And yet, often times those are not taken into consideration by for-profit corporations that have extensive archives.
Profit motive will not preserve our history. It needs better and more robust protections than the whims of industry. It needs the public to understand what can and will be lost if we don’t do this in a systemic manner. We need better historical education, starting with k-12, including HOW histories are actually written and what they depend on to get written.
Until that happens, we’ll continue to lose our musical history and the future that @orenwolf predicted in his comment WILL come to pass. We have a choice about that, and honestly, this should be yet another election issue. I suspect that a Trump presidency/dictatorship will see a vast gutting of our public institutions that preserve our history, with lots of it put into private hands, and politically motivated historical preservation that leaves out lots of our voices.
But getting people to understand that and to give a shit is like pulling teeth. It’s really depressing, as someone who teaches history…
