66 Chapter 5: Biblical Integration in History: The Grand Debate Thomas S. Mach Have you noticed how popular Ancestry.com has become? People everywhere are signing up and trying to learn about where their families came from, when they came to this country, what they did, and why they did it. As human beings, we seem to be innately interested in these questions. Now, I realize that quality is not found in everyone. Schoolage children tend to find history either very interesting or very boring. There does not seem to be much in between those two extremes and, unfortunately, I fear that most fall into the latter category. A scan of latenight television or cable news shows will evidence that most Americans have very little knowledge of the world’s or their nation’s past. We should find it distressing when a randomly selected individual cannot identify what nation we fought against in the War for Independence, who the president of the United States was during the American Civil War, or what brought the country out of the Great Depression. I could go on a diatribe about how historically illiterate Americans are, how the educational system has relegated history courses to second place behind science and math requirements, and how colleges have dropped history courses from general education programs, but that is not the purpose of this essay. What is interesting, however, is that in spite of the evidence that many of us do not know our nation’s history very well, most of us are intrigued by our own personal history. We could simply chalk this up to our narcissistic society, but I would like to think it goes deeper than that. When we meet people for the first time, one of the first questions asked revolves around what we do for a living. When I tell people that I teach history, I often receive the comment that they did not appreciate history as a student but as they grew older, they came to appreciate it. I think this growing sense of the importance of history has to do with the realization that ourselves, our families, our culture, our nation, and our faith are grounded in the past. Knowing the past gives us a better sense of who we are. More than 26,000 people have traced their lineage back to individuals who sailed across the ocean on the Mayflower and have joined the Mayflower Society. A conflict over who was and was not actually a descendent of Thomas Jefferson led to a major investigation regarding whether or not Jefferson had lived with a slave named Sally Hemings as
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