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History keeps the powerful's records
A lopsided record
The wealthiest and most literate people, with the greatest resources, made a lot of records and also managed to have those records preserved. Everyone else disappears, and their remains are gone. Any history that begins with what survives starts from that lopsided record, which makes it hard to arrive at a proper perspective on the human condition.
Looking beyond it
The record can be repaired. Evidence that does survive in other forms can show the lives of the powerless as well as the powerful, and anyone telling a story about the past has to keep looking for it.
Looking beyond the official record means turning to discarded objects, small personal keepsakes, and things so common that nobody thinks about how important they are, the kinds of items that never end up behind museum glass.
How do historians recover ordinary people's lives?
Historians turn to sources that were never meant as histories: tax rolls, court cases, parish registers, wills, and the lists of belongings taken after a death. Since the 1960s, a movement often called history from below, shaped by E. P. Thompson's 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class, has used such records to follow laborers, servants, and the poor. Archaeologists add old trash heaps, called middens, which reveal what people ate and used.
Why do everyday objects rarely survive?
Cloth, wood, leather, and paper rot away in most soils, while pottery, stone, and metal last. As a result, archaeologists often recover many broken pots and very few garments from the same site. Worn-out things were also repaired, reused, or burned rather than kept. Dry caves, deep bogs, and shipwrecks are among the few places where perishable objects have been preserved.
Why could so few people write their own records?
Literacy was rare for most of history. Estimates compiled by the Our World in Data project put global adult literacy at roughly 12 percent in 1800, compared with more than 85 percent today. Writing materials, schooling, and free time were all costly, and the people who had them tended to be rulers, clergy, merchants, and officials.
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