History

A narrated tour, meanderings along the river, pamphlets, and my restaurant placemat educated me Sunday in Savannah, GA.  The oldest city in Georgia was established in 1733.  James Oglethorpe (a leading London social reformer) envisioned a colony between English South Carolina and Spanish Florida as a place to resettle Britain’s poor - especially those in debtors’ prison whom he saw as tragically mistreated.  Oglethorpe’s initial Colony Charter prohibited four things:  slavery, lawyers, Catholics, and hard liquor.  The king, keen on keeping Catholic Spain away from South Carolina, thought a new colony in betwixt would be an excellent buffer.  As history of the city deposited bits into my knowledge bank curiosity grew.       

History is defined as a noun at dictionary.com.
1.  The branch of knowledge dealing with past events.
2.  A continuous systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc.
3.  The aggregate of past events.
4.  The record of past events and times, especially in connection with the human race.
5.  A past notable for its important, unusual, or interesting events.

Regrettably, I didn’t pay enough attention to history as a subject in school.  Now I find it fascinating.  I feel fervently curious about people of passed times because their stories, like ours, are the threads that weave together the tapestry of the tale.  Just as presently, there was hope and heartbreak, pride and passion, greed and good in government leaders, wealthy people increasing wealth off the backs of the impoverished and wealthy people building schools and opportunities for improvement, murder and marriage, individuals working for personal good and individuals spending their lives working for the good of many, birth and death, despair and celebration.

Pirates and paupers, natives and newcomers, slaves and spinsters, artists and artisans, indentured servants and intrepid explorers are present in the history of Savannah.  As I descended steep cobblestone paths leading from the high bluffs of Bay Street down to River Street I realized the rocks beneath me traveled across the Atlantic Ocean as ballast stones in ships craving goods from American colonies.  Stones out, cotton in - what to do with the rocks?  Pave the streets and shore up the wharf.

As my ankles worked not to turn on the uneven surface, I thought of bare feet plodding though that port against their will.  Throughout the day, I thought of the numerous people who had knelt to pray in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Lafayette Square, of folks who heard the first draft of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream Speech at the First African Baptist Church on Franklin Square, of the people whose homes were burned in fires that wiped out half the city in 1796 and 1820, of young boy-soldiers from all sides of different wars who marched and camped in Forsythe Park, of people like me who wander along city streets planned long ago and remaining in use today.

History teaches me to see people in the past and the present.