ABSTRACT
Do a search for “history meme” and you’ll get a sense of what those of us who teach general education history courses are up against. There’s a lively traffic in such memes on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit; online meme generators make it quick and easy for site visitors to upload an image, create a caption, and produce their own “fake history.” Meme-makers reference moments in history by reimagining Snoop Dogg as a white plantation mistress and Christopher Columbus as an ironically threatening quipster (“That’s a nice nation you got there … Be a shame if someone DISCOVERED it.”). 1 Stills from SpongeBob Squarepants are their own subgenre of history meme: SpongeBob and other inhabitants of Bikini Bottom appear variously as a member of China’s Red Guard, Harriet Tubman, Hitler, a victim of mustard gas, a California gold miner, and a Jewish concentration camp prisoner. While history teachers like me might be consoled by the fact that someone, somewhere, is having some fun with history, it should deeply disturb us that even history fans could reduce the terror of genocide to the bulging eyes of a cartoon sponge. Disturbed, but not surprised: history meme generators are merely the latest incarnation of our tendency to treat—and teach—history as a series of easily decipherable moments waiting only to be matched with the proper caption.
