ABSTRACT

The poem, “A Worker Views History” by Bertolt Brecht is really a series of rhetorical questions (https://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1406.html, accessed April 24, 2009). The poet asks readers to consider who built the fabled wonders of the ancient world and died in wars of conquest and voyages of exploration. His point is that historians generally describe the triumphs and tragedies of the rich and powerful, but ignore the lives of masons, cooks, workers, and the enslaved, ordinary people who did the work and fought the battles that made the events and developments of the past possible and created the world we live in today.