Editing 1979: History

{{comic
| number    = 1979
| date      = April 11, 2018
| title     = History
| image     = history.png
| titletext = HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?
}}

==Explanation==
This comic quotes a [https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19134214/httpswwwxkcdcom1979/|a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue]. The tragic event referenced throughout is the {{w|Assassination of James A. Garfield|assassination of President James A. Garfield}}. Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the "dry and tedious" historians to comb through the details.

The writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the impossibility of learning all of it. 

The article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future. 

For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies assuming that he would easily win re-election by the state legislature--but then failed to achieve re-election due to party factions and political infighting.

Interestingly [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03x0cd,%2Fm%2F0b22w a comparison of Google search frequency for the years 2004-2018] shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling Conkling's Wikipedia article] and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that Conkling's re-election defeat was an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.

The writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote. 

The bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events. If they have time to pay attention at all, future readers will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.

The title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.

Although this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.

==Transcript==
:[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.]
:Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.

:[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:]
:'''The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved.''' <font color="gray">Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield. </font>

:<font color="gray">The intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered. </font>

:'''How accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss?''' <font color="gray">Is there anything in the first century of our history—even the death of the great Lincoln—which can be used as a parallel? </font> 

:<font color="gray">Perhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer.</font> '''But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record.''' <font color="gray">He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian. </font>

:::<font color="gray">-The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph </font>
:::<font color="gray">&nbsp;September 30,<sup>th</sup> 1881 </font>

:[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.]
:Cueball: Man. The past is so '''''big. '''''
:Megan: How do historians even cope?
:Cueball: I have no idea.
:Megan:  I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.


{{comic discussion}}

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