Recent battles over how to teach history in American schools have focused on views of America’s domestic racism, but that’s only one piece of the problem of how we view history. Our pre-college curriculums and popular histories are filled with stories of great white men who single-handedly changed the world. However, many of these supposed ground-breakers were in fact preceded by generations of people including persons from other cultures and nations.
American Thomas Edison “invented” the light bulb a century after it was in development by inventors such as Alexander Lodygin from Tambov Governorate of the Russian Empire, Italian Alessandro Cruto and the African-American inventor Lewis Howard Latimer, whose filament patents allowed for the commercialization of the light bulb. And while Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh but working in the United States, is credited with inventing the telephone, his work followed decades of work by others, such as Italian Antonio Meucco and the 1,200-year-old acoustic telephone technology from the Chimu Culture of Peru, stored at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.
Claiming exceptional performance only by people of Western European descent, and ignoring what non-Western Europeans have done, propagates negative attitudes toward other groups — a reality that has led to racism, anti-immigrant sentiments and white supremacy.
The most problematic of these ethnocentric myths involves what’s often called the most important invention of the last millennium: the celebration of Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg as the inventor of movable metal type. Historians often say that Gutenberg’s mid-15th century invention led to some of the most important changes in western history — including the Protestant Reformation, nationalism, capitalism, individualism and democracy.
It was an incredible achievement, in that telling.