About The Site's Creator

Me beginning work on the Great American Novel in 1974 (which I still haven't finished)

About The Creator: Michael Shawn Barnes

The Authentic History Center is independently owned and operated by Michael S. Barnes

Greetings! Since so much of my time is dedicated to the creation of history, I thought it appropriate to tell a little of my own, about the path that led me here. My first brush with history was in my birth city of Detroit, during the 1967 riot. Since I was just shy of two years old, I really don't remember anything about it (I do remember playing with a very cute neighbor girl though). My recollection of the event is a series of photographs my father took of National Guard troops riding around in five ton trucks with fixed bayonets that were a part of our family photo albums. My mother tells me that there was quite a bit of anxiety in the neighborhood, and she distinctly remembers a White Southern emigrant walking by the house and saying, "you best get inside lady, they're comin'." We lived on Marlowe Street, about 1.5 miles west of the riot boundaries, and in telling me this story, my mother then added, "But they never did come." In a middle lower class neighborhood made up of Irish and Italian Americans, one can safely conjecture who the "they" were. One of my mother's favorite stories about me, which she tells whenever I'm particularly deserving of embarrassment, is of a visit to the doctor around this time. While sitting in the waiting room, I was suddenly inspired to lean over and lick the bare arm of a matronly African American woman. I like to think of that episode as an early attempt at embracing diversity and helping heal the wounds inflicted on the city during that tumultuous summer.Within a few years, favorable economic conditions permitted our family of four to move 43 miles almost directly north to Oxford, where we took up residence in a

Cruising Detroit, 1968

My first superhero comic: Amazing Spider-Man #134 (July 1974)

modest suburban ranch until the fall of 1975. I recall those years as being idyllic. We had woods behind our house, several lakes in which to swim and fish, and the neighborhood was teeming with kids of all ages. It was these children who introduced me to collecting, especially baseball cards and superhero comic books. We'd walk the mile to Don & Joyce's Party Store for the former, and ride our bikes the 1.4 miles to Patterson Drug Store for the latter, where I bought my first Amazing Spider-Man comic (#134) in 1974. A frequent neighborhood activity was the "comic book trading convention," where we'd swap unwanted books for new reading material. Many of the comics I acquired during this time would eventually push me in the direction of collecting and analyzing historical artifacts.It was during this time that another historical event thrust itself into my life, in a way that greatly impacted my development as a human being. When my mother's three attempts at procreating a daughter resulted in my older brother Jeff, in me, and in my younger brother Greg, she decided to take a more definitive route. In 1974 she read an article in the Detroit Free Press about a family that had used private channels to adopt a Vietnamese orphan. Not a woman prone to shyness, she contacted and met this family, and then a few others in the area who had done or were thinking of doing the same thing.This was a relatively new concept. There were plenty of

Rebecca's orphanage photo, c. September 1974

families in the area who had adopted Korean children, but adopting from Vietnam was a pioneering experience and my mother wanted to be a part of it. Vietnam was to me at age eight an obscure event I was vaguely aware of. When the subject did come up on the playground at Daniel Axford Elementary, it was to ask, "Who do you want to win, the North or the South?" Since all we really knew was that there was a North and a South, it seemed like a relevant question. That would soon change. This is a story I intend to tell in much more detail on this website in the Vietnam section, but the basics warrant mentioning here. In 1974 my family adopted my sister Rebecca out of a Saigon orphanage. She was almost four years old when she arrived that October, and I was almost nine. Rebecca was in tough physical condition. She had the distended belly characteristic of malnutrition, her teeth were rotted out and smelled bad, and she had yet to be introduced to potty training. She stole food and hid it around the house (but being four, she wasn't very good at it. We'd easily find the loaf of bread she'd

Rebecca & me (with home-done haircut) February 1975

stashed beneath her pillow), and she wasn't very particular about where her protein came from. She would eat broccoli and ice cream with equal enthusiasm, and she also ate leaves, crayons, even the scabs she picked off of her body. And yet Rebecca's problems were insignificant compared to those of the second child my parents adopted. In the waning days of America's Vietnam experience, a small group of private citizens from the Detroit area who were loosely connected through their adoption experiences traveled to Vietnam to get as many kids out of Saigon as they could. They arrived in the capital in mid-April 1975 and left just a few days before the final collapse. Operation Babylift, the US government's effort at doing the same thing was under way as well, but this was a private effort. They went to as many orphanages as they could and created a master list of orphans with only basic information (inventing birth dates when they were unknown), and made arrangements for later transportion to the airport. When they had done all they could, the group left Saigon, a few short days ahead of the planeload of children, which left on or about April 28. Before leaving, my father put his name on the list next to the name of a two-year-old girl, thinking that it'd be nice for Rebecca to have a younger sister. Because they had seen hundreds of kids over several weeks, he didn't know which child he had just decided to adopt. He only remembered later that he had been told at her orphanage that she was sick.

My father arrived home just in time to turn around and head back to Detroit Metro on April 28, where all of the Detroit area families who were adopting from this last trip had gathered. Our new sister, whom we named Mary Kim, was not on the plane. She had been too ill to make the entire trip and was being treated at the Naval hospital on the Presidio in San Francisco. My parents quickly flew out there. What I remember from those couple of days that they were gone is a phone call in which they told my older brother Jeff and I not to expect a sister like Rebecca. Mary Kim was in deplorable condition. Estimated to be nearly two years old, she weighed twelve pounds. Her body was covered with open sores, and she had almost no fingernails or toenails, her body lacking the nutrition to produce adequate keratin. She was infected with parasites too. They removed worms from her rectum twelve inches long, and they shaved her hair because of head lice. In addition to the severe malnutrition she had experienced and the physical damage it had caused, Mary Kim was also diagnosed with "mild" cerebral palsy, and with microcephaly. But there was something else wrong with her too, and over the next few years she would see several specialists, none of whom were ever able to conclusively identify her affliction [In 2001 my mother happened to see an MSNBC special on the effects of Agent Orange on the children of Vietnam. She reports being stunned at the physical and cognitive similarities between these children and my sister]. Mary Kim was not severely retarded, however. Her eyes would follow you intelligently, and she did acquire an understanding of English that allows her to answer questions by shaking

Mary Kim at Oaknoll Naval Hospital, 1975

Mary Kim, Oaknoll Naval Hospital, San Francisco (April 30, 1975)

Mary Kim (August 1, 1976)

her head "yes" or "no". (She can even tease you if you give her the opportunity to by asking the right question). She cannot walk, crawl, sit up, or even feed herself. Her entire body is afflicted with a rigidity that makes it extremely difficult for her to even open her fist. This part of her illness became more pronounced as she grew older, and has placed severe stress on her spine. She has never be able to talk beyond a few words such as "light," which are communicable in part because of how urgently she looks at the light and for us to look at it too. The funny thing is, none of us ever felt any awkwardness toward Mary Kim. We simply took her in and loved her as she was, which was pretty darn near perfect in our eyes.That fall we moved across the state to Holland, Michigan, where we adopted a French-Vietnamese boy with mild cerebral palsy, an adoption that was ultimately terminated more than a decade later. These experiences, with these damaged children, had a tremendous impact on my world view and my place in it, and they certainly made me more attune to international happenings.

In 1979, at the age of thirteen, my parents divorced. My older brother moved out on his own a short time later, and for the next five years it was my mother and I taking care of four younger children, two of them with special needs. I worked at the local KFC for three years, sometimes helping out with

Early concert, 1981

groceries, often bringing home leftover chicken (and the smell that was an occupational hazard of working for Colonel Sanders). It was around the time of my parents divorce that I discovered music, just in time to witness (and celebrate) the death throws of disco and to help usher in a new era of alternative rock by spending a ghastly percentage of my $3.35 an hour wages on LP records, concert tickets and T-shirts, and on other accoutrements of the era that we believed enhanced the rock 'n' roll experience. Much of this site is devoted to music, a legacy of the many thousands of hours I spent in my basement late at


"Before and After," 1984

night listening to those LPs and writing horrible poetry. Thus distracted, I graduated from Holland Senior High School in 1983 with mediocre grades, no immediate plans, and no real vision of where I was headed. I had taken an AP US History course though, because even preoccupied as I was, my earlier experiences had fostered an appreciation for the subject. Nearly a year after graduation the historical forces of growing up caused me to impulsively take a trip downtown to military recruiters row one day in early 1984. Knowing next to nothing about the military and never having lived near a military base, all options seemed relatively equal to me. I remember that the first office I stopped in was the Navy's, and that the recruiter told me to come back after lunch (silly man). Next in line was the Marine Corps office, where the recruiter was more than happy to accommodate me. A few weeks later I was back in the city of my birth taking the ASVAB, the results of which qualified me for various military jobs. When I looked at the list of Military Occupational Specialties offered, I picked the one that had the longest training school after boot camp, reasoning correctly that more schooling would equal a better job. My MOS was, "AV-8 Communications and Navigation Systems Technician," which meant next to nothing to me. I only knew it was technical, that I'd be stationed "West Coast," and that I'd be there for a six year enlistment. A few months later I was off to boot camp in San Diego. My training took me first to Tustin, California, then to NAS Millington, Tennessee for electronics training, and finally to Cherry Point, North Carolina for a brief aircraft orientation. In July 1985 I went home on leave, packed up my little Ford Fiesta and took off for Yuma, Arizona, where I would be stationed for the remaining five years of my enlistment. I worked as a troubleshooter on the electrical and avionics systems on the Harrier aircraft, a job I loved, if not always the regimental life (which sometimes bordered on the maniacally absurd) that accompanied it. Assigned to a tactical squadron, we deployed frequently, including a six-month "West Pac" trip around the Pacific rim on the USS Tarawa, an amphibious assault ship named for a bloody WWII battle. While no major wars took place, my time in the military (1984-1990) saw one of the greatest peacetime military buildups in American history, and those of us who served together during this time now think of ourselves as the last of the Cold Warriors.

Olongapo, Philippines (July 1986)

USS Tarawa flight deck (November 1986)

CAX, Twenty-Nine Palms, CA (November 1987)

My sister Jessica (1985)

Only a few months after I hit the road for Yuma, my mother again adopted, this time as a single parent. It would be two full years before I would meet my little sister Jessica from the Dominican Republic [note: my mother remarried in 1992, and now her nurturing urges are assigned to grandchildren, two dogs, and the occasional stray cat that always seems to know where to show up]. My time in the military heightened my awareness of world events and deepened my appreciation for history and for foreign cultures. At the conclusion of my enlistment in 1990, I returned to West Michigan and embarked full time on my undergraduate degree in history, which I completed (along with the requirements for a teaching certificate) in three years. Jobs were scarce in Michigan that year, and I worked instead as a counselor in a Grand Rapids

At Ground Zero (July 2002)

home for troubled youth. This experience only served to make me an even better teacher when I did finally enter the classroom full time the following year. I began teaching US history to 10th grade high school students in 1994. Since that time I have completed a Masters degree and 30 additional hours of course work beyond that degree. I have also had the privilege of participating in numerous seminars with such prestigious organizations as Gilder Lehrman and the The Bill of Rights Institute.

I had been a collector since those early days in Oxford, but it was as a young adult that I began to turn a critical eye to many of the items I had collected, especially comic books. In particular, I realized that the many Bronze Age titles that featured minority characters reflected the changing society resulting from the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, and yet so many of them still retained some stereotyping (and almost none of them were commercially successful). I began to investigate further, looking for how history was reflected in other popular culture sources. The invention of the Internet impacted my collecting in two ways. It made discovering and acquiring items much easier, and it provided me with an idea for how I could share my growing collection with others and use it as an educational tool. The Authentic History

Black Goliath #1 (February 1976)

Center was launched in 1999. It has grown in size and scope, with the emphasis now turning slowing toward historical analysis. The technical quality of the site has also improved, but the majority of my time is spent on the history rather than on learning new technology. Functionality is more important to me than aesthetics. The Authentic History Center receives no funding outside of donations from users. CDs and DVDs of historical sounds and images from the collection are given as gifts for those who donate.

In addition to my work on The Authentic History Center and my teaching duties, I am busy with family and other interests. I live in West Michigan with my wife, 4 children, three cats, and one dog.