Historians, Historical Memory, and You

American Wars in Historical Memory(6/20/11)

Jennifer Ratner-RosenhagenAssociate Professor of History,

UW-Madison

What is “Historical Memory”?a. “When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.”

Gustav Meyrink, Author (of The Golem)

b. “[Historical Memory] is the most dangerous product the chemistry of intellect has concocted. It produces dreams and drunkenness….It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable, and vainglorious.”

Paul Valéry, Poet and Philosopher

c. "What matters ... is not that [a recollection of the past] be correct by our standards or anyone else's, but that it be convincing to the particular group of individuals ... for whom it serves as an explanation of the world they inhabit. ... [W]hat matters about any particular version of history is that it be meaningful to the collective subjectivities and self-identities of the specific group which it addresses. In other words, we are not concerned with 'real facts' or even a coherent methodology, but rather with the consensus of assumptions and prejudices shared by the historian ... and his audience.” John Elsner, Art Historian

Historical Memory Making as a Social Practice

“[I]t makes more sense to refer to… ‘practices’ rather than treating ‘the collective memory’ as a ‘social fact sui generis.’

--Jeffrey Olick, from States of Memory (2003)

Homegrown 9/11 Memorial, Long Beach, CA

National Holidays

Public Memorials & Monuments

Shaw Memorial, Boston, MA (1897)

Historical Reenactments

Movies“Saving Private Ryan”

(1998)LiteratureThe Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Varieties of Historical Memory

Historical Research & Scholarship

Varieties of Historical Memory

“[E]vents passionately recalled are often more emphatic than when originally experienced. Just as we forgot or elide scenes that initially failed to strike us, we exaggerate those that did. …We mask diversity and collapse countless earlier images into a few dominant memories, accentuating any impressive characteristic and exaggerating its splendour or fragility.”

“The past is not dead,…it is not even sleeping.”

--Lowenthal on Historical

Memory (1985)

Selections from the Historiography of American Memory

“Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation, and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation.”

--Kammen

“War is a contest of injuries and interpretation.”

“Wars and wounds are not equivalent, but they are sometimes analogous.”

--Lepore

“[T]he first fifty years of remembering the Civil War was but a prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.”

--Blight

9/11 Memorial (ded. 2005)Greenbay, WI

“Today’s growing numbers of memorials represent heightened

anxieties about who and what should be remembered in

America.”

“Memorials…are archives of public affect.”

--Erika Doss, Memorial Mania (2010)

Civil War Era Gravestone

“The lack of far-reaching debate over the Civil War…may not be a cause for self-congratulation….It maybe be, rather, that we like the current story too much to challenge it very deeply…The risk…is that we paper over …complicated moral issues…The risk is that we no longer worry about the Civil War.”

--Edward Ayers, “Worrying about the C.W.” (1998)

Caskets of Fallen Soldiers Returning from Iraq War (n.d.)

For Further Reading:John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the 20th Century (1992)Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1999)Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: Metropolitan, 1996. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1998)Jeffrey Olick, ed. States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection (2003)Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998)Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998)Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (Oct. 1984)David Thelen, et. al., Special Issue on Memory and American History, Journal of American History 75 (Mar. 1989)