Throughout the novel, history plays a large role in shaping the events of the present, especially when this history is violent or traumatic. The characters are influenced by their own pasts, their family backgrounds, and important historical events. The past can appear in dreams, memories, or even physically. 

For characters like Big Mom, with an unusually long lifespan usual lifespan, this effect is intensified, since they were actually present for events long past. Big Mom continues to remember and relive the moment when the US Army slaughtered Indian horses. It is this memory that encourages her to continue teaching music and attempting to help her people. Robert Johnson, when asked by the devil what he values most, thinks to his ancestors’ enslavement and answers that freedom is the most important thing to him. Although he did not experience slavery firsthand, its presence in his people’s history directly shapes his values and choices. Other characters feel the effects of the past in a more everyday manner, for example, by struggling with the hereditary nature of alcoholism. With the characters of Sheridan and Wright, however, the past interacts with the present in a very literal way.