List of Revisions

History is Re-Written by the Narcissist's.

The adage "History is written by the victors" is often presented as a neutral statement of fact, a pragmatic acknowledgment of power. But this view is a dangerous understatement. It politely obscures a more brutal truth: history is not merely written by the victor, but actively plundered, desecrated, and rewritten by a consciousness that is no better than that of a pirate, a terrorist, or a narcissist.

Viewed through this lens, the historical record becomes a narcissist’s mirror, crafted to reflect only their own perceived greatness. Like a pirate, this victor plunders the achievements of others, hoisting their own flag over stolen innovations, art forms, and territories, claiming them as their own discovery. Like a terrorist, they use the destruction of memory as a weapon, burning the archives, leveling the towns, and silencing the storytellers to enforce an ideological order built on fear and cultural homogeneity.

The result is not simply a history with omissions, but a deliberately falsified narrative—a national mythology built on a foundation of stolen credit and erased greatness. Anything that contradicts the victor's fragile, self-aggrandizing image is deemed a flaw in the reflection and must be shattered. This list is an act of historical reclamation. It is the beginning of an effort to piece together the shards of those shattered mirrors, to name the uncredited, to honor the erased, and to expose the narcissistic void at the heart of the official story.

A Running List of Erased, Overwritten, or Denied Legacies

1. Onesimus

   • Date: 1721

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: An enslaved West African man, Onesimus taught his enslaver, Cotton Mather, the ancient African practice of inoculation to prevent smallpox. Mather championed the technique, which helped quell a deadly outbreak in Boston and laid the groundwork for modern vaccination in America. Onesimus's identity as the source of this life-saving knowledge was almost entirely written out of the narrative, with credit given to Mather's "ingenuity."

2. Seneca Village

   • Date: Founded 1825, Destroyed 1857

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: A thriving community of predominantly African American landowners in Manhattan, with churches, a school, and a stable society. The village was systematically dismantled and its residents forcibly evicted under eminent domain to create Central Park. For over a century, official histories referred to the area as a "shantytown" inhabited by "squatters" and "vagrants," completely erasing the reality of a prosperous, self-sufficient Black community to justify its destruction.

3. Sister Rosetta Tharpe

   • Date: 1930s - 1940s

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: A queer Black woman who was the primary architect of rock and roll. Her pioneering use of distorted electric guitar, charismatic performance style, and fusion of gospel with blues directly inspired Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, and Little Richard. As rock and roll was commercialized and whitened, her foundational role was almost completely forgotten, and she was relegated to a gospel niche, while the men she inspired became legends.

4. Alice Ball

   • Date: 1916

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: A 23-year-old African American chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy (Hansen's disease). She died before she could publish her findings. The president of her college, Arthur Dean, continued her work, published it as his own, and mass-produced the injectable treatment, calling it the "Dean Method." He took full credit, and Ball's revolutionary contribution was ignored for nearly 90 years.

5. Dr. Charles Drew

   • Date: 1940

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: While his work with blood banks is known, the full context is often erased. Dr. Drew invented the system for storing blood plasma, which saved countless lives in WWII. However, he resigned from his role in the American Red Cross blood drive in protest of the U.S. military's racist policy of segregating blood by donor race. His principled stand against scientific racism is frequently omitted from his legacy, reducing his story to one of invention without its crucial activism.

6. The Community of St. Malo, Louisiana

   • Date: Founded c. 1763

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: The first permanent settlement of Filipinos in the United States, established by "Manilamen" who had escaped Spanish galleons. This thriving fishing village existed for over 150 years, developing a unique culture in the Louisiana bayous. Because it was an isolated, non-white, non-European settlement, it was largely ignored by historians until it was physically destroyed by a hurricane in 1915, allowing its pre-American colonial history to be almost entirely forgotten.

7. The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898

   • Date: November 10, 1898

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: A violent coup d'état where an armed mob of white supremacists overthrew the legitimately elected, biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina. They murdered dozens of Black citizens and banished many more. For decades, this event was presented in history books as a "race riot" instigated by Black citizens, completely reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator to justify the illegal seizure of power.

8. Lewis Latimer

   • Date: 1881

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: An African American inventor and draftsman who worked with both Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. While Edison invented the lightbulb, it was Latimer who invented and patented a superior carbon filament that made the bulbs long-lasting, affordable, and practical for widespread use. His critical contribution is almost always overshadowed by Edison, who gets singular credit for the "invention of the lightbulb."

9. Garrett Morgan

   • Date: 1914 & 1923

   • How It Was Erased or Revised: The inventor of an early gas mask (a "safety hood") and the three-position traffic signal. As a Black man, he faced such intense racism that he often had to hire a white actor to pose as the "inventor" during presentations to sell his life-saving devices. This act of self-erasure for commercial survival became a de facto historical erasure.

10. Cathay Williams (as William Cathay)

    • Date: 1866-1868

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: The first and only known female Buffalo Soldier. Born into slavery, she posed as a man named William Cathay to enlist in the U.S. Army after the Civil War. Her story was completely unknown and unrecorded in military histories until research uncovered her pension application files over a century later.

11. Biddy Mason

    • Date: 1856 - 1891

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: After successfully suing for her freedom in California, Biddy Mason worked as a nurse and midwife, saved her money, and became one of the first and most prominent Black landowners in Los Angeles. She was a major philanthropist who co-founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her incredible "rags-to-riches" story of entrepreneurship and community building was largely excluded from the founding narratives of Los Angeles, which favored the stories of white male pioneers.

12. The Rock Edicts of Ashoka (in the context of Western thought)

    • Date: c. 260 BCE

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: The Mauryan Emperor Ashoka carved edicts on pillars and rocks across India promoting religious tolerance, animal rights, social welfare, and non-violence. These represent one of history's earliest and most profound declarations of human rights. In Western-centric historical education, the origins of human rights are almost exclusively traced to Greek philosophy or the Enlightenment, completely ignoring a massive, non-European precedent.

13. Edmonia Lewis

    • Date: 1860s - 1870s

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: The first professional African American and Native American (Ojibwe) sculptor to achieve international fame. She moved to Rome and became a celebrated neoclassical artist, yet she was largely excluded from the canon of American art history for over a century due to her race and gender. Her most famous work, "The Death of Cleopatra," was lost for decades and found in a storage yard in the 1980s.

14. Bayard Rustin

    • Date: 1940s - 1960s

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: The brilliant strategist and organizer behind the Civil Rights Movement. He was the chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington. Because he was an openly gay man, he was forced to work in the shadows and was often pushed aside by other leaders who feared his sexuality would damage the movement's reputation. His central role was intentionally minimized for decades.

15. Pauli Murray

    • Date: 1940s - 1970s

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: A non-binary Black lawyer, writer, and priest whose legal arguments formed the bedrock for both Brown v. Board of Education and gender equality cases. Thurgood Marshall called their work the "bible" for the Civil Rights Movement, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray for the legal strategy that won her landmark gender discrimination cases. Due to their race, gender identity, and queerness, their foundational legal and intellectual contributions were largely uncredited and attributed to the more famous figures they influenced.

16. The Colfax Massacre

    • Date: 1873

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: The bloodiest single instance of racial violence during the Reconstruction era, where up to 150 Black men were killed by white militias fighting for control of the Grant Parish courthouse in Louisiana. The Supreme Court case that followed (United States v. Cruikshank) gutted the federal government's power to protect Black citizens, directly enabling the rise of Jim Crow. The event was often omitted from textbooks or downplayed as a "riot."

17. The Contributions of Islamic Scholars to the Renaissance

    • Date: 8th - 14th Centuries

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: Scholars in the Islamic Golden Age (e.g., Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, Ibn al-Haytham) preserved classical Greek texts and made monumental advancements in mathematics (algebra), medicine, optics, and astronomy. This knowledge was transmitted to Europe and became a direct catalyst for the Renaissance. The Western narrative often frames the Renaissance as a direct "rebirth" of Greco-Roman ideas, erasing the crucial centuries of Islamic preservation, innovation, and transmission that made it possible.

18. The Zoot Suit Riots

    • Date: June 1943

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: A series of attacks by white U.S. servicemen on young Mexican American men and other people of color in Los Angeles. The media framed the victims—the "zoot-suiters"—as delinquents and instigators, blaming their "unpatriotic" clothing. This revisionist narrative flipped the script, portraying a racist mob attack as a justified response to juvenile crime.

19. Frank "Machito" Grillo and Mario Bauzá

    • Date: 1940s

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: These two Cuban musicians were the primary architects of Afro-Cuban Jazz (or "Cubop"). They fused complex Cuban rhythms and percussion with the improvisational language of American jazz, creating a revolutionary new sound. While figures like Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Kenton (who were collaborators and champions of the music) became jazz legends, the foundational role of the Afro-Latino originators who started the movement was often relegated to a footnote.

20. Lucy and Anarcha, subjects of J. Marion Sims

    • Date: 1845 - 1849

    • How It Was Erased or Revised: J. Marion Sims is hailed as the "father of modern gynecology." He perfected his surgical techniques by performing dozens of experimental operations on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. Two of them, Lucy and Anarcha, endured over 30 surgeries each. Their suffering was the uncredited and non-consensual foundation for his fame and for medical advancements that benefited white women. Their names and experiences were completely erased from the laudatory histories of Sims's career for over 150 years.