A Country’s Story: Who Gets Remembered?
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: How We Tell a Country’s Story
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is around 1300 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
One more time, let's imagine a camera. It zooms in on human hands driving wooden poles into narrow cracks in slabs of stone. Water is poured slowly into the crevices. Over weeks, the wood expands. Rock begins to split.
Nearby, oxen drag quarried stone across uneven ground. Boats wait along the Potomac River to carry the load toward a growing city.
It’s the 1790s. Well over 200 years ago.
At first glance, this may seem like an ordinary moment. But many of the people laboring here are enslaved. And they are doing the arduous work of extracting stone from earth, a foundational part of the construction process for one of the most recognizable symbols of the United States: the White House.
Some of this stone would be sent to plantations, where they would be turned into bricks by the hands of men, women, and children. Other pieces were sent directly to the construction site.
For the creation of the White House and Capitol, enslaved people were involved in “every aspect of construction,” from clearing the land — felling trees, removing stumps and roots, leveling hills — to extracting stone, firing and laying bricks, building walls, and sealing rooftops.
Zooming in on such details reveals a difficult truth: enslaved people were forced to construct the physical symbols of a nation whose founding ideals and elected leaders did not yet recognize their freedom, or full personhood.
This year marks the 250th anniversary since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Anniversaries like this often invite reflection, celebration, critique, and conversation. They ask us to return to what we consider foundational. Inspiring. And challenging.
They reveal the need to widen the lens — reminding us that countries are not built by documents alone. They are built by human beings — some remembered, others overlooked, and many excluded from the very ideals they helped sustain.
This month, we’ve been exploring how we tell a country’s story:
In Week 1, we asked: When and Where Do We Begin?
In Week 2, we explored democracy and: What Ideas Build the Foundation?
Last week, we examined: Who is Included in “We the People”?
This week, we turn to another question: When we tell the story of a country, who gets remembered?
Memory and National Stories
When people tell the story of a country, the narrative often narrows around recognizable figures: founders, presidents, generals, inventors.
Naming such figures matters. Their decisions shaped laws, governments, institutions, and public life — impacting millions of people across generations.
But if we widen the frame, another truth comes into view: countries aren’t built by “famous names” alone. They are also shaped by the people whose names rarely appear in textbooks, on statues, or on government currency.
Nations and cultures are also built by those who quarry stone, cook meals, raise children, sew uniforms, harvest crops, clear land, print newspapers, educate children, care for the sick, build roads, and organize communities.
Some labored by choice and received wages. Others, unfortunately, were forced into labor through coercion and violence. Some left behind speeches and signatures on parchment. Others left fingertips in brick, kitchens, docks, fields, and foundations.
Much of this labor made national growth possible, even when the people performing it were denied equal rights, recognition, freedom, or full personhood within the country they helped build.
Collective memory can shape whose humanity becomes visible within a country’s story — and whose contributions and lives remain just outside the frame.
The Stories Symbols Carry
The White House was built to serve as both the residence and workplace of the U.S. President, and as a national symbol.
Designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban in a neoclassical style, with a white exterior and Greek-inspired columns, the White House was intended to communicate many ideals such as permanence, stability, and democratic aspiration.
European stonemasons and wage laborers contributed to the project. Much of the labor, however, was forced upon enslaved Black Americans through systems of slavery upheld by the U.S. government and individual enslavers. Many of their names were not carefully preserved in public records at the time.
Recognizing this history does not erase the country’s founding story. It expands it.
It asks us to hold difficult truths at the same time: aspiration and exclusion, democracy and dehumanization, vision and exploitation. It also asks us to recognize the skill, endurance, and knowledge carried by the very people whose labor made many national symbols possible. Perhaps this is part of what expansive historical understanding requires: learning how to resist flattening people, places, and symbols into simple stories.
Countries are rarely shaped by a single group of people, or lawmakers alone. They emerge through generations of celebrated and unrecognized labor — physical, cultural, intellectual, technological — carried by human beings whose lives do not always enter public memory equally. Yet their contributions remain part of the foundation beneath the stories nations tell about themselves.
Brick by Brick
In modern times, more than a million people usually visit the White House each year. They’ll see layers of white-painted sandstone and brick rising from foundations laid more than two centuries ago.
Only in recent years has a more expansive account of its construction become publicly visible. Since 2021, visitors walking along the northern edge of Lafayette Square may come across a plaque commemorating the enslaved people who co-built the White House and Capitol.
It states: “The use of enslaved labor to build the home of the President of the United States — often seen as a symbol of democracy — illuminates our country’s conflicted relationship with the institution of slavery and the ideals of freedom and equality promised in America’s founding documents.”
The plaque matters for what it says, but also for what it reveals about memory itself. For generations, millions of people visited one of the most recognizable buildings in the U.S. without encountering a public acknowledgement of enslaved Black Americans whose forced labor helped make its construction possible.
Today, historians, archivists, and institutions have worked to recover some of those identities through database and archival projects that preserve hundreds of names connected to the construction of the White House and Capitol.
Naming cannot undo the dehumanization, violence, or inequality people endured. But remembrance can restore a measure of humanity to lives too often reduced to statistics, labor, silence, or censorship.
And perhaps that is part of what expanding a country’s story asks us to do: to revisit inherited narratives and widen them by asking whose hands shaped the foundations beneath the symbols people pass each day — on foot, through photographs, within textbooks, or across glowing screens.
Classroom Connection
Show students an image of a well-known national symbol, monument, government building, or landmark from your country or region.
Ask:
What does this place, building, or landmark symbolize?
Who do we usually associate with it?
Whose stories are most often centered when we learn about it?
Then invite students to trace the people whose labor, ideas, and contributions made the site possible.
Ask:
How does learning more about the people behind the symbols change your understanding of it?
Why do some historical figures become widely remembered while others remain less visible?
What kinds of labor are most likely to disappear from collective memory?
How might expanding the frame change how we understand a country's story — and the story we tell ourselves about our own cultural inheritance?
This month, we’ve widened the frame — from land, to ideas, to participation, to memory.
There is often a tendency to simplify a national narrative: to reduce a country to founding moments, famous figures, or familiar symbols. But perhaps the story of a country becomes more meaningful when it’s allowed to remain complicated. When it’s humanized. When we take the camera and zoom out, widening the frame — allowing more people to come into view.
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