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I'm author of The Snipesville Chronicles. I'm also a published academic historian, but don't hold that against me.Oh, and I'm a Brit. I just happen to live in Georgia.

Friday, April 18, 2008

History In The News: Race and American Memory


My freshmen students LOVE to study history and memory: It's a revolutionary idea to them, and indeed to most people, that history isn't handed down from generation to generation of historians carved on stone tablets (or in dry-as-dust textbooks), unchanging, but that historians constantly return to original sources from the past to ask new questions in light of present concerns, and argue with each other (constantly!) about what it all means.

In class, I have the students look at three examples of the same event described in three editions of the same textbook, published in the 1920s, 1950s, and early 2000s, and we are amazed by how each passage is different, and how it reflects the times in which it was written. We also consider how (understandably) resistant many people are to the fact that history is—and must be—constantly rewritten, and how "revisionism" is considered to be some vast conspiracy of historians who were schooled in the 1960s, when it's a constant of the writing of history from ancient times to the present.

It's understandable that they're resistant, but it's wrong. Not necessarily in a moral sense, but because it blinds us to our options in the present.

One of the best ways to check out how the memory of history can be totally divorced from the past is to think of family folklore. How many old family stories, I ask, reflect badly on the family or any of its members? I encourage students to do their own research into family history, and to embrace the baddies, because they are interesting, and because honesty is liberating. We are not responsible for the deeds of our dead ancestors: We need to try to understand them and the times in which they lived, and come to terms with what we discover.

Race is a hot-button topic throughout America, and nowhere more than in the South. Many of my students are initially shocked by the involvement of Africans in the slave trade, or by their ancestors' participation in lynchings in the South of 100 years ago. But the more they study the subject, the more they come to comprehend the cultural and social pressures, and the power of delusional thinking, that lead to dreadful deeds. The lesson to take away, I think, is to appreciate that our ancestors were complex human beings, just as we are. We are not responsible for their beliefs and actions, but we are responsible for our own. We should never shy away from the pursuit of truth in history as in life, because dishonesty and willful ignorance dishonors the past and ourselves.

Yet how we commemorate history is so often decided by people who have apparently never thought about these issues, or who have, and are more concerned with maintaining political correctness (on the left or the right) than in self-examination, and honest and rigorous examination of the past. That's no way to deal with history in a democracy. And I am so glad to see Roger Cohen's short but sweet article in the New York Times this week that reminds us, gently, that searching for truth in the past can, does, and should set us free in the present. As he says, "That's scary. It can also be salutary."

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2 comments:

Jon said...

The Cohen editorial is excellent, and he deals well with a question that students often ask, why is there a museum to the Holocaust on the Mall?

Aside from all the difficult political reasons, a central reason is the Holocaust is used as a legitimating story for the American Century. "See what these other people did because we weren't involved in the world?" it asks, with the inevitable corollary that obviously we must be involved in the world to prevent such events in the future. (except that we don"t)

James Loewen has revised a new edition of his LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, a book every teacher of history should read, and he does an excellent job of arguing that students must learn to engage the problems of history at an eary age, college is often too late.

Great post, Annette.

Jon

Annette Laing said...

Thanks, Jon! I agree that Loewen's book is well worth checking out, and even though don't always agree with him, he's always wonderfully thought-provoking--and readable. I'll add a link to the book. BTW, there's a great (but heavy) book on the development of the Holocaust museum, and all the political concerns that shaped how it presents the Holocaust. My students and I read it, and we agreed that it was hard, but worth the effort for what we learned about the pressures on museums.