Memory as History is fine, unless your brain is bad!

While doing a reading for our oral history seminar on Thursday I was immediately compelled to 'spill the beans' about the myriad of ideas swirling through my brain. Michael Frisch's essay The Memory of History from A Shared Authority in which he discusses how memory and history are severed and connected from each other through our recollections, shaping our interpretation of past events. This idea resonated with a long standing historical dilemma I have encountered and have been fascinated and horrified with for many years. Specifically, I am talking about Holocaust deniers! As a Jew, I certainly have my own ideas of what memory and history mean to this particular event. As a Jew with family who both survived and perished in the event, I feel a certain personal connection both to the history, and to the ongoing evolution of its interpretation. A more than casual observer if you will! The ideas purported by Frisch illuminated to me again a great need for historians, both public and academic, to connect collective memories with history.

I read a book once that has ingrained in me this 'holistic responsibility' of historians: History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt. I believe this book should be a mandatory read for anyone who wishes to eventually call themselves a historian. In this book, she recounts her experience in British Libel court against popular historian David Irving. Irving sued her for libel because she labelled him a holocaust denier (rightfully so!) and in British Libel law, the onus is on the defence to prove what she said was true, unlike in North America where the onus falls upon the plaintiff. The trial in effect (and by the design of Irving) becomes a court case on the existence of the holocaust. I am sure that some fellow historians unaware of this case have had their jaws dropped to floor and rolled back up again in horror. How can you place a historical event on trial, especially one of the most documented events in all of human history? To me, this is where the issue of memory and history really becomes interesting.

Take the thousands of testimonials from both survivors, liberating forces, Nazi officials and any other observing party and you have an extremely rich oral history reserve. What does it all mean? To a global society? To a solitary individual? How can our recollection of the past preserve the history for future generations in spite of a vast reservoir of sources? Years after finishing Lipstadt's book, I still have not come to a conclusion. Again, this idea of memory plays a massive factor, one I have not confronted until this blog entry. If social memory can be altered on a large scale, then history in general can be transformed even despite sources! This is the main objective of Holocaust deniers. Streamline your arguments into one cohesive contention, clear out any ideological biases (it's very hard but they are quite successful) and present it to the public. If they buy even a fragment of the argument, then collective memory over the event in question has been altered. In this almost tit-for-tat trade-off, historical 'truth' can be whittled away to nothingness. However, one rearguard against this form of 'historical murder' is the function of memory of the peoples involved. This is why a digital project, such as the SHOAH Foundation, forms such an important historical function as it preserves these testimonials for future generations to weigh against revisionist interpretations. The scary reality is that sources themselves do not constitute history for those intent on presenting a new history. Hence the importance of always maintaining a strict connection between memory and history. Otherwise who knows what type of future history we might end up with?

I started wanting to talk about memory and history and how they interplay with each other to form understanding. Where I am now I am not really sure. Are my thoughts jarring? Perhaps. Are they disjointed? In this instance almost certainly. I am still left with a decaying feeling in my stomach that despite documentation, commemoration and publication any historical 'truth' can be wiped away and changed forever. All we need is a realignment in our collective memory for an event to change meaning. I am positive this has happened to many events over time as the real event or situation was buried by a collective shift in memory. I feel as though this is a very natural phenomenon and a main reason for the changing face of all historical events over time. As we discussed early on in Digital History class in regards to myths, people will believe anything they want. And in a lot of cases, facts’ repudiating those myths only emboldens the believers. Perhaps this is the source of my anxiety over the issue in question. No matter how many books are written, movies made or primary sources collected, people will simply always be asking the question 'Did six million really die?'

Canadian Identity: Defensive Heritage

I have always been fascinated by the notion and development of Canadian national identity. For me it always starts and ends with the question "What is a Canadian'. More specifically, what other traits other than our geographic proximity makes us Canadian? For many countries around the world, an apparent ethnic association is usually sufficient to answer that question. Culture plays the biggest part in my opinion but this usually takes centuries to develop into a distinct national culture. So how then can Canadians answer this question?

While reading the first chapter in C.J Taylor's Negotiating the Past:The Making of Canada's National Historic Parks I came across a term that I have long thought best describes how Canadians identify themselves: Defensive Nationalism. Taylor was using the term to refer to the Loyalist Tradition in Canadian History as a reactionary understanding of culture.¹ I think that this term is extremely applicable to how most Canadians view themselves in terms of a National Culture. Because we live in such a diverse country where ethnic, religious, social and even cultural enclaves are celebrated it is hard for Canadians to assert a culture that is our own and common to all Canadians. We seem to define ourselves by what we are not, in a particular regard to our gigantic neighbour to the south.

Most Canadians react violently to idea that we are a 'northern State of the Union' saying we are not like them because of all these reasons... which I will not begin to address. It is much easier for us to define ourselves in this way as a national culture. Yet, we are really not that different from Americans at all, a point which many Canadians would loathe to admit or accept for that matter. Reading about the loyalist tradition made me realize that Canadians have always engaged in this type of cultural construction since confederation. Perhaps it is our proximity to Britain and America near the turn of the 20th century that had us negotiating a middle position between them from the onset. A loyalist might answer the question of national culture like this: "We are like the British in this sense, yet unlike them because of this and don't even get me started on the Americans, we are nothing like them!" Add in the French heritage which is so rich and has cultivated a great deal of its own culture that it can stand outside of Canada altogether. This is evidenced by the Federal Governments acceptance of Quebec as a 'nation' in itself. If we add aboriginals (which we certainly should) to the mix, again our history confounds the creation of a national culture simply because of the multitudes of cultures operating in Canada throughout its existence.

I guess to sum up my ideas to a national culture is that I am no clearer about its source than when I started writing this blog. I was hoping to come to some conclusion about why we can't seem to define a national culture. Perhaps it's because we simply do not have one, but I for one reject this idea. A nation must certainly have its own culture that is reflected in its institutions, art, beliefs and values. I think that Canadians just cannot pin it down because of our rich heritage of multiculturalism in terms of historical nation building through colonialism all the way to our concerted effort to live in a multicultural society today. Canadians have always had a very difficult time expressing who we are as a national culture without excluding other members of Canadian society (Loyalist can define themselves but at the expense of the other groups in Canada). However, from reading Taylor it seems that historically speaking we have always defined ourselves by happily pointing out what we are not!

Endnotes

1. C.J. Taylor, Negotiating the Past:The Making of Canada's National Historic Parks(Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990), 4-5.

Scarcity of Abundance? Which historians will be affected?

Scarcity or abundance? How does the access to information change our perceptions of the world around us and our place in it? Does the more information we know or have access to transform our ideas of historical consciousness both for professionals, amateurs and the public? Why or why not? These are fascinating questions that are shaping the role of historians and the very nature of history itself. Our seemingly endless technological ascent only expediates the process and forces us to confront the question head on lest we be perpetually playing catch up. I for one am fascinated by intellectual paradigm shifts that occur on a large scale and believe that we are indeed living through one as scholar Roy Rosenzweig clearly demonstrated in his article Scarcity or Abundance. The shift is what he describes as the transition from the culture of scarcity to the culture of abundance.¹

What is the culture of scarcity and how does it shape our perception of the past and how does it differ from the emerging culture of abundance? The culture of scarcity refers to the limited access of historical documents and sources by scholars and the public alike. This refers both to the limited number of people who were allowed access to these sources as well as the relatively small amount of actual documents that those with access could study. Conversely, the culture of abundance refers to seemingly endless amount of information now being collected by and preserved through computers. A historian looking to study the Clinton administration will need many lifetimes just to sift through his administrations email, let alone to fully interpret his presidency. As technological advance continues, the amount of information that can be preserved is staggering. For future historians, tackling this amount of information will focus on new strategies for research and will create new types of interpretation. But will all historians be affected by this paradigm shift? I have a particular interest in Classical History and Medieval History but how will the culture of abundance affect this area of history? This is one area of history that I believe will not be fundamentally altered, such as modern history, by the culture of abundance. Even with this paradigm shift, studies of antiquity and classicism will remain in the realm of the culture of scarcity simply due to the amount of sources that have been lost and can never be recovered.

Given this development I feel that historians who deal in modern history are the ones who are confounded with this new culture of abundance. Historians who study older times periods, especially medieval and classical will greatly benefit from this technological paradigm shift. There are few remaining literary sources from that time period and each has been studied meticulously for generations by previous classical scholars. Above that, there is a great deal of physical remains left from antiquity but again, we do not get an entire picture and are only left with puzzle pieces. The new technological environment does change how classical and medieval historians can communicate with each other, their access to sources and even new types of interpretation. Yet, there is not the dramatic assault of information that is present for modern historians. Disparate sources that were previously isolated from scholars are now available in digital forms and can be shared across continents. Digital imaging has allowed these historians to recreate the environments and buildings of ancient human civilizations, which further helps them to recreate and interpret the past. I feel as though these historians will always deal in the culture of scarcity, and the shift to this new culture of abundance only enhances their studies. They have harnessed new technology to enhance the limited amount of sources they can work with and to promote more communication between scholars. This new technology is great, but it can’t bring back all the sources lost over time meaning some historians will never get to dabble in the new culture of abundance.

Endnotes

1. Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (June 2003):