Discuss what responsibilities, if any, citizens should have related to being historically

informed. For example, what historical inquiry skills might be important for a citizenry to
have to address current global challenges?

Citizens have the responsibility of being historically informed because without such critical
awareness of history, they are easily manipulated into following narratives that might not
necessarily further their values, quality of life, access to resources or education, or otherwise
undermine their personal interests.

Take for example Edward Snowden. There is a commonly repeated narrative that by having
been given asylum in Russia, it is proof that he was a traitor to American interests and that
his disclosure of the illegal domestic surveillance program instituted by the National Security
Agency (NSA) was personally motivated by either some motive of personal enrichment or
anti-Americanism. This framing neglects to mention that he was traveling through Russia
when the US government suspended his passport, stranding him against his will in Russia, a
country that was still at that point commonly seen as 'other'/ 'them'/ 'a recent and future
enemy,' and otherwise an easy framing to criticize and make claims of the allegiance of a
person who would 'choose' to live there. Through controlling this narrative, it is possible to
make one see a person who was attempting to protect the interests of average American
citizens as a traitor, discrediting the claims they made in the first place.

Another example is the 1776 Report, a report published by the White House during the
Trump administration claiming that Universities across the entire United States were
infiltrated by communists, as well as claiming that the arts, music, and writing spheres had
been similar infiltrated by communism; while also stipulating that the United States was
founded to be a religiously driven country. Rather conversely, it did so while praising the
musician Woody Guthrie as a paragon of American patriotism and virtue. Anybody who has
studied McCarthyism, folk music in the 1940's and 50's, or Communism and its relative
representation across the world is astonishingly aware of how direly this falls apart under
examination. Compared to West Europe, communists in the United States are a nearly extinct
species with no political representation for nearly seventy years, Woodie Guthrie was
famously tailed and investigated by the FBI during McCarthyism and had interactions with
various communist circles, many of his peers had their passports suspended, Universities
have not been infiltrated by communists and this has been a tactic used in the past to route
administrations with views considered undesirable by a small group of individuals with vest
interest in maintaining power by stripping individuals of accreditation, position, and social
standing though the House of Anti-American Activities Committee, which is historically
viewed as having infringed significantly on civil liberties of Americans during its time.

"I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When 
And How and Where and Who."

-Rudyard Kipling

Think about a challenge, opportunity, event, or issue that affects your community. How might
being more historically informed impact how you understand that issue or how you take
action?
My community is in Wroclaw, Poland. Here, there is a significant amount of historical and
cultural baggage from the forty-four years of Soviet occupation. Without studying it, an
American would have many questions, and sometimes friction, if they were not to inform
themselves and begin to question 'why,' in regards to Polish culture and society. Currently,
there a recent challenge (amongst many) in this community is the influx of refugees fleeing
due to the invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russia. Before the invasion, the population of
Poland was approximately 37 million people. In the first days of the war, the average border
traffic peaked at 140 thousand per day, totaling since the beginning (February 24th, 2022)
over 3.5m refugees, a square kneed increase of population of nearly 10%, concentrated
mostly in major cities such as Wroclaw, Warsaw, Gdansk, and Krakow. The country was
faced with several issues such as mouths to feed and house, that these people do not pay taxes
and there would be no additional funds at a government level to handle such issues, that
while the languages are similar and at times mutually telligible, that this varies wildly by
person, competence, and experience; at the same time dependencies on Russian petroleum
needed to be navigated and the quality of life and cost of living changed radically for the
average citizen. Public transport became overly congested, permissions to work need to be
made and processing 3.5m people takes an administrative force that needs to be mustered,
there are many despondent and now desperate people, which breeds an increase in crime
through no fault to a community, but nonetheless this can motivate anti-refugee sentiments,
which need to be calmed in order to maintain some sense of order, myriad problems from the
geopolitical disruption of not just a country, but an entire region of the world with threats
being made to other former USSR occupied countries, including Poland.

Generally, Poland is an unusually historically informed country, due in part to a strong

cultural memory and importance placed on history with the value being keenly understood
because of the intentional and systemic erasure of Polish history by the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany. Poland was raided of its artistic, cultural, and written histories, either burnt,
sold to private collectors in conquering nations, or otherwise ported to faraway places never
to be seen again, or just lost. 

Take for example Zamek Ksianz, a magnificent castle in the Lower Silesian Vovoidship
(roughly translated, the "state" or "province" which the city of Wroclaw occupies, ceded to
Poland as war reparations from Germany after World War II). It was formerly the largest
library in central Europe, collected by various offshoots of the Hapsburg family and their
subjects during the previous five centuries. Today, it has no books, they were all looted
during the war.

Nonetheless, the collective consciousness has placed great emphasis on either restoring,
excavating, or passing down orally; traditions to keep the culture and history alive, even
when Poland has as a nation, been dissolved multiple times, sometimes for over a century,
each time to come back like a pheonix, an important symbol in the Polish mythos and culture.
Because of this, the community in Poland, nearly unilaterally, has banded together to support
Ukrainians at extreme cost to themselves in a way that America, if I may be for a moment
critical of the country from which I come, has not seen in my generation. People went to the
train stations where there were veritable stacks and pyramids of people completely unknown
to them, speaking a different language, with nothing in the way of money or goods to offer
them, and seeing the crippling of the government buerocratic structure, took them into their
homes freely, for months at a time, helping them to find work, to try and learn the language,
to find permanent accommodations and get work visas. They donated food, clothing, money
(despite Poland not being a 'rich' country in the EU), even enlisted in the Ukrainian foreign
legion, and searched for ways to make things work even in the face of overwhelming odds,
while missiles rained just kilometers off their border, when it might be arguable to look only
after oneself and buckle down for the times to come.

Thusly, the historical memory of Poles being subjected to similar atrocities from the same
abusers, and awareness of a shared history with Ukraine (besides both suffering under Soviet
occupation, Lviv was a Polish city before World War II, and much like Poland gained lower
Silesia from Germany, it lost Lviv, formerly Lwow, to the USSR, in fact, a majority of
people who are native Wroclawians have ancestry from Lviv as the entire city was forcibly
resettled to Wroclaw, whose former German occupants, excepting a fraction of a percent who
were given right to stay in order to keep the basic functions of the city operating; were all
forcibly booted to Germany) contributed to this sheer amount of unyielding willpower that is
still going, eight months later.

Bibliography:

https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/3/article/the-war-in-ukraine-and-
migration-to-poland-outlook-and-challenges.html

Popiński, Ph.D., K., 2022. Wroclaw's History. [online] VisitWroclaw. Available at:
<https://visitwroclaw.eu/en/wroclaws-history> [Accessed 5 October 2022].