Living History

There is a mistaken belief that history is a subject that has already been written. That it is unchanging, that unlike science there is nothing new to discover, nothing new to learn, that history is just a bunch of stories about dead people who are irrelevant to today.

But recent discoveries prove these naysayers wrong. We found King Richard’s body under a parking lot and Blackbeard’s ship of the Carolina coast. Cannons from the wreck of the La Juliana, a ship from the Spanish Armada were found off the Sligo coast in June.

Just this past summer the remains of four leaders of Jamestown were discovered. In addition to giving us a look into what life was like at Jamestown, researchers also uncovered a mystery. Captain William Archer was buried with a Catholic reliquary. The question that is being asked now is why a Catholic reliquary was found beneath the first Protestant church in the new World? Theories abound that Captain Archer was a secret Catholic, possibly even a cleric because of the way he was buried, with his head pointing east. Were there more Catholics than previously thought at Jamestown? This simple discovery could mean the start of the rewriting of Catholic history in the United States. Discoveries like these have the potential to increase our knowledge of historic events and can rewrite those dusty history books.

These discoveries also prove that history is a living, ever changing subject, exciting enough to interest even the most jaded student.