- Multiple Accounts & Perspectives
- Analysis of Primary Sources
- Sourcing
- Context
- Claim-evidence Connection
http://teachinghistory.org/historical-thinking-intro
Sunday, May 15, 2011
What is Historical Thinking?
Watch this introductory video for an overview of ways of thinking inherent in knowing and doing history. Historical thinking is complex and multi-faceted; we focus on five key aspects particularly relevant to the K-12 classroom. These are:
http://teachinghistory.org/historical-thinking-intro
http://teachinghistory.org/historical-thinking-intro
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Who is Crafting our National Identity?
by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
Public institutions in Canada, particularly those with a national focus, are mandated to present a national perspective on the past. Such a mandate raises the essential questions of “Who defines nation-ness” and “What represents a nation’s true identity”.
In Les Lieux de Mémore (1989) , Pierre Nora establishes a distinction between real memory and historical memory: Memory is life, while history is the reconstruction of what is no longer; memory is a perpetual bond with the present, while history is a representation of the past; memory is selective in its information, while history calls for analysis and criticism; memory is sentimental, while history is prosaic; memory is bound to a specific group of people, while history belongs to no group in particular and is thus universal; memory takes root in concrete objects, while history is temporal; memory is absolute, while history is relative. As historians, we are taught to be suspicious of memory, for as Nora explains, the “true mission [of history] is to suppress and destroy [memory]” . With the acceleration of history, Nora argues, there has occurred in France a slippage of collective memory (authentic environments of memory). In turn, collective memory has been replaced by “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory), which serve the people as their official keepers of memory. Thus, these sites of memory constitute France’s national memory, and can be monuments, emblems, commemorations, symbols, rituals, textbooks, documents, or mottos: the material culture of France. Ironically, having destroyed memory, history “calls out for memory because it has abandoned it”, and in its place, nations “deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally”. Such national sites of memory are problematic, in that we must question who is creating the memory site and for what purpose.
Every public institution in Canada has a Collections Management Policy and curators, as well as archivists, must be selective in what they actually collect – so in an indirect way, they are crafting our national memory, or, as Benedict Anderson would indicate, creating our imagined community. Nationality, significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind that are fabricated and imagined. Nationalism is not real: “it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Such imagined communities are perpetuated through the creation of a national consciousness - expressed through such national icons as emblems, maps, monuments, census, official languages, the arts, school instruction, and museums. As Anderson poignantly explains, “no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” . Rather than recognizing such monuments as sincere expressions of remembrance, Anderson sees them as tools to bind together our national imagination and somehow justify loss of life for a greater cause of national destiny.
Within such a gamut of national memories and imagined identities, our pursuit of “truth” in history seems ever more evasive. But, if our “national treasures” are the keystones to our national identity (no matter how fabricated this identity may be), they spark our imagination and thus selectively hold us together as a nation. This indeed is a great feat, and so the role of public historians in working with academic historians in crafting our national identity must be valued as a profession of utmost significance.
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
Nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983)
Public institutions in Canada, particularly those with a national focus, are mandated to present a national perspective on the past. Such a mandate raises the essential questions of “Who defines nation-ness” and “What represents a nation’s true identity”.
In Les Lieux de Mémore (1989) , Pierre Nora establishes a distinction between real memory and historical memory: Memory is life, while history is the reconstruction of what is no longer; memory is a perpetual bond with the present, while history is a representation of the past; memory is selective in its information, while history calls for analysis and criticism; memory is sentimental, while history is prosaic; memory is bound to a specific group of people, while history belongs to no group in particular and is thus universal; memory takes root in concrete objects, while history is temporal; memory is absolute, while history is relative. As historians, we are taught to be suspicious of memory, for as Nora explains, the “true mission [of history] is to suppress and destroy [memory]” . With the acceleration of history, Nora argues, there has occurred in France a slippage of collective memory (authentic environments of memory). In turn, collective memory has been replaced by “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory), which serve the people as their official keepers of memory. Thus, these sites of memory constitute France’s national memory, and can be monuments, emblems, commemorations, symbols, rituals, textbooks, documents, or mottos: the material culture of France. Ironically, having destroyed memory, history “calls out for memory because it has abandoned it”, and in its place, nations “deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally”. Such national sites of memory are problematic, in that we must question who is creating the memory site and for what purpose.
Every public institution in Canada has a Collections Management Policy and curators, as well as archivists, must be selective in what they actually collect – so in an indirect way, they are crafting our national memory, or, as Benedict Anderson would indicate, creating our imagined community. Nationality, significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind that are fabricated and imagined. Nationalism is not real: “it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Such imagined communities are perpetuated through the creation of a national consciousness - expressed through such national icons as emblems, maps, monuments, census, official languages, the arts, school instruction, and museums. As Anderson poignantly explains, “no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” . Rather than recognizing such monuments as sincere expressions of remembrance, Anderson sees them as tools to bind together our national imagination and somehow justify loss of life for a greater cause of national destiny.
Within such a gamut of national memories and imagined identities, our pursuit of “truth” in history seems ever more evasive. But, if our “national treasures” are the keystones to our national identity (no matter how fabricated this identity may be), they spark our imagination and thus selectively hold us together as a nation. This indeed is a great feat, and so the role of public historians in working with academic historians in crafting our national identity must be valued as a profession of utmost significance.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
What History? For What Purpose? For Whom?
by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
Among historians, there really is no doubt that history matters. We are engrained with the essential belief that without knowledge of the past, we are unable to contextualize the present – and it is only through history that we are able to gain insight, and learn from those who lived before us. Most historians agree that history must be evidence-based and that the practitioners must respect established methods of analytical inquiry that are as objective as possible. The controversy arises when one begins to interpret the evidence, and this becomes even more complicated when we consider the how and what of presenting history to students.
As the discipline applies to the classroom, Ken Osborne outlines three distinct concepts of teaching and studying history that continue to be at play in varying degrees within Canadian schools: nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking. He also extends his analysis, by suggesting a fourth concept, which he indentifies as historical mindedness.
The narrative of nation building - history from the top down, or bottom up – is something which many of us remember from our own schooldays. This is the history Chad Gaffield recalls in my opening quotation. It is history that is patterned upon chronology, often presented in a way that fosters an appreciation for progress. As J.L. Granatstein suggests, this is the history on which great nations are built:
In the 1970’s, there emerged a greater interest in the social, cultural and gender aspects of history. In the classroom, history became a tool for societal transformation in which students learned about the past within the context of current public issues. As Osborne observes, “history became less a chronological survey of the past and more the examination and analysis of problems, themes, and concepts in which chronology was largely ignored.” Considered more of a social studies approach to teaching history, this methodology is still very common, as the events of the past are interpreted in ways that make them more relevant to the present. Much like Maurice Halbwach’s analogy of a self-portrait, history is built around fundamental themes, such as family, community, and nation – starting with the most immediate connection of “me” and extending out into a broader historical perspective - so that the here and now is a living part of a collective memory. In this way, history is presented not as a line of chronological events, but as a web of effects that are interconnected and applicable to the present.
In the 1990’s, a third dimension of teaching history was added to the mix, in that students were encouraged to develop critical thinking skills. Through the adherence to formal methods of historical research and objective analysis, students are permitted to arrive at their own conclusions. Thus, they are trained in the process of doing history. They learn the fundamental skills of historical thinking; question the evidence; and ideally learn how to think for themselves. Through this inquiry process, students role-play as professional historians by adopting “forms of knowledge” (modeled after R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history) that are identified in Canada as The Benchmarks of Historical Thinking:
In addition to the three distinct concepts of nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking in teaching and studying history, Ken Osborne has also identified a fourth concept which is more subjective: historical mindedness. This concept, he describes as a “way of viewing the world that the study of history produces”. Historical mindedness combines the traditional narrative and knowledge of the past, with relevance to the present and broader social issues, while also adopting the discipline of historical thinking. Thus, historical mindedness combines the three previous concepts of nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking, while placing the past within a continuum of time that is connected to the present as well as the future. Ultimately, Osborne suggests that there is room in the classroom for all three concepts of teaching and studying history (nation-building, societal transformation, critical thinking), and when these three are combined in an instructional plan, the end result is an overall instilment of a fourth concept: historical mindedness.
Although rooting the past in some aspect of the present can be beneficial when teaching basic principals to young people, such an approach can also be problematic in that the past becomes too easily consumable. As Sam Wineberg explains, by “viewing the past through the lens of the present”, the past becomes a useable commodity that is easily dismissed without much thought:
Wineberg describes the study of the past as existing between two polemics - that of the familiar and the foreign - in which either extreme has its pitfalls. It is through the achievement of mature historical thought and understanding (an intellectual process which comes about through the reinforcement of habits of mind) that the study of the past can become most beneficial. To this end history matters because it educates in the deepest sense: it teaches “humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history”. Thus, it is of fundamental importance to every human being.
History is of fundamental importance to citizenship as well. As James Loewen summarizes, history “is about us”; and whether that us be “wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point”. In Great Britain, the us of history is reflected within the current “Britishness” debate which Sir Keith Ajegbo introduced in the 2007 curriculum report on Diversity and Citizenship. Ajegbo recommends the introduction of a history element to the citizenship curriculum as a way of understanding what it means to be British:
Such an approach supports the thinking of historians who participated in the British Institute of Historical Research Conference “Why History Matters” in 2007, where the utility of history was recognized as a powerful citizenship tool. In this sense, history is seen as a basis for understanding similarities as well as diversity; learning about the source of common belief systems and values; making connections to local, national and international identities; and ultimately gaining an appreciation of what it means to be human:
Many of these same assertions hold true in Canada as well. Recognizing that history education has moved beyond nation-building to embrace citizenship training in Canada, Christian Laville describes a duality that strives for a unified sense of shared memory on one hand, and independently-minded historical thinking on the other. Historical thinking equips students with the intellectual tools needed to exercise their civic responsibilities, while historical mindedness creates a common identity that serves to build unity. This common identity is what Ken Osborne would call the “big picture” of Canada’s past; and historical thinking is the ‘intellectual self-defence’ needed to participate in a democratic society. Osborne presents seven (sound) arguments for history as self-defence:
As an extension of citizenship training, history is also fundamentally important in establishing a shared sense of identity. It binds us together, by providing a broad framework in which every citizen must be able to find their stem of acceptance; and without this acceptance – a sense of belonging – citizens have no shared identity. In the words of J.L. Granatstein, history is important “because it is the way a nation, a people, and an individual learn who they are, where they came from and where they are going, and how and why their world has turned out as it has”. But shared identity, as Britain’s Diversity and Citizenship curriculum report shows, must be broad enough to embrace cultural and ethnic diversity, respect differences, and bridge commonalities. Such is the global nature of citizenship in the twenty-first century.
Living within a complex backdrop of globalization, students need to be equipped with the tools to think critically about the past and the present. As Stéphane Lévesque cites scholars Ken Booth and Tim Dunne: “we cannot assume, for the foreseeable future, that tomorrow will be like today. The global order is being recast, and the twists and turns will surprise us’. Teaching students to think historically can, as Levesque explains, “be a valuable contribution to the short and long-term challenges awaiting them”.
But, as Margaret Conrad has illustrated, history in the age of Wikipedia also requires new rules of engagement for historians. As the printed page is overtaken by cyberspace, Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a global village becomes ever more apparent and citizenship is no longer restricted to geographical boundaries. Within the “seamless web of experience” that the Internet has since availed, McLuhan predicted that the student would need a “do-it-yourself kit” in order to master the new global media. Perhaps The Benchmarks of Historical Thinking can provide students with the do-it-yourself kit that McLuhan predicted for the 21st century: the habits of mind that can enable Canadians to be full participants in today’s global society.
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
“In the history courses I took in school in the 1960’s, we read about history, talked about history, and wrote about history; we never actually did history.” (Chad Gaffield, 2001)
Among historians, there really is no doubt that history matters. We are engrained with the essential belief that without knowledge of the past, we are unable to contextualize the present – and it is only through history that we are able to gain insight, and learn from those who lived before us. Most historians agree that history must be evidence-based and that the practitioners must respect established methods of analytical inquiry that are as objective as possible. The controversy arises when one begins to interpret the evidence, and this becomes even more complicated when we consider the how and what of presenting history to students.
As the discipline applies to the classroom, Ken Osborne outlines three distinct concepts of teaching and studying history that continue to be at play in varying degrees within Canadian schools: nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking. He also extends his analysis, by suggesting a fourth concept, which he indentifies as historical mindedness.
The narrative of nation building - history from the top down, or bottom up – is something which many of us remember from our own schooldays. This is the history Chad Gaffield recalls in my opening quotation. It is history that is patterned upon chronology, often presented in a way that fosters an appreciation for progress. As J.L. Granatstein suggests, this is the history on which great nations are built:
If Canada is to be worthy of its envied standing in the world, if it is to offer something to its own people and to humanity, it will have to forge a national spirit that can unite its increasingly diverse peoples. We cannot achieve this unanimity unless we teach our national history, celebrate our founders, renew the old and establish new symbols, and strengthen the terms of our citizenship… We have a nation to save and a future to build.Yet, as noble as this sounds, such narratives of nation-building are what Benedict Anderson would dismiss as pure fabrication – an imagined community and “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” … crafted by the author to serve some higher purpose.
- Establish historical significance;
- Use primary source evidence;
- Identify continuity and change;
- Analyze cause and consequences;
- Take historical perspectives; and
- Understand ethical dimensions of history.
… by viewing the past as useable, something that speaks to us without intermediary or translation, we end up turning it into yet another commodity for instant consumption. We discard or just ignore vast regions of the past that either contradict our current needs, or fail to align tidily with them. The useable past retains a certain fascination, but it is the fascination of the flea market… Because we more or less know what we are looking for before we enter this past, our encounter is unlikely to change us or cause us to rethink who we are. The past becomes clay in our hands. We are not called upon to stretch our understanding to learn from the past. Instead we contort the past to fit the predetermined meaning we have already assigned it.
Wineberg describes the study of the past as existing between two polemics - that of the familiar and the foreign - in which either extreme has its pitfalls. It is through the achievement of mature historical thought and understanding (an intellectual process which comes about through the reinforcement of habits of mind) that the study of the past can become most beneficial. To this end history matters because it educates in the deepest sense: it teaches “humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history”. Thus, it is of fundamental importance to every human being.
While it is important for young people to explore [contemporary] issues as they affect them today, it is equally important that they understand them through the lens of history. It is difficult to look at devolution without understanding how we became the United Kingdom. Can immigration be debated properly without some knowledge of the range of people who have arrived on these shores over centuries? We are certainly not advocating that Citizenship education should be conflated with history. However, we are strongly of the opinion that developing an appreciation of the relevant historical context is essential to understanding what it means to be a citizen of the UK today.
Such an approach supports the thinking of historians who participated in the British Institute of Historical Research Conference “Why History Matters” in 2007, where the utility of history was recognized as a powerful citizenship tool. In this sense, history is seen as a basis for understanding similarities as well as diversity; learning about the source of common belief systems and values; making connections to local, national and international identities; and ultimately gaining an appreciation of what it means to be human:
School history has to do much more than confirm or enhance an individual’s identity. It has to be about the bigger picture and a wider world because to study history is to grow up and move beyond ourselves.
Many of these same assertions hold true in Canada as well. Recognizing that history education has moved beyond nation-building to embrace citizenship training in Canada, Christian Laville describes a duality that strives for a unified sense of shared memory on one hand, and independently-minded historical thinking on the other. Historical thinking equips students with the intellectual tools needed to exercise their civic responsibilities, while historical mindedness creates a common identity that serves to build unity. This common identity is what Ken Osborne would call the “big picture” of Canada’s past; and historical thinking is the ‘intellectual self-defence’ needed to participate in a democratic society. Osborne presents seven (sound) arguments for history as self-defence:
1. History armours us against all those people who claim to know it and are only too anxious to tell us what it proves;With intellectual self-defence, comes intellectual freedom – and an ability to make informed choices and effect change in the present.
2. It releases us from the grip of the past, which so easily holds us captive and shapes our ideas;
3. It teaches us how to be constructively skeptical (but not cynical or blindly rejectionist) when faced with appeals and arguments;
4. It protects us from being misled by the taken-for-granted conventional wisdom of our own times;
5. By showing us a wide variety of alternative beliefs systems, social practices, cultural norms, and the like, it enlarges our awareness of alternatives and choices;
6. It helps us understand and take part in debates that are going on around us about the future of Canada and of the world more generally, debates that are going to affect us whether we like it or not;
7. And, finally, it makes us less short-sighted and narrow-minded than we would otherwise be by helping us situate the present in the context of the transition from past to future so that we are not governed solely by the short-term imperatives of the here and now.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
ActiveHistory.ca: Podcast: Ian McKay on the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada
Ian McKay, professor of history at Queen’s University, recently delivered an engaging and provocative talk titled “The Empire Strikes Back: Militarism, Imperial Nostalgia, and the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada”. McKay’s talk was the keynote address of the 15th annual New Frontiers Graduate History Conference at York University.
The talk is available here for audio download: ActiveHistory.ca
McKay is the author numerous books, including The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (1994) and Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History (2005). He won the Canadian Historical Association’s MacDonald prize for his book Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada (2008). More recently, McKay co-authored In The Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (2010), which was reviewed here on ActiveHistory.ca.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Let’s Talk History! - A Dialogue about Doing History
On February 17, 2011, students on the University of New Brunswick campus came together to talk history. This was an activity planned by members of the faculty of Education as well as History, in recognition of New Brunswick Heritage Week. It was a pragmatic occasion, designed to provide participants with an informal setting where they could pause and reflect upon how historians think historically.
As a key part of Let’s Talk History, history graduate students were invited to participate in a dialogue with education students from Ian Andrews’ Teaching Canadian Studies class. This involved matching ten history students with Andrews’ fifteen social studies students, so that the latter could gain first-hand pedagogical content knowledge about history education. The Benchmarks of Historical Thinking provided a framework for their discussions.
As each history student talked about their research question, their method of inquiry, and epistemological lens, it became evident that there were many factors motivating their thoughts about the past. The history students spoke of their long-view perspective on continuity and change; of how history is a human experience; and how they are challenged to think beyond the parameters of presentist ideologies.
For their part, the education students were able to quickly identify elements of the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking in the explanations. They also witnessed the passion and motivation that historians hold for their research topics. History, for
Saturday, February 19, 2011
“What might it mean to live our lives as if the lives of others truly mattered?”
by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
“What might it mean to live our lives as if the lives of others truly mattered”? This is the question that Roger Simon poses in his discourse on the pedagogical significance of remembrance-learning. His response: if the lives of others truly matter, then we should accept the memories of others as counsel and learn from them. Memory and remembrance provide the framework by which individuals have the ability to re-experience the past through the lives of others. Although highly transient in nature, memory and remembrance are the triggers that allow us to make connections between the past, present and future.
Engaging with the past is a profoundly personal experience that is driven by memory. Be it personal, collective or historical, each of us finds our sense of identity by (to borrow the words of Robert R. Archibald) “connecting the dots” between ourselves and others across time. In this way, we are able to make sense of the events that happen in our lives or in the lives of others.
Preliminary research findings from the national survey project Canadians and Their Pasts confirm that a vast majority of Canadians engage in the past as part of living their daily lives. As with similar findings in the United States and Australia, Canadians do this in a variety of ways, but activities that relate to the collective memory of families are considered most important. In explaining why family history is so significant to Canadians, most speak about issues of identity: “it identifies who I am, gives me an idea of where I come from, where I am going”. Such early findings confirm that Canadians possess a deep connection to their past – provided that it is encountered through the people who mean the most to them: the family unit, culture group, or nation to which they closely associate.
In his thoughtful publication about returning home, entitled A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community, public historian Robert R. Archibald addresses many of these same memory connections. Returning to his boyhood home of Ishpeming, Michigan, Archibald wanted to use his own memory as a “personal historical experiment”; to explore relationships between place, memory, identity and community. In the places of his youth, Archibald re-remembered his past and learned a great deal about himself:
Archibald found that his personal memory was sparked by certain locales – a particular sight, sound, smell or sensation – and some of these memory triggers were unique to him alone. Walking and reminiscing with his sister Anne, for example, Archibald witnessed the power of memory and the experience of historical perspective in real life:
But there were also times when Archibald’s personal memories shared a common thread with others in the community. Such memories (associated with locations or events that touched the lives of many) were not unique to Archibald, and were thus part of a collective memory. Some of these locations, such as the community’s landmark hotel (the Mather Inn), serve as memory anchors for many individuals, including the author:
Other landmarks, however, were shared by others who were not part of Archibald’s own collective memory nor collective group. Within the city of St. Louis, for example, where Robert Archibald is currently President of the Missouri Historical Society, the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, located in the center of St Louis’ historic African-American neighborhood, serves as a collective memory site for the African-American community of St. Louis:
Both the Mather Inn and Phillips Hospital are equally significant to communities who extract their shared identity from these sites; the latter, however, is even more significant than the former, since it serves as witness to a community that (in the past) was excluded from the powerbase of the former. By preserving a landmark such as the Phillips Hospital, the community of St. Louis is reconciling historical memory (factual evidence that St. Louis’ African-American community truly did exist and contributed to the economic development of the city) with collective memory (concepts and remembrances held true by those who are still living). Such reconciliation of memory could provide a context for what Roger Simon describes as “remembrance-learning” – that is to say, not just representing the past as a foreign relic, but bringing the past into the present: finding counsel in the remembrances of others, relating this to the present, and learning from it.
To “live our lives as if the lives of others truly mattered” is to find counsel in the memories of others and in so-doing learn from the past. Such a prospect requires an acceptance of what Jörn Rüsen describes as “otherness” – either the otherness of another culture or the otherness of another space in time. Roger Simon describes such an encounter with otherness as “historiographic poetics” – the juxtaposition of differing points of view or remembrances – and he presents this as a pedagogical strategy for bringing the past into the present, drawing out personal meaning, and enabling societal re-generation through empathy and reconciliation.
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
“What might it mean to live our lives as if the lives of others truly mattered”? This is the question that Roger Simon poses in his discourse on the pedagogical significance of remembrance-learning. His response: if the lives of others truly matter, then we should accept the memories of others as counsel and learn from them. Memory and remembrance provide the framework by which individuals have the ability to re-experience the past through the lives of others. Although highly transient in nature, memory and remembrance are the triggers that allow us to make connections between the past, present and future.
Engaging with the past is a profoundly personal experience that is driven by memory. Be it personal, collective or historical, each of us finds our sense of identity by (to borrow the words of Robert R. Archibald) “connecting the dots” between ourselves and others across time. In this way, we are able to make sense of the events that happen in our lives or in the lives of others.
Preliminary research findings from the national survey project Canadians and Their Pasts confirm that a vast majority of Canadians engage in the past as part of living their daily lives. As with similar findings in the United States and Australia, Canadians do this in a variety of ways, but activities that relate to the collective memory of families are considered most important. In explaining why family history is so significant to Canadians, most speak about issues of identity: “it identifies who I am, gives me an idea of where I come from, where I am going”. Such early findings confirm that Canadians possess a deep connection to their past – provided that it is encountered through the people who mean the most to them: the family unit, culture group, or nation to which they closely associate.
In his thoughtful publication about returning home, entitled A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community, public historian Robert R. Archibald addresses many of these same memory connections. Returning to his boyhood home of Ishpeming, Michigan, Archibald wanted to use his own memory as a “personal historical experiment”; to explore relationships between place, memory, identity and community. In the places of his youth, Archibald re-remembered his past and learned a great deal about himself:
Here I cannot escape my present or past self. Here my own aging is apparent and I mourn my very own lost boy. And here I assess the proud successes and dismal failures of my own life. (15)
Archibald found that his personal memory was sparked by certain locales – a particular sight, sound, smell or sensation – and some of these memory triggers were unique to him alone. Walking and reminiscing with his sister Anne, for example, Archibald witnessed the power of memory and the experience of historical perspective in real life:
As Anne and I walk in the midst of these memory places and as we recollect with each other, we find noncongruent memories. First there are events and places that Anne remembers and insists that I must also, but I just do not; and vice versa. Then there are points where we agree that something took place but each of us has remembered or interpreted it very differently. We agree to not agree… (41)
But there were also times when Archibald’s personal memories shared a common thread with others in the community. Such memories (associated with locations or events that touched the lives of many) were not unique to Archibald, and were thus part of a collective memory. Some of these locations, such as the community’s landmark hotel (the Mather Inn), serve as memory anchors for many individuals, including the author:
… as the site of major events… combined with thousands of shared memories of proms, parties, visiting friends and relatives, dinners, and receptions, as well as more private memories of honeymoons, meetings, and partings, this building is a repository of civic memory that accords it a community-wide significance. (33-34)
Other landmarks, however, were shared by others who were not part of Archibald’s own collective memory nor collective group. Within the city of St. Louis, for example, where Robert Archibald is currently President of the Missouri Historical Society, the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, located in the center of St Louis’ historic African-American neighborhood, serves as a collective memory site for the African-American community of St. Louis:
… a place of nativity, a hall of hope, a promise broken, a place defiled, a legacy lost, a future imperiled. (12)
Both the Mather Inn and Phillips Hospital are equally significant to communities who extract their shared identity from these sites; the latter, however, is even more significant than the former, since it serves as witness to a community that (in the past) was excluded from the powerbase of the former. By preserving a landmark such as the Phillips Hospital, the community of St. Louis is reconciling historical memory (factual evidence that St. Louis’ African-American community truly did exist and contributed to the economic development of the city) with collective memory (concepts and remembrances held true by those who are still living). Such reconciliation of memory could provide a context for what Roger Simon describes as “remembrance-learning” – that is to say, not just representing the past as a foreign relic, but bringing the past into the present: finding counsel in the remembrances of others, relating this to the present, and learning from it.
To “live our lives as if the lives of others truly mattered” is to find counsel in the memories of others and in so-doing learn from the past. Such a prospect requires an acceptance of what Jörn Rüsen describes as “otherness” – either the otherness of another culture or the otherness of another space in time. Roger Simon describes such an encounter with otherness as “historiographic poetics” – the juxtaposition of differing points of view or remembrances – and he presents this as a pedagogical strategy for bringing the past into the present, drawing out personal meaning, and enabling societal re-generation through empathy and reconciliation.
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