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Great Men Of History

Prince Otto von Bismarck noted that "What we learn from history is that no one learns from history." I contend that a major reason is that virtually no institution actually teaches history. Instead we get a corrupt mythology that reinforces the dominant ideology and affirms the status quo. Snap quiz for 25 percent of your mark: "In the United States, who freed the slaves?" Did you answer Abraham Lincoln?
Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Fredrick Douglas, and Garrison Lloyd, in that order, would all have been better, or at least more accurate answers. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation after Gettysburg, but that merely ratified what was inevitable. The four people I name, and hundreds of others, were the ones who created a social situation that made it possible for Lincoln to do so.
I do not mean to denigrate what Lincoln did: he was a great man. Certainly Lincoln brought an end to slavery as soon as it was politically feasible, probably as early as it might reasonably have been done. Certainly a different president might have tried to keep slavery as an institution, for example George B. McLellan, who was both a credible presidential candidate and proslavery.
But we are taught that history is made by the particular actions of lone great men, which is utterly false. It was the Sojourner Truths that made the Emancipation Proclamation politically feasible, and eventually, inevitable. No president could have ended slavery as an institution even five years earlier than Lincoln did, but equally no president could have done more than delay its end.
The "great men" of history are caught up in tides of change almost as much as everyone else. They have slightly more capacity for influencing it than the average person, but not much. The people who create those tides of change are the ones who shake society by its roots. And who are these people? The four I mention include two runaway slaves, a travelling Quaker preacher, and a young radical who edited newspapers;...