A good reminder that not all southerners supported the enslavers during the civil war, and not all southerners today are Trump supporting bigots.
Also… this quote:
“History is not what happened. It is what gets written down in an imperfect, often underhanded process dominated by self-interested political, economic and cultural authorities.”
Oh, and the Cyclorama (there is a picture of it in the story) is not held at “the civil war museum”… it’s at the ATL history center, and is indeed properly contextualized for the audience - none of that “lost cause” crap anymore. In fact, it was not originally created as a piece of lost cause mythos, but as a memorial to the union victory in ATL…
Visible here is the clash that Mayer warned about, between the study of history and the construction of public memory.
The title is misleadingly simple, I thought, and Mr. Malik seemed himself constrained in his report by that very conflict. I’m not sure that “clash” can be resolved until the social and political utility of the public memory of an event, however constructed and by whomever, dwindles to nothing. That’s pessimistic, I realize.
I enjoyed this perspective from this morning’s Toronto Star op-ed page.
But perhaps Adlai Stevenson understood what was going on when he ran for president in the 1950s and a woman approached him to say, “You have the support of every thinking American.” Stevenson replied, “That’s nice. But I need a majority.”
Well, I think his point was to illustrate that history and memory are different, and how the historian he’s talking about showed that reality. Most people don’t seem to be aware of that difference, which is important to understand. Most people just assume that history and memorialization are the same thing, and that memorials are built on firm historical understanding, when they are often politically driven. Just look at how people argue for the preservation of statues built as part of the lost cause mythology meant to celebrate and enforce white supremacy. You keep hearing people say that when you take down a Robert E Lee statue, that you’re destroying history, which is untrue.
In this case, he’s discussing how the historical debates about the Holocaust are twisted to political ends, and those asking questions about the public understanding of that event are often demonized.
I don’t know if I agree with that? Are we meant to ignore history and not have any kind of public memorialization of the past, just because it’s sometimes used in bad faith? I’d argue it’s better to have a more nuanced understanding of the past in the public memory, and I don’t think that’s impossible. Human beings are built for understanding narratives, even complex ones.
Durkin said that, while Spain officially ended its slave trade in 1867, she had come across an account by the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who had travelled to Benin and visited the slave port of Ouidah in 1873. He wrote of seeing 300 people locked in a barracoon, a slave pen, and noted that two slave ships had recently sailed from that port. . . .
Although Stanley’s account had appeared in the New York Herald at the time, Durkin said it was another overlooked key piece of evidence that she unearthed. There had been rumours of later trade but this evidence supported findings by Cuban historians that trafficking continued into the 1870s.
If Rosenbach’s assessment were true, Finque realized, the history of theater was staggeringly inaccurate. Historically, American theater history begins in 1752, when Lewis Hallam founded what is considered to be the first professional theater company in the British colonies. These pages provided evidence that shifted the axis of this history to South America more than 150 years before Hallam crossed the Atlantic.
Even more shocking was that the company included two women: Isabel de Los Angeles, wife of Perez de Robles, and the unnamed wife of Luis de Mayorga. Not only were they stage actors, they were paidactors entitled to their own shares. Women of the same era were often prohibited on European stages, and male actors portrayed women in William Shakespeare’s plays.
Crypto Jews is a term used for those who escaped the Spanish Inquisition by moving elsewhere and taking different surnames. In Latin America, a common source of the new surnames was nature. Robles is a known Sephardic ‘crypto’ surname there.
It’s possible the South American theater world was heavily Jewish rather than Christian, and thus would be less ‘puritanical’.
What’s going to happen to electronically stored constructions of “history”?
With full transfer to electronic-only information, we are moving to an ever-ruling “presentism”. Information can be seemingly efficiently and costlessly transmitted today or over a very short time period, but is afterwards lost forever. When our civilization vanishes, the new researchers, perhaps thousands of years away, will be faced by the conundrum: did literacy disappear? How to explain that a civilization from which there are millions of written records (that would be saved the way that the Dead Sea Scrolls were saved) had suddenly abandoned literacy and gone back to oral communication and barbarism?
This is a real problem. Personal bugbear of mine, so this just might turn into a rant, sorry.
There is already a lot of data either on media that can’t be accessed because the hardware is gone and/or the media have deteriorated. Plus data that wasn’t backed up properly and got lost. And data that was deleted on purpose to save storage space or even wasn’t saved in the first place1).
There is a lot to be said for microfilms stored in a mineshaft. All you need to read them is a sousaphone magnifying glass and a bit of light.
1) When the news agencies switched to digital for their photographs ~20-25 years ago (when digital storage did cost a lot more than today) at least some of them introduced policies to only safe the pictures that were published/sold or had people in them who were “important” at the time and delete everything that wasn’t interesting at the time.
There are lots of photos in the non-digital archives of people or events that also weren’t relevant for at the time but became interesting later. My favourite example are the allied conferences during WW II. Lots of pictures with Andrei Gromyko hovering in the background; at the time he was an assistant briefcase-carrier or something.
Not to mention all the private archives that can be such good sources to confirm events and put them into context and whatnot.
I’m struggling to figure out what to do with family records. My cousins burned CDs years ago to store collections of family photos. I have two devices left that can read them. Online repositories of digitized documents might not last, leaving only the extracted details in the future. Photos taken over the past hundred years wind up on USB or people’s phones. We definitely need a more durable common solution to this problem to prevent that information from being lost.
Still waiting for those holographic storage systems they were playing with in the labs 30 years ago… with lasers! And perspex cubes and the occasional roll of clear sticky tape to demonstrate how versatile the process is.
Remember bubble memory?
My fix for now is having everything digital on multiple harddrives that get backed up regularly and replaced when I think they’re approaching MTBF estimates.
What I’d really like to have is something reliably permanent.
In my job I regularly look up buildings’ records in our archives. Some of them are from the mid 19th Century. Blueprints and original drawings (ink on linen-based paper). All I have to do is to unfold the plan and voilà - I can extract the information I’m looking for.
ETA: I’ve got drives going back to 5.25" floppies (for now) and for a time I used MO-Disks and before that DAT. CD-ROMs and DVDs seemed a good idea - until the first one that could not be read because it had deteriorated after a couple of months.
:
Star op-ed page.
We definitely need a more durable common solution to this problem to prevent that information from being lost.