Heritage Months, What Comes Next
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: Heritage, Memory, and the Stories We Tell
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,100 words, an estimated 4-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’ve been exploring Heritage Months as living and layered — as doorways, rather than destinations; as lenses, rather than containers.
In Week 1, we honored the 100-year legacy of Heritage Months through Dr. Woodson’s vision for Black history — a spark that widened the historical canon and challenged omission.
In Week 2, we reflected on heritage as something dynamic — shaped by memory, migration, language, community, and personal interpretation.
In Week 3, we turned to sound, tracing the influence of Sister Rosetta Tharpe — often called the “Godmother of Rock and Roll” — to consider how heritage moves across genre and through generations, and how recognition sometimes trails behind influence.
This week, we ask a quieter — yet urgent — question: What happens after the month ends?
When the Calendar Turns
Heritage Months often arrive with visible intention — banners, assemblies, curated book displays, highlighted figures, thoughtfully prepared lesson plans.
And that visibility matters. It signals recognition. It creates space. It invites conversation.
And then, as months do, they conclude. Bulletin boards change, book displays shift, and new units begin.
I’ve found myself wondering: What are Heritage Months meant to curate or hold? And what are they meant to extend?
If Heritage Months are doorways, then the essential question may not only be what happens during the month, but what continues after.
As Woodson intended, Heritage Months were interventions: correctives to omission. They were designed to expand what counts as history and who belongs within it.
But after the month ends, how do the goals become integrated into the longer narrative — the stories we tell about ourselves, our communities, and our shared world? The stories children absorb not only from what we highlight once a year, but from what we normalize every day.
If discussions of heritage — or race, culture, ethnicity, community, identity — live only within designated months, we risk narrowing the very lens those observances were created to widen.
So what might help us keep the door open?
Ways to Keep the Door Open
Let’s consider a shift in how we frame the story.
Idea 1: Teach Movements, Not Silos
When we teach individuals in isolation, we risk turning history into a series of disconnected spotlights. But history is rarely solitary.
When teaching someone like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — whose name appears in teaching standards for almost every state in the U.S. — we can situate him within the broader, long arc of the Civil Rights Movement, placing him among other organizers, strategists, clergy, students, labor leaders, communities, and everyday people who shaped, and were shaped by, that era.
Figures such as Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong, and Cesar Chavez remind us that advocacy has often been multiracial, multilingual, and interconnected.
Many of these individuals were described as “firsts,” but they were also more than a first. When telling their stories, we can expand their personal backgrounds and lived experiences to broaden context, or to reveal the systems they navigated, the predecessors who paved pathways — comparing their stories to others in a search for similarities and a celebration of differences.
To expand the narrative, we might ask: What shaped them? Who came before them? Who carried their work forward? What systems constrained them? And what communities sustained them?
When we see people as navigators of systems — rather than isolated icons or heroes — heritage becomes layered, relational, and ongoing.
Idea 2: Trace Influence, Not Ownership
Heritage and culture rarely develop in isolation. They travel, they adapt, they layer.
Consider, for example, the tomato — now central to Italian pasta sauce, Indian curries, and countless global cuisines. Yet, as we explored previously, the tomato originated in the Americas. We may want to also highlight how it was cultivated by Indigenous communities for thousands of years before traveling outward through global colonization and trade.
Cultural traditions have traveled in similar ways. Music, for example, carries the sounds of many routes and many hands.
As we mentioned last week, the sound of Rosetta Tharpe reverberates through generations of artists. Contemporary artists like Bad Bunny blend genres and diasporic influences that reflect layered inheritance rather than singular origin.
In this light, tracing influence does not diminish pride. It does not erase cultural specificity. Instead, it reveals connection — how traditions are shaped by encounter, exchange, migration, resilience, and creativity.
When we follow influence alongside echoes of origin, culture appears not as something sealed, but as something carried — across time, communities, and generations.
A Quiet, Yet Urgent Question
Even with good intentions, Heritage Months can sometimes feel like a completed checkbox. But there is a deeper invitation here.
There is a quiet, yet urgent, question that asks: How do these stories reshape not just a designated moment, but the longer narrative?
The longer narrative is the story we internalize about who builds nations, who shapes culture, who leads movements, who innovates, who belongs.
It is the story children absorb — not only from what we highlight once a year, but from what we normalize every day.
As I’ve reflected on Heritage Months this year, I’ve realized that visibility has power. And yet, the work of Belonging and Inclusion also requires something more sustained. Something woven into the fabric of how we teach, speak, celebrate, and remember.
Such work is rarely solitary.
Libraries, community elders, colleagues, local historians, artists, and others can all become partners in expanding that narrative.
To shift or widen the lens, we may keep in mind:
Where there has been separation, we can look for interconnection.
When categories feel rigid, we can notice overlap.
Where stories feel isolated, we can trace influence.
The story of “us” is often more layered than maybe we’ve been taught.
If Heritage Months open more doors, our task — as educators, caregivers, and community members — may be to keep them open.
Not only for a month, but for the ongoing, unfinished story we are shaping together.
Let’s Pause and Reflect
When the calendar turns, which stories remain centered — and which begin to fade?
What shifts when we teach interconnection instead of isolation?
If Heritage Months open the door, what is one small, steady way you might help keep it open in the months ahead?
This week, choose a story from your family, community, or your own experience that isn’t often highlighted. Consider sharing it with a colleague, bringing it into a classroom discussion, or reflecting with someone you care about — doing so is one way to keep the door open to stories that expand understanding.
Theme: