first victim was Steven Hicks, 18 years old, a hitchhiker on his way to a concert. He wanted to be a musician. He had a family who spent years not knowing what had happened to him.
The 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001 included a pastry chef, a high school football coach, a woman who had just started a new job that day, a man who called his wife from the tower to tell her he loved her. Their names are carved in stone at the memorial in New York. That was the right thing to do.
The thousands of men and women lynched in America between the Civil War and the mid-twentieth century mostly died without their stories being told. Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative has spent years trying to document their names and their lives. That work is not finished.
The victims of the Galveston hurricane of 1900 — 8,000 people — are largely unnamed in the historical record. They had lives. They had families. They had stories. Almost none of it survived.
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What We Can Do
Preserving the stories of victims — of crimes, of disasters, of historical injustices — is one of the most important acts of historical preservation available to ordinary people.
Research and document the victims in stories you already know. Look up the names of crime victims when you encounter a story focused on the perpetrator. Read about them as people, not just as victims. Share what you find.
Support organizations that do this work. The Equal Justice Initiative, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and many local historical societies are actively working to name and remember forgotten victims. That work deserves support.
Contribute to public records. If you know the story of someone who has been forgotten — a victim of a crime, a person lost in a disaster, an ancestor erased from history — document it. Write it down. Upload it to Archive.org. Add it to a memorial database. Publish it on a blog. Put it somewhere it can be found.
Tell the full story when you tell any story. When you talk about historical events, make sure the victims are as real and specific in your telling as the perpetrators are. Say their names. Describe their lives. Refuse to let them be reduced to statistics.
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History belongs to everyone who lived it — not just to the people who caused the most damage. It is past time we started recording it that way.
