reading of the week 9/21

Who and what is important in history?
How can history be used to construct an ahistorical world?

Rosenzweig and Thelen tackle the first question in their book Presence of the Past. What they discover is perhaps nothing new but it is interesting that they find the need to call it the “past” instead of “history”. In my mind much of what people described as the past (importance of family traditions especially) was simply family history. But perhaps the most startling fact in the book is who is considered a historical authority. Museums are trusted above all other public forms of history (including high school education). The problem with this is that most museums are episodic or thematic—focusing on one episode or theory and often leave out other contexts. At least most people realized the problematic nature of most movies—that even those that purport to be non-fiction or “based on a true story”—are barely based on fact, and have a huge amount of conjecture and sensationalism in them.

The association of the past with family is a very powerful one, my family included. The family history is perhaps one of the most unifying and non-controversial conversations one can have with relatives—or it can be the most contentious over the minutiae. The national narrative of history can be a large and abstract thing, but a family narrative is much smaller and often more concrete way of describing history. Apparently people seem to place the national narrative in terms of their family histories and use this to understand the past. It provides concrete explanations for the abstract—such as the Great Depression and the Cold War—but family history also provides something else. Family history provides an alternate account for those who feel left out of, or completely distorted in, the national narrative.

Kim and Jamal's article on the Renaissance Faire had another way of looking at the past. These faires have people that are “regulars” who take on fictional personas for the entire weekend. They often act essentially as volunteer docents, taking the more “tourist” visitors on a trip through this parallel world. In order to do this they take create an ahistorical world based on the “facts” of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but really the myths—like Camelot.