{"id":7607,"date":"2024-05-16T17:17:09","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T17:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/setupjunkie.net\/?p=7607"},"modified":"2024-05-20T16:18:07","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T16:18:07","slug":"black-explorers-connect-to-shared-history-in-polar-academy-you-cant-be-something-if-you-cant-see-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/setupjunkie.net\/index.php\/2024\/05\/16\/black-explorers-connect-to-shared-history-in-polar-academy-you-cant-be-something-if-you-cant-see-something\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Explorers Connect to Shared History in Polar Academy: \u2018You Can\u2019t Be Something if You Can\u2019t See Something\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 1909, a long-forgotten American explorer named Matthew Henson stood on the top of the world. <\/strong>Henson had traveled for months across Greenland’s frozen landscape to reach the North Pole with Commander Robert Edwin Peary.<\/p>\n Most members of the expedition turned back during the arduous journey, but Henson \u2014 born in Maryland to sharecropper parents \u2014 was largely forgotten for a simple reason: He was Black. Historians continue to argue<\/a> if Henson and Peary were actually the first people to reach the North Pole. But there’s no doubt that Henson’s contributions were sidelined. <\/p>\n “When the first human footprints were pressed into the snow at the most northern point on the planet all that remained of the original corps were Peary, 40 dogs, four native Inuit hunters and an African-American man who would be forgotten by history for almost half a century,” National Geographic<\/a> wrote in 2014.<\/p>\n