I am writing from my desk after just finishing scholarly articles for my Historical Methods class. A class that is laid out by the syllabus that "will explore various different models and methods for researching, analyzing and presenting history in both academic and popular forms (including films, journalism, internet sites, and museum exhibits)." Like most history classes we begin the class by discussing what history is. As it can be confusing... the word history is used in two ways 1) the events of the past (a very simple definition) and 2) the writing and interpretations of the past. It can also be confusing because as Carl Becker "Everyman His Own Historian" wrote that every thing we do is in the past. So what makes the past? What makes it history? Becker breaks the simple definition of "History is the memory of things said and done." Memory is a fickle thing to pass history on. As we all know one event could happen in our lives and can be perceived in many different ways. Also events can be forgotten unless written down right down, and it is said victors write the history. In our first class we read quotes that my professor collected quotes and one was by Winston Churchill "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." So even if things are written down right in the moment of happening they can still be written down wrong because let's face it we are all bias.
But we can not just let history be facts "left to themselves, the facts do not speak; left themselves they do not exist, no really; since for all practical purposes there is no fact until some one affirms it" (Becker). He later writes "the history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world. The history that does work in the world, the history that influence the course of history is living history, that pattern of remembered events, whether true or false that enlarges and enriches the collective specious of, present of Mr. Everyman." There are certain things in the world and in our lives that can not be forgotten. Alexis de Tocqueville (a French political thinker and historian) best known for writing Democracy in America first published in 1835 and then another volume in 1840 (a source used by many historians to get in the mindsets of early 19th century Americans) writes about the American Individualism. He criticizes Americans that our individualism makes "every man forget his ancestors" he writes that American's seek out newness and he says that each generation is a new people. This is why we can not purely allow on memory as a source of history. This view of Tocqueville is written in David W. Blight's article "'For Something beyond the Battlefield': Fredrick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War." In Fredrick Douglass' lifetime he faced the problem that people were forgetting the Civil War and the reasons behind the war so the last part of his life was spent keeping alive the Civil War. For me a twenty-first century girl it seems hard to realize that people would forget something like the Civil War especially because when ever I go to the American History section of a book store rows and rows of books are dedicated to the Civil War. But maybe Fredrich Nietzsche is right in his suggestion happiness often requires a degree of forgetting the past (Blight). And after tragic events we have to move on, we are every day faced with an ever-changing present and that requires us to forget, maybe "to forget" is not the right word but "to shuffle away" things in order to move one. Douglass and Tocqueville both seem to agree that "As a people, Americans had always tend to reject the past and embraces newness."
Is that true? I know most of us always want the newest gadgets, the newest thing in technology but have we have embraced the newness so much that we forget the past. For some things it is true. My post below (click here) is a collage of pictures from when I was younger...I posted them on my Facebook and my mom told me what was going on in them. I know for children we forget things before the age of five, it seems normal so I guess that is part of my forgotten past. But more historically I think it is true, we (every day people) can't remember every detail of the past that's why we have historians. But even still history is full of gaps. And I know as a wanna-be historian when studying history we look at history through our own lenses and that sadly blocks history from being told as well. Plus I know when I told people I was majoring in American History, and now going for my master's in History I know people look at me oddly because they think of history as a bunch of dates, dead people and every separate from them.So I think people have pushed the past behind them because it seems boring and not worth their time but I like the thought of history being a story of how we got to be where we are today and it leaves me with a sense of wonderment or mystery. Author Sam Wineburg in his article "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" quotes historian Richard White "Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time." I agree with this we should view the history as a strangeness and maybe we won't ever fully understand it but I as a wanna-be historian I look forward to being a sort of detective.
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| Clio the Muse of History |
