Yes, I do go on a bit about the library of Illinois history
whose future is at stake in the wrangling over who runs the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. I believe that the fate of the
library matters because history matters – history that is of a certain kind, or
rather, with a certain focus.
In 2009, Jill
Lepore talked with Humanities magazine about her work. Lepore is
best known as a contributor to The New Yorker, but fewer people know her
as a
scholar of early American history – she’s on the Harvard faculty — and winner
of the Bancroft Prize. Among several other interesting things, she said this.
It’s
striking to me as an obsessive reader of newspapers and watcher of news how
impoverished our historical perspective is on most contemporary problems. . .
. And [providing that perspective is]
something that most academic historians don’t do — and, in fact, are opposed to
doing — so it’s mainly journalists who are trying to use the past to cast light
on the present, because journalists have an obligation to explain. And yet they
have very little space with which to do it–no time and no column inches. . . .
Worse, journalists have very
little of the knowledge sufficient to give them that perspective. Two
generations of journalists have been trained in the methods and history of
journalism when they should have been taught history. Lepore then said . . .
There’s this lovely
Carl Becker essay, it was his presidential address to the American Historical
Association in 1931, “Everyman His Own Historian.” . . . . Here’s what he said:
“We are Mr. Everybody’s historian as well as our own, since our histories serve
the double purpose, which written histories have always served, of keeping
alive the recollection of memorable men and events. We are thus of that ancient
and honorable company of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and
minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been
entrusted the keeping of the useful myths.”
Okay, on a re-read, it gets a little puffy, but,
still, I love that. Our obligation is to remember, or to find out, what
happened a long time ago and remind people about it because no one can remember
everything. Most people can barely remember their own childhood. I can hardly
remember yesterday. Becker believed that’s why we need historians. To be a
public historian, not a public intellectual, not a popular historian, not a pundit,
but a public historian, is to be a keeper of our memory as a people.
I might add that public history not only keeps
alive our memory as a people, it plays a crucial role in turning people into a
people.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2015.
