Group items tagged

A 61-year-old architect from the Nisga’a First Nation, Stewart explains that he “wanted to make a point” about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”

Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.

History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.

Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason—how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians. When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.  

“This is an art book,” said Mr. Xu, 60, who has more than 20 photography books to his name. “I have no interest in discussing what they mean.”But the simple act of publishing images of the protests that convulsed Beijing in the spring of 1989 is likely to be viewed as a provocation by the hard-liners who currently rule China. In the ensuing years they have tried, with much success, to impose a collective amnesia on the nation by censoring photos and news accounts that are part of the historical record in the rest of the world.

But the simple act of publishing images of the protests that convulsed Beijing in the spring of 1989 is likely to be viewed as a provocation by the hard-liners who currently rule China. In the ensuing years they have tried, with much success, to impose a collective amnesia on the nation by censoring photos and news accounts that are part of the historical record in the rest of the world.

Why is Stalin now gaining popularity? For one, people remember less and less about his purges and prison camps — which in Russia began to be thoroughly investigated and openly discussed only in the 1980s. As the sharp edges of Stalin’s image have gone out of focus, he has become what Ilya Budraitskis, a leftist thinker and activist, described to me as an “empty shell that can be filled with different meanings.”