Understanding this absence requires understanding something about how histories are selected and maintained.

Every nation’s historical narrative involves choices — decisions about which events, which places, and which people will be treated as significant and which will be relegated to footnotes or omitted entirely.

These choices are never neutral.

They reflect the interests and perspectives of the people and institutions that make them, and they produce a historical narrative that serves some interests while marginalizing others.

The American historical narrative that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the narrative that shaped what was taught in schools, what appeared in textbooks, and what entered popular culture — was organized around a specific vision of American origins: European colonizers arriving in a largely empty continent, encountering primitive peoples who were obstacles to civilization, and building from scratch the institutions and achievements that constituted American greatness.