I really appreciated Dr. Bezio’s Podcast #9 because it reminded me of my Slavery & Freedom class I took last semester. In that class, my professor taught my peers and me how to reinterpret history by critically reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources for what wasn’t said. In other words, this is colloquially known as the silences in history that predominantly people of minority demographics write about yet are “silenced” by dominant groups who want to maintain power and authority in a society. Even now, as a Jepson student, I still find myself engaging in Historiography because while it is important to understand what a particular author was trying to convey to a certain audience during a particular time period, it is equally important to investigate the relevant context surrounding that author’s background and the background of their audience to see how historical events shaped literature and what consequences have modern-day society grappled with as a result of those events.

A popular example of this would be the focus of my research paper, which has a normative claim that American society should not continue to pride itself on extending independence to all Americans on the Fourth of July when a large segment of the United States population- namely, enslaved Africans, women, and indigenous peoples- could not claim such liberties and rights that may have been outlined by the Declaration of Independence, but was really only meant to benefit property-owning, white American men. Moreover, in studying how the celebration of the Fourth of July as America’s sole day of independence has led to negative consequences for certain groups in the U.S., I’ve found that a majority of Americans- Black Americans- are advocating for Juneteenth to be federally recognized as a national day of Independence. And this is significant because of the constant forms of oppression and inequality Black Americans face on this campus and in the larger realm of society that continuously reduce us to second-class citizenship.