An "explosion of History"...

"Normally as a historian, the challenge is how do you make history connected to the modern day? But I don’t think that is the challenge, because history has exploded into the present”.

David Olusaga in an interview with Herpreet Kaur Grewal discusses how a younger generation is bringing the public History of our multi-racial societies to the surface and keeping them in our "consciousness".

It made me think about the shame encountered as a young teenager bringing questions and historical sources around the British presence in India into our 'A' Level History classrooms only to have them dismissed as "irrelevant".

Though the evidence suggested the opposite, it was clear that there was "no room" for anything beyond the "saris, samosas and steel bands" that we not only had permission for but were sought out to bring into our Religious Education classes. Who doesn't enjoy a spicy samosa served by an exotic teen wearing a sari and playing Bollywood music in the background? It's far easier on the senses than the information painstakingly captured from archived index cards in hushed rooms of the India Office Records where I seemed to be the youngest and only person of colour in those days. Especially when they spoke of the unimaginable contradictions of how colonialism crept into the subcontinent, transformed into control and then Independence was actually fought for versus "civilly negotiated".

Olusago highlights the impact of the #BLM movement on how young people he writes for these days don't have the narrow views of British history that some of us were nourished with.

“Young people don’t have that alternative vision,” Olusoga explains. Accordingly, he is not revealing to them something that shocks them because it clashes with what they thought they knew; they don’t yet have what Olusoga calls the ‘fantasy island story’ version of British history – “so they are far more open.”

He also says that he has noticed that children around the age of 11 have “understood that the world is not as nice as we would want it to be, they are beginning to understand that there is inequality” and “so they are braver and they are more willing to confront these things than I think we often give them credit for”.

Let's hope this brave new world of History will overturn some of the earlier chapters we continue to see in our classrooms and conversations.